Costa Rica Habitat Synopsis Rants

<v Speaker 1>Okay, we're gonna give it a little We're gonna give
<v Speaker 1>it some time for the ads, for the shitty ads
<v Speaker 1>to stop, so you could actually hear this song, because
<v Speaker 1>this is a banger. It should be what is it
<v Speaker 1>fifteen seconds? You got fingers that you can fast forward
<v Speaker 1>through the ads?
<v Speaker 2>There stand, Wow, Wow? Us down.
<v Speaker 1>Stands located cry Why don't you right? Job located looking girl?
<v Speaker 2>Stand?
<v Speaker 1>Why don't us down? No?
<v Speaker 2>Don't stand? Sir, sir, sir Sarah. Excuse me, sir, Sir, Sir,
<v Speaker 2>Sir Sarah, excuse me, sir, sir.
<v Speaker 1>All right, this enough of it?
<v Speaker 2>Sarah. Excuse me, sir sir.
<v Speaker 1>That's what they they're kicking us out. That's what they
<v Speaker 1>say when you're about to get kicked out, Sir Sarah.
<v Speaker 2>Excuse me.
<v Speaker 1>God, it was like a fucking nails on a chalkboard
<v Speaker 1>to me whenever I hear that, sir, God, I can't
<v Speaker 1>stand being called sir. In Texas, everybody calls you, so
<v Speaker 1>you just get used to it. I still don't like it,
<v Speaker 1>but it's you know, and even I'll do it sometimes
<v Speaker 1>it's a nice way. It's like a polite thing. Right.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know what that there's because everyone's packing heat here.
<v Speaker 1>Everyone's got to maintain this. Oh, it's like the old wist,
<v Speaker 1>maintain the surface layer of politeness even though you're I'm
<v Speaker 1>just kidding. People are People are generally nice here, if
<v Speaker 1>not somewhat insane, and uh, you know, the education system sucks.
<v Speaker 1>But okay, let's not tell me. Listen, I had to
<v Speaker 1>go to the bank today, which I would rather I
<v Speaker 1>would I would probably rather have to eat ass for
<v Speaker 1>like twenty minutes, like I don't and I'm not one
<v Speaker 1>who enjoys eating ass, so it would be like, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, you know, it'd be like if I was
<v Speaker 1>eating Mitch mcconnald's ass for twenty Like that's like similar
<v Speaker 1>to going having to go to the bank, getting a
<v Speaker 1>call being like you have to you have to come
<v Speaker 1>in sir to uh to put your phone number because
<v Speaker 1>we ever we got the wrong addressers, you know, I
<v Speaker 1>think that's what it was. It was a wrong address.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I had to go in there. I
<v Speaker 1>try to turn myself, you know, off from reality. When
<v Speaker 1>I'm in there. You know, it'll be five minutes. I
<v Speaker 1>was in like forty five minutes. It was just fucking
<v Speaker 1>it's torture, the suits, the landscaping, the parking anytime. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>existing in modern American consumer society is painful enough for me.
<v Speaker 1>It's hell that is that alone is like eating Mitch
<v Speaker 1>McConnell's ass anytime I'm driving up the I thirty five
<v Speaker 1>corridor between San Antonio and also one of the most
<v Speaker 1>hideous stretches. Well, there's a lot of those, especially at
<v Speaker 1>the in the southeast, the lower latitude quarters. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to beat too hyperbolic, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's like eating Mitch McConnell's ass. So any and we've
<v Speaker 1>started the podcast off talking about eating the acid and
<v Speaker 1>aging Republican oligarch reporting supporting Senator. I guess we can
<v Speaker 1>get to the rest of the podcast if I've did.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it helps filter out the proofs, helps filter
<v Speaker 1>out the squares. Anyway, I just got back from god
<v Speaker 1>damn from Costa Rica. I just got back from Costa Rica.
<v Speaker 1>How many white girls in dreadlocks have you heard say it?
<v Speaker 1>I just got back from Costa Rica. I was the
<v Speaker 1>most amazing thing I had it. I went to an
<v Speaker 1>Iahuasca ceremony and it you know, because that's what I
<v Speaker 1>thought that Costa Rica was all about and I'll be honest,
<v Speaker 1>when I landed an airport, I kind of thought that too,
<v Speaker 1>because it was all Anglos. It was like all Americans.
<v Speaker 1>I said, this is just it's like a fucking United States.
<v Speaker 1>This is like, I mean, Mexico is so fucked up
<v Speaker 1>these days, well for the last decade. I guess it
<v Speaker 1>makes sense that, you know, the the gringos come down
<v Speaker 1>to Costa Rica and it's it's it's the wealthiest country
<v Speaker 1>in Latin America. I think, is that true? Most expensive
<v Speaker 1>at least one of them. But uh, you know, but
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know there was a diverse, such a diversity
<v Speaker 1>of habitat any any time a country is associated with beaches,
<v Speaker 1>I turned myself off to I just I just ignore
<v Speaker 1>it because I don't I'm not a beach pro. I
<v Speaker 1>think that shit is whack. I don't care about hanging
<v Speaker 1>out in the beach. Fucking lame. I got shit to do,
<v Speaker 1>you know, And there's hungry sharks in there, and I
<v Speaker 1>can't blame them. Shout out to the shark that ate
<v Speaker 1>that woman's leg in South Podtery Island last year. Uh
<v Speaker 1>Rome free, little buddy. So uh anyway, but I made
<v Speaker 1>the same mistake of perception with Dominican Republic. But holy shit,
<v Speaker 1>Costa Rica was you know, it was incredible. A gentleman
<v Speaker 1>invited me down there to go film some stuff and
<v Speaker 1>it was incredibly worth it. And shout out to him,
<v Speaker 1>thank you. And I'm the fucking dry force in the
<v Speaker 1>northwest part of the country, the cloud forest, the oak species,
<v Speaker 1>the fucking Jurassic Age conifers growing at nine thousand feet
<v Speaker 1>in cloud forest. So I think me and Allen and
<v Speaker 1>Mandy are gonna try to schedule some sort of like
<v Speaker 1>group tours, something that I don't want to call it
<v Speaker 1>a tour. It's not a fucking tour. You go out
<v Speaker 1>there with a bunch of science and biology nerds and
<v Speaker 1>you post up at a spot and it's all organized,
<v Speaker 1>which is way more than I can ever say for
<v Speaker 1>myself because I just get a shitty rental car and
<v Speaker 1>you know, gelevant all over the country going. I don't
<v Speaker 1>make a fucking itinerary, and I don't know what I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna do it. I'm maybe I don't want to do
<v Speaker 1>that that day. Why would I lock myself into something,
<v Speaker 1>You know, I have no organization whatsoever when I do
<v Speaker 1>this stuff, and that's what makes it so fun. On
<v Speaker 1>a rewarding I was, you know, looking for corcasolioid. He's
<v Speaker 1>a dry tropical oak at ten o'clock at night near
<v Speaker 1>beehehe in uh Guanacaste, Costa Rica and the dry forest
<v Speaker 1>two hundred foot elevation. I didn't know I was going
<v Speaker 1>to be there. Had I stuck to a plan, I
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't have been able to see it. And I was
<v Speaker 1>just driving around looking for it, looking for oaks. It
<v Speaker 1>was fucking driving me nuts, man, I drove so much.
<v Speaker 1>But what an incredible oak and oak that grows in
<v Speaker 1>dry tropical forest at two hundred feet elevation and uh,
<v Speaker 1>just the habitat you never expect to see oaks in.
<v Speaker 1>But we might schedule we might try to schedule some
<v Speaker 1>group tour there in early July, which would be cool.
<v Speaker 1>It'll be lots of microscopy, d NA secret saying, we'll
<v Speaker 1>be giving presentations. It'll just be a clusterfuck of NonStop
<v Speaker 1>botanizing and my cologizing. Is that a word. That's the mushroom,
<v Speaker 1>that's the mushroom. Season is like May, it's the rainy
<v Speaker 1>season May through September and so in July. That's uh,
<v Speaker 1>that should be there should be plenty of mushrooms there.
<v Speaker 1>But it's just it's an if it comes to fruition,
<v Speaker 1>I'll let I'll be posting shit about it in a week,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But also the economy shit. So you know
<v Speaker 1>these things would cost like two grand or twenty five hundred.
<v Speaker 1>And before you freak out, that's all this shit is included.
<v Speaker 1>It's all paid for. And like you know, the one
<v Speaker 1>that Alan did a net quarter, they didn't make any
<v Speaker 1>money of it. They barely made They made like a
<v Speaker 1>couple grand. It was just how much it costs to
<v Speaker 1>run all that shit, all right. But uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>since Trump's destroying the economy, since the game show host
<v Speaker 1>that his president is destroying the economy, people might be
<v Speaker 1>a little more and just fired, you know, two hundred
<v Speaker 1>thousand federal employees, people might be a little hesitant to
<v Speaker 1>spend money. So I totally understand that, But god, have
<v Speaker 1>you ever been to a fucking dry We're not going
<v Speaker 1>to be in the dry tropical force that we plan.
<v Speaker 1>This trip will be in the force like nine thousand
<v Speaker 1>feet elevation climbate of Humboldt County, California, but it's different though,
<v Speaker 1>because the air is so thin it holds, you get
<v Speaker 1>you know, greater temperature swings between day and night. So
<v Speaker 1>it's not really analogous to like lowland northern California because
<v Speaker 1>the air is so thin. So oh, and there's paramo
<v Speaker 1>up there too. I saw Puya desk larioides and this
<v Speaker 1>fucking blackn them black that it's a it's a fern.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a coalescent blacknum. You get these in South America,
<v Speaker 1>in high elevation South America or low elevation, higher latitude
<v Speaker 1>South America. These these black thems. They just look fucking
<v Speaker 1>I saw what was it? Lamerio psychus? Was it what
<v Speaker 1>I saw in Chile? What a we? It's psychis to
<v Speaker 1>you think it would be a psycha, but it's a
<v Speaker 1>it's a black them. Just incredible diversity. I was in
<v Speaker 1>like four or five completely different habitats when I was there,
<v Speaker 1>mid elevation, tropical forests, lowland, dry forest cloud for paramo,
<v Speaker 1>the paromo is fucking incredible. God damn it. Man. It's
<v Speaker 1>just you know, you get all these species in genera
<v Speaker 1>that you normally find at higher latitudes, like you'd expect
<v Speaker 1>to see in like the Rocky Mountains, or like far
<v Speaker 1>South Chile. There was Gunnera up there, and oh it's
<v Speaker 1>gonna I got a shit ton of videos to edit.
<v Speaker 1>I've got videos from Ecuador, Chile and fucking Costa Rican
<v Speaker 1>out I gotta edit. But I don't know what I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna do it, but uh, we'll get a round to it.
<v Speaker 1>But that if you've never been to tropical dry forest,
<v Speaker 1>it's pretty incredible. It's it's I was like getting pissed
<v Speaker 1>on by He didn't piss on me, but he tried
<v Speaker 1>to piss on me from up on a tree. He
<v Speaker 1>was in a in a Cassia grandis tree for basi,
<v Speaker 1>and he tried to piss it. A little bastard tried
<v Speaker 1>to piss on me, which I can't blame him. I
<v Speaker 1>would probably do the same if I was a monkey,
<v Speaker 1>I'd be peeing on people from different trees and elevations.
<v Speaker 1>Just a natural response, especially humans to humanity, is that
<v Speaker 1>you want to you know, at least he wasn't throwing
<v Speaker 1>shit these little guys though. That was it was Jeffrey's
<v Speaker 1>spider monkey. I don't know who the fuck Jeffrey was.
<v Speaker 1>Some biologists one hundred years ago, some dead hawk I
<v Speaker 1>don't know anyway, but uh, and they were really like,
<v Speaker 1>not aggressive, but they weren't afraid. They came up and
<v Speaker 1>ran up at the Capuchins, the white faced Capuchins, those
<v Speaker 1>cute little bastards with their little vampire teeth, were afraid
<v Speaker 1>of me. I tried to give them a banana, which
<v Speaker 1>I know you're not supposed to do, but I couldn't resist.
<v Speaker 1>They weren't a fucking mango tree. Mangoes aren't even native
<v Speaker 1>to the Americas, so give me a break. Okay, what's
<v Speaker 1>the banana gonna do? All Right? They had and these
<v Speaker 1>animals had the run of the park too, because all
<v Speaker 1>the staff was gone. It was first, it was the
<v Speaker 1>week the weekday. Second, it was like the tail end
<v Speaker 1>of the dry season, so everything, all the plants, all
<v Speaker 1>the leaves were on the ground. It was felt, you know, crunch, crunch,
<v Speaker 1>crunch everywhere you walk there. It was high as balls.
<v Speaker 1>It was probably ninety five degrees that day, which now
<v Speaker 1>I'm used to after living in South Texas for how
<v Speaker 1>long I've been here four years. I didn't mean to
<v Speaker 1>live down here. It was an excellent you know, I
<v Speaker 1>just came down here for other reasons, for family obligations,
<v Speaker 1>and now you know, now I'm stuck. But we started
<v Speaker 1>a fucking you know, nonprofit conservation project, so you know whatever.
<v Speaker 1>And it's been good for fueling my hate of consumer
<v Speaker 1>society too, because that shit is everywhere. You know. It's
<v Speaker 1>a defficult done here. So there were three monkey species
<v Speaker 1>I encountered. God, the howler monkeys too. They're terrifying. Fuck me,
<v Speaker 1>I was in a I almost got a little buggered out,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I was filming Marshallow series. She's this beautiful
<v Speaker 1>columnar cac guy that branches, but the branches that it
<v Speaker 1>gets stayed close to the stem, so it's got this
<v Speaker 1>kind of parallel tuning for look to It was really
<v Speaker 1>cool parallel stem tuning fork look. And it's got this
<v Speaker 1>beautiful epicuticular wax where the growth stops and you can
<v Speaker 1>probably use that, you know, and then it'll get a
<v Speaker 1>green segment when it would burst of new growth like
<v Speaker 1>six inches, so you got towards the top of its stem,
<v Speaker 1>you got like six to eight inches of green interspersed
<v Speaker 1>with the probably like half a inch or an inch
<v Speaker 1>of white like this white wax. And that's where you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's got this pattern, this zigzag pattern on the ribs
<v Speaker 1>because that's where all the you know what, that was
<v Speaker 1>the end of the plant. That was the end of
<v Speaker 1>the stem where it's growth ceased for the dry season,
<v Speaker 1>and then when the rainy seasons start up again, then
<v Speaker 1>you get a burst of new growth. So it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of analogous to tree rings on cacti. And I've seen
<v Speaker 1>it on another columnar cactus species, like in western Chiapas, Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. And so these marshallow series I was in
<v Speaker 1>dry tropical force put up towards the top. The kars
<v Speaker 1>was exposed and there was thin soil, so it was
<v Speaker 1>dominated by burs Simaruba, which you get in South Florida.
<v Speaker 1>To the tourist tree is the common name Frankinson's family,
<v Speaker 1>Elephant tree family. You really shouldn't use common names. So
<v Speaker 1>I'm just telling you just learned a fucking genus name.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta say that, sorry, got it, hey, coming name?
<v Speaker 1>Some of ours are so stupid, so uh, you show
<v Speaker 1>some respect for the plant, all right, learn the fucking
<v Speaker 1>genus name. It's not that Hardimaruba and uh and Marshall
<v Speaker 1>is series dominated. And I was checking this out, and
<v Speaker 1>then you know the there's leaves all over the ground too,
<v Speaker 1>and there's a couple of venomous snake species. There's a
<v Speaker 1>venomous crotalus, and they're all vipers. Of course, I guess
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple of coral snakes. You don't got to
<v Speaker 1>worry about those, they're small and you know, cryptic. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And then the fertile lance. Fucked the fertile lance. That's
<v Speaker 1>the only viper I would possibly if it was on
<v Speaker 1>my property, I would probably kill it because they they're
<v Speaker 1>so aggressive and territorial, and they're not like rattlesnakes. They're
<v Speaker 1>not kind enough to let you know when they're you know,
<v Speaker 1>when you're nearby, and they reproduce like fucking rants too.
<v Speaker 1>There's so many of them. I met some lady whose
<v Speaker 1>dog got bit. And they don't give you any warning again,
<v Speaker 1>They'll just there. It's like stepping on a land mine,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or stepping close to a landmine, because you
<v Speaker 1>don't even have to really step on them. They'll just
<v Speaker 1>bite you whatever. And it's fucking nasty venom too. It
<v Speaker 1>just causes rotting flesh and just anyway, so I was stepping,
<v Speaker 1>I was stepping around as Marshallow series filming it, and
<v Speaker 1>I later realized I lost the video. The video It
<v Speaker 1>was cool, It was only like two or three minutes.
<v Speaker 1>And then I heard this like it sounded like this
<v Speaker 1>guttural wine, and I thought, is that a fucking cat?
<v Speaker 1>What the hell is that? Like? Is that a jaguars?
<v Speaker 1>And then I heard another one from sixty feet away,
<v Speaker 1>and uh, and I realized the other monkeys, they're like
<v Speaker 1>up in the trees. And obviously it's not a cat
<v Speaker 1>because cats are outry, but it was still totally terrifying
<v Speaker 1>at first. And then I looked up and I saw
<v Speaker 1>like this little spider monkey like the size of a cat,
<v Speaker 1>maybe a little bit bigger, giant pair of nuts on
<v Speaker 1>the sky too. I mean, I said, wow, like he
<v Speaker 1>had a giant it looked like the truck nuts, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because the truck no pair of human balls
<v Speaker 1>ever looks like the nuts that these meatheads, these double
<v Speaker 1>digit IQ dumb as a brick fucking retards hang on
<v Speaker 1>their their trucks like in a in a you know,
<v Speaker 1>the lower in the lower latitude US Arizona to Florida,
<v Speaker 1>anywhere in between. But this monkey's balls looked just like that.
<v Speaker 1>I was amazed. I said, that's amazing, you know, to
<v Speaker 1>get to when he was like crawling headfirst, upside down, swinging,
<v Speaker 1>you know, going to different trees. Yeah, it was. I
<v Speaker 1>saw Kawai too, giant paar of nuts on him. I said, wow,
<v Speaker 1>just I've just like OBJECTI fight these animals. So but anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so this is towards the top of this cart and
<v Speaker 1>the cars. If you've never been on dog Tooth Krst,
<v Speaker 1>it's really it's bizarre rocks. It dissolves really easily in
<v Speaker 1>the high rainfall areas because these are dry forces. They'll
<v Speaker 1>be dry for six months. By five to six months
<v Speaker 1>no rain, you're still low latitude, so it's hot as shit.
<v Speaker 1>So all the plants just drop their leaves. They just
<v Speaker 1>go drought deciduous. I didn't even know what it was
<v Speaker 1>a thing until I saw it in David Attenborough movie
<v Speaker 1>a decade ago, you know, talking about drought deciduousness, Like
<v Speaker 1>so many people have no clue. This is like a
<v Speaker 1>dominant forest type around the world at the same given latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>the tropical latitudes. You know, it doesn't happen at the
<v Speaker 1>equator really, but it happens in between twenty one degrees north,
<v Speaker 1>and I mean even kind of in South Texas where
<v Speaker 1>I am twenty six degrees north. Anywhere at the same
<v Speaker 1>latitude India, you know, North hemisphere, Southern hemisphere, southern hemispheres
<v Speaker 1>obviously reversed, the dry seasons reversed, and it's all just
<v Speaker 1>because of those low pressure systems causing thunderstorms at a
<v Speaker 1>certain time of year. And then as the Earth, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it goes to the other side of its orbit, then
<v Speaker 1>that low pressure system moves to the other side of
<v Speaker 1>the equator, causes the dry or causes the dry season
<v Speaker 1>where it just was six months previous, et cetera. But
<v Speaker 1>I was the karst is wild because it's it's literally
<v Speaker 1>like a dog dog's tooth. It's you can't walk on
<v Speaker 1>a barefoot. It would fucking cause you to bleed, so
<v Speaker 1>you need really thick soled boots. Would probably tear up
<v Speaker 1>tennis shoes really quickly. But that's in those thin soiled
<v Speaker 1>areas where you get to the top of it and
<v Speaker 1>there's no soil, then you get a different plant community,
<v Speaker 1>you know, your typical rocky arid microsite in a otherwise
<v Speaker 1>dense forest type thing. And that was really cool to
<v Speaker 1>see because there was a Gave Workley eye up there,
<v Speaker 1>which is the syndemic A Gave. I mean, the plant
<v Speaker 1>community just totally changed you for me. A schlechtin Dally eye.
<v Speaker 1>I've seen that name before. I don't know who Shlecton
<v Speaker 1>Doll was. I should probably look him up, but god,
<v Speaker 1>it's just stupid. You know. It's bad enough to know
<v Speaker 1>I always say that sorry obligatory rant that I was gone.
<v Speaker 1>It's bad enough to name plants after people, but it's
<v Speaker 1>when you've got that ridiculous ass European sounding name. I
<v Speaker 1>don't you know, and no offense to you know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what is it? Scandon Navy, no, Norwegia. What
<v Speaker 1>is he German? What is the Schlechtindhal? What is it German?
<v Speaker 1>I think it's German. When you got a name like
<v Speaker 1>it just sounds goofy as fuck when you try to
<v Speaker 1>latinize it, Why would you do that? Put his name
<v Speaker 1>in there? Maybe his name was Ernie. You know, you
<v Speaker 1>for be an Ernie. I you know, shout out to Ernie.
<v Speaker 1>How many Ernies do you know in your life? You know? No,
<v Speaker 1>there's no no one's name in their kids Ernie anymore.
<v Speaker 1>And I think that's the real travesty you want to
<v Speaker 1>talk about, you know, corporate fascism, moralagarch Yet it's sad,
<v Speaker 1>But the real tragedy is no one's naming their kid
<v Speaker 1>Ernie anymore. Ernest God schlechtin you forb be a schlechtind
<v Speaker 1>you get the fuck out of here. Jesus just named
<v Speaker 1>the fucking thing after or what it? You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>got cherry, it's got bark that looks like a cherry tree,
<v Speaker 1>like peeling, red, beautiful bark. Name it after that. But
<v Speaker 1>you name it after this fucking dead guy. You know this?
<v Speaker 1>How long is this plant in a species? For a
<v Speaker 1>few million years? And your name Schlechton Dolly, Hushchlechton Doll.
<v Speaker 1>I should Oh my god. It's a guy with a
<v Speaker 1>hand in his uh, in his in his in his coat.
<v Speaker 1>Remember when they used to do that in his stick
<v Speaker 1>the hand half in your coat. Diedrich Franz Leonard, We
<v Speaker 1>get the fuck out of here. He was a professor
<v Speaker 1>of botany and director at the botanical gardens at a
<v Speaker 1>Martin Luther University of hal Wittenberg. From why the fuck
<v Speaker 1>that guy lived? How long did he live to be
<v Speaker 1>sixty to fifty years. I don't know. Maybe he was
<v Speaker 1>a nice guy, you know, Maybe he was a nice guy.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe he was giving blowjobs at a truck stop. That's
<v Speaker 1>not bad either. I don't know. I do know that
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't make sense to name a plant after him, though,
<v Speaker 1>that's anyway, schlechtin doll God, I fucking hate that. I hate,
<v Speaker 1>I hate, I hate, hate hate such a cool plant
<v Speaker 1>anyway for me shlectin Dhali, I is, I guess I
<v Speaker 1>can get medium tree size. The one I saw was small.
<v Speaker 1>It was growing on a carstick cliff, overlooking a beautiful vista,
<v Speaker 1>a mirrored ore, with two black vultures eyeing me somewhat
<v Speaker 1>skeptically from a completely leafless tree. Everything there was waiting
<v Speaker 1>for the range. The range had start in May. But oh,
<v Speaker 1>this is this thing going on? But anyway, and then
<v Speaker 1>there was a guy where cosma tear. There was, which
<v Speaker 1>is tarrat a c a fern. It was all shriveled
<v Speaker 1>up and dry, but I could see the white farina
<v Speaker 1>on the undersides of the leaflets of the fronz uh
<v Speaker 1>and a gave werkley. Nowhere else did I see this
<v Speaker 1>in this habitat except on these rocky outcroppings, so you
<v Speaker 1>get it. It's you know, it's basically stuck. It's sydemic
<v Speaker 1>to these micro sites that are otherwise because it needs
<v Speaker 1>full sun, in full exposure, and it you know it can.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's adapted to grow on thin to no soil.
<v Speaker 1>And what a cool species it was. I saw it
<v Speaker 1>on another site too, which I'll we'll get too later
<v Speaker 1>in the podcast. I saw it much closer to San Jose,
<v Speaker 1>the capital city of Costa Rica, growing on a sketchy
<v Speaker 1>cliff composed of crumbly shale talus that was really hard
<v Speaker 1>to get up and sketchy as fuck, but uh, definitely
<v Speaker 1>worth it. Yeah, so guys, just getting up there, I
<v Speaker 1>got the mosquitoes got really bad towards the top to
<v Speaker 1>it because the monkeys were there and so they had
<v Speaker 1>some defeast on or what, but they were horrible. I
<v Speaker 1>wish I had one of those little electric tennis records.
<v Speaker 1>Just swat the fuckers because they were making filming really hard.
<v Speaker 1>They're making taking photographs really hard. That Euphorbia was completely
<v Speaker 1>leaf list, but it was flowering and tiny scyathia everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>That's how I realized it was a euphorbia because otherwise
<v Speaker 1>doesn't really look like one. It's got papery, it's got
<v Speaker 1>like bark that looks like peeling birch bark, but it's
<v Speaker 1>like a deep blood red beautiful. And then there was yeah,
<v Speaker 1>marshallow Sirius aragoni eye, that blue tuning fork cactus, candelabra
<v Speaker 1>cactus and our gave Werkley eye and that cool, cool
<v Speaker 1>ar gyracosma. Just it's such a wonderful habitat. And and
<v Speaker 1>then coming down there was just so much animal life too.
<v Speaker 1>Like the animal there's there was no staff there, so
<v Speaker 1>the animals had the whole run of the park. I
<v Speaker 1>saw a white tailed deer in this habitat, which is
<v Speaker 1>wild to see him in a dry tropical forest. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>same species, you know, the Virginianus. But uh, but it was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it was a really rich site. And just
<v Speaker 1>being in those in those kinds of forests. Man, there's
<v Speaker 1>Leana's everywhere too, which that was what struck me. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's just because it was the last day. It was
<v Speaker 1>the last thing in the memory. But like everything I
<v Speaker 1>encountered was new, every plant was new, every species was new.
<v Speaker 1>I had no clue half the stuff I was looking at.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, maybe I could get it down to family,
<v Speaker 1>but it was just a wonderful experience.
<v Speaker 2>I love that.
<v Speaker 1>I love being disoriented. There's so much excitement, curiosity, and
<v Speaker 1>the habitat is so different because it'll get two meters
<v Speaker 1>of rain during the rainy season. That's more rain than
<v Speaker 1>most places in North America in the United States. But
<v Speaker 1>then it's got this six month dry season where it's
<v Speaker 1>hot as balls, you know, and then of course there's
<v Speaker 1>not much of a change in daylight, very minuscule. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's generally around twelve hours twelve hours slightly because you're
<v Speaker 1>not right at the equator, you're ten degrees left to
<v Speaker 1>you get slightly longer days in summer, but not by much.
<v Speaker 1>But god man, yeah, it was it. And the crunch
<v Speaker 1>of the leaves too, like every the leaf litter is everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>which you know, what fun guy are eating those when
<v Speaker 1>it does rain, you know. And I love to be
<v Speaker 1>there in the summer too, and just see the night
<v Speaker 1>and day contrast because it's you know, most dry places
<v Speaker 1>in North America or in the United States are most
<v Speaker 1>most dry climates, you know, they're just dry all the
<v Speaker 1>time you'll get rain a little bit, they'll be lush
<v Speaker 1>for like a month, like Sonora doesn't. There'll be lush
<v Speaker 1>for a month. Then it just it's but you could
<v Speaker 1>still tell it's a doesn't. But this is like a forest.
<v Speaker 1>It's an actual forest, and two meters is a fucking
<v Speaker 1>lot of rain. It gets six feet of rain a
<v Speaker 1>year during the wet season, but then it doesn't rain
<v Speaker 1>for five or six months. And what that brings out
<v Speaker 1>in plants, like the kinds of shit that they have
<v Speaker 1>to do to deal with that is crazy to me.
<v Speaker 1>Like it's just like so tolerating so much rain, bursts
<v Speaker 1>of growth and then sitting tight for six months. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's basically the same thing that plants do in a
<v Speaker 1>temperate climate you know where used to before before climate change,
<v Speaker 1>Like when it plays like Chicago still used to get
<v Speaker 1>actual winters, but it's instead of it being the cold,
<v Speaker 1>it's just a complete dry Like that's the only changing factor.
<v Speaker 1>I just had to stop and give a online presentation,
<v Speaker 1>So I'm back with you give an online presentation about
<v Speaker 1>long killing. It's always fun, it's always so rejuvenating to
<v Speaker 1>hear how many people are on board with that. And
<v Speaker 1>how insane people think lawns are. It just doesn't make
<v Speaker 1>any sense. Those roots don't go deep. You're not holding
<v Speaker 1>water in in areas that are prone to flooding, and
<v Speaker 1>you're requiring a lot of steroids pesticides, you know, steroids,
<v Speaker 1>pesticides and herbicides to infund it's eyes, to keep the
<v Speaker 1>thing alive. In dry areas, you're keeping up perpetually bonds.
<v Speaker 1>I think, God, I fucking hate lunch. Okay, anyway back
<v Speaker 1>to the what we were talking about. So these dry
<v Speaker 1>forests were in but what was kind of disheartening was
<v Speaker 1>that to get to them, I had to drive through
<v Speaker 1>miles of agriculture that was previously dry forest. So so
<v Speaker 1>much you know, it's like anywhere you go in the world,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's the human impact is so intense, and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of that agriculture is of course being used
<v Speaker 1>to grow hay to feed cattle and livestock. Not the
<v Speaker 1>most efficient system. Hopefully we'll figure that out in the
<v Speaker 1>next century or two before we annihilate ourselves. Unlikely, but
<v Speaker 1>you know that's what we So we got existentialist philosophy
<v Speaker 1>for you know, and apocalyptic humorous nihilism. Oh God, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry. Okay, So, but to get to these yeah,
<v Speaker 1>to get to these forests, I had to go. Thank god,
<v Speaker 1>Google Maps fucked me, as they usually do. They sent
<v Speaker 1>me on this backwards ass loop. And this is the
<v Speaker 1>thing I remember when I was traveling a lot right
<v Speaker 1>in freight transitionship. There was no smartphones yet. Thank god,
<v Speaker 1>it was such a wonderful, wonderful time. I'm like the
<v Speaker 1>last generation that got to experience that. So to get around,
<v Speaker 1>we didn't have navigation systems. We had maps. So you
<v Speaker 1>would actually go to library, print out a map, or
<v Speaker 1>maybe jack one. It's from a you know, change store
<v Speaker 1>or they like Walgreens and all these dructures used to sell,
<v Speaker 1>you know, these foldable maps. I don't think they'd do
<v Speaker 1>that anymore, like these foldable laminated maps that would fold
<v Speaker 1>into like little pamphlet size and so, and you actually
<v Speaker 1>had to think about where you're going and navigate and
<v Speaker 1>remember street names. Shit like that you have to do anymore.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, Google Maps fucked me. It took me through
<v Speaker 1>this backwards ass way down what ended up being a
<v Speaker 1>private road through agriculture. I had to turn around and
<v Speaker 1>then one of them the irrigation canal had overflowed, the
<v Speaker 1>had flooded the road, and I was driving this little
<v Speaker 1>beat up, said Dan that it's like little Euroca, and
<v Speaker 1>so blessed that thing. I took it some places that
<v Speaker 1>it definitely should not have gone so anyway. But because
<v Speaker 1>of that, I got to see some cool stuff. I
<v Speaker 1>got to see cashew trees not really being invasive but volunteering.
<v Speaker 1>And it's like, actually they suck the cashew fruit, which
<v Speaker 1>I don't recommend doing because it's got you rushi all oil.
<v Speaker 1>It's got allergenic oils as one third of the plants
<v Speaker 1>and the family Antacardiaci do similar to you rushia, all
<v Speaker 1>the same compound in poison oak, you know, Lithrea costica.
<v Speaker 1>In Chile, Lithrea costica produces a similar compound called litriol
<v Speaker 1>that can cause an allergenic reaction. But I think it's
<v Speaker 1>like poison ivy, like you have to get sensitized to
<v Speaker 1>it first. I don't know, But the point is is
<v Speaker 1>I wass going through these agricultural fields too. I saw
<v Speaker 1>a lot of cool fucking birds. I saw a fasciated
<v Speaker 1>tiger heron beautiful bird, a jabberou which is like this stork,
<v Speaker 1>Like this big white stork with a black hood, looks
<v Speaker 1>like some ount of like a Star Wars you know,
<v Speaker 1>like it's like one of the creatures you see, you
<v Speaker 1>know in the New re with the Congress, Like you
<v Speaker 1>see the politicians in the robes in the Star Wars movies.
<v Speaker 1>Sometimes they look like one of these storks. You know,
<v Speaker 1>this real weird looking guy. Beautiful wasn't vibed out by
<v Speaker 1>me either, uh, And I saw what I see a
<v Speaker 1>Cordia species. Cordia is the genus of Texas olive. Cordia
<v Speaker 1>bassierra is the Texas you see in San Antonio and
<v Speaker 1>South Texas barage in ace. It's got those little hairs
<v Speaker 1>in the leaves, scabbard leaves, sandpaper like leaves, big white
<v Speaker 1>flowers and a two forked style and stigma in the center,
<v Speaker 1>which was a giveaway later for or can be a
<v Speaker 1>giveaway for family. And some of these you know baragi
<v Speaker 1>and ace trees like Aredia or Cordia et cetera. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the Boris family produces a lot of tree forms species
<v Speaker 1>that have it that are trees and in lower latitude
<v Speaker 1>tropical environments. Yeah, so that was fucking great.
<v Speaker 2>To see.
<v Speaker 1>I saw Cordia then and Cordya. I forget the other one,
<v Speaker 1>but but lots of interesting stuff along the way. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it was so it's so exciting everyone because everything is new.
<v Speaker 1>Everything I was passing by was worth stopping to take
<v Speaker 1>photos of and and try to document so that I
<v Speaker 1>could remember it. And that's all I'm doing in places
<v Speaker 1>like this. I saw a really cool fucking corvid called
<v Speaker 1>a white throated magpie. J looks like a blue jay
<v Speaker 1>with this big, big ass, you know, plumage on top.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking gorgeous bird. It was hanging out in Bursra. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if it was Bursra simaru, but I looked
<v Speaker 1>like a different Bursra species. It didn't have the red
<v Speaker 1>bark and had different leaves. But uh, it was eating
<v Speaker 1>the Bursra berries or I guess they're droops. They've only
<v Speaker 1>got one seed in them. Gorgeous birds though, And there
<v Speaker 1>was a bunch and they were just fucking Corvids are
<v Speaker 1>always so funny too. They're so loud and have so
<v Speaker 1>much personality and are just like kind of a pain
<v Speaker 1>in the ass, which is like a good quality. I
<v Speaker 1>like person too. I hope on my tombstone. It says that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, great guy, but he was kind of a
<v Speaker 1>pain in the ascidt times. That's if I would, I'll
<v Speaker 1>settle with that. You know. There was a really cool
<v Speaker 1>palm I saw that was used just you know, on
<v Speaker 1>marginal on the margins of agriculture, and that was cool
<v Speaker 1>too us because a lot of the most of the
<v Speaker 1>plants you saw on the sides of the agriculture were natives,
<v Speaker 1>you know, as used to be the case before corporate monoculture.
<v Speaker 1>Agriculture in the Midwest, you know, annihilated all these milkweed
<v Speaker 1>strips and shit like this horrible fucking not even leaving crumbs,
<v Speaker 1>like the strips of greenery along the farm fields, not
<v Speaker 1>even leaving those for native plants anymore anyway. But they're
<v Speaker 1>still doing it in northwest Costa Rica. But Bactris guianensis
<v Speaker 1>was this spiny palm species and it's got these like cups,
<v Speaker 1>these like eight to nine inch cups, like elongated oval cups.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a bowl shape thing, and it's just it's
<v Speaker 1>just this the like the little space that protects the inflorescences,
<v Speaker 1>the flowers and then later the fruit. Okay, apparently I
<v Speaker 1>naturalists is saying Backtrisky and ensiss is invasive in Coasta Rica.
<v Speaker 1>I don't really buy that because it's native three hundred
<v Speaker 1>miles away. You're telling me it never it never fucking
<v Speaker 1>made it there prior to humans. I mean, I saw
<v Speaker 1>it in the forest there. That's got to be a bullshit.
<v Speaker 1>There's got to be a bullshit assessment with how plant
<v Speaker 1>distributions shift and change over millennia and how climates change
<v Speaker 1>over millennia, and it's crazy to think that that's right. Someone.
<v Speaker 1>I heard someone calling Verbusina and Coelioides invasive in southern California,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, how the fuck is that in
<v Speaker 1>its native like two hundred miles away. How the fuck
<v Speaker 1>would it have never made it there? I don't I
<v Speaker 1>think this. I think a lot of peoples and understandably,
<v Speaker 1>so I understand why this is a lot of people's
<v Speaker 1>understanding of invasive and native is flawed because they don't understand. Again,
<v Speaker 1>it's zooming out, how did this thing get there? Right?
<v Speaker 1>It's much harder to go across an ocean if you're
<v Speaker 1>a seed or a little plantlet on a debris raft
<v Speaker 1>or whatever. A three thousand mile ocean than it is
<v Speaker 1>to go across a two hundred mile expanse of mostly
<v Speaker 1>tropical forest. I guess there's a there's not even really
<v Speaker 1>a mountain range in a way there. Yeah, it's native
<v Speaker 1>three hundred miles away, and like northern Colombia. Hey, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I don't think I buy that and
<v Speaker 1>verbosena and see, I mean there's always cases. But I
<v Speaker 1>was saying this before, Like the most generally speaking, and
<v Speaker 1>take this with a grain of salt, the worst invasives
<v Speaker 1>are always from other continents because those are what have
<v Speaker 1>been separated the longest. There's a reason for it, right,
<v Speaker 1>And this is what idiots who deny invasion biology who
<v Speaker 1>shouldn't be taken seriously at all because they're generally not
<v Speaker 1>botanists or collogists. They're either from the permaculture community, no
<v Speaker 1>offense to them, or don't know plants at all. The
<v Speaker 1>whole thing you're talking about with native and invasive is
<v Speaker 1>was it adapted to this region? Did it evolve there?
<v Speaker 1>There's a reason behind it. There's a method to the madness.
<v Speaker 1>It's not just human purity. It's not just like the
<v Speaker 1>how far back in time do you have to go
<v Speaker 1>out well, it's not even about that. When you look
<v Speaker 1>at all the things, all the other organisms this species
<v Speaker 1>has relationships with it, starts to make sense. You realize that, okay,
<v Speaker 1>this is connected to this, and you've got a specifict
<v Speaker 1>pollinator here and a fungus here, beneficial fungus, and it's
<v Speaker 1>evolved defenses against this certain insect because it's been in
<v Speaker 1>an evolutionary arms race with it for you know, five
<v Speaker 1>million years. For fuck's sake. I mean, this is not
<v Speaker 1>that hard of a concept to think about. So someone
<v Speaker 1>was busting my balls about that too. God, he was
<v Speaker 1>fucking annoy He was on the Facebook. What would you know.
<v Speaker 1>Shame on me for reading comments on a Facebook page.
<v Speaker 1>But I do enjoy interacting with people some on there
<v Speaker 1>sometimes cause it's you know, a lot of people are
<v Speaker 1>cool and they're just curious and I get to answer
<v Speaker 1>questions whatever. But some guy is some blowhard. You know,
<v Speaker 1>he's responding like six paragraphs to every thing, either trying
<v Speaker 1>to like it felt like showboating, or it's always men,
<v Speaker 1>it's always fucking men to do this showboating, or you know,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah, but it's just shit like that. I ended
<v Speaker 1>up just blocking them. Take a fucking hike. But talk
<v Speaker 1>to your shrink, all right. I'm not your fucking therapist.
<v Speaker 1>This isn't your space. Chill out, you're not being friendly,
<v Speaker 1>being a dick, all right, Just fucking block and delete.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, especially Facebook, it's so full of morons and
<v Speaker 1>just bored, lonely people. And I have sympathy for them
<v Speaker 1>to an extent, but just fucking go outside, Go do something.
<v Speaker 1>Go teach yourself fucking piano or astronomy or Spanish, you're
<v Speaker 1>fucking Czechoslovakia whatever, you know. God, it's just it's it's horrible.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's like the what it does to the human mindset. One.
<v Speaker 1>People are posers because they get you get to you know,
<v Speaker 1>you get to decide what you look like to other people.
<v Speaker 1>You get a filtered, choreographed and uh and tailored uh
<v Speaker 1>wayed to you know, portray yourself. But also, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you remove the face to face interaction. People has become
<v Speaker 1>some people has become total cunts. And that's what this
<v Speaker 1>guy was, he's becoming. He was just like a cunt.
<v Speaker 1>So I said, just fucking you know, he was arguing
<v Speaker 1>about something. He's like, well, not really, because how do
<v Speaker 1>you explain and I was like, listen, man, I've been
<v Speaker 1>all over the world. I've seen this. There's exceptions, take
<v Speaker 1>with a grain of salt, but generally the continents, it's
<v Speaker 1>the whole ecosystem. It's not just the plant species. When
<v Speaker 1>you're thinking about invasive versus native and how something behaves,
<v Speaker 1>it's all about checks and balances. It's invasive because there's
<v Speaker 1>nothing that's evolved to take it down, like cacti in Australia.
<v Speaker 1>Cact I never would have made it to Australia because
<v Speaker 1>they were separated by a fucking ocean. Right one cack,
<v Speaker 1>this species made it to Africa. Not surprisingly, it's a
<v Speaker 1>bird dispersed species and only one in the last however,
<v Speaker 1>many millions of years since cacti evolved. That tells you
<v Speaker 1>it's you know that the chances are pretty rare that
<v Speaker 1>these long distance dispersals happen, because not only does it
<v Speaker 1>does it need to get dispersed it it's got to
<v Speaker 1>be self fertile. If it's only one seed, it's got
<v Speaker 1>to get established, it's got to land in the right spot,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. Versus what humans have done moving shit around
<v Speaker 1>exponentially more. You know, thousands of times in the last
<v Speaker 1>century or two all over the world anyway. Yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>back Terris skiinensis it was everywhere. So it's got these
<v Speaker 1>spines on it. I'm so interested in palms now because
<v Speaker 1>they a lot of them have such defenses. You could
<v Speaker 1>tell they were getting fucked with. They were like the
<v Speaker 1>kid that got kept getting beat on, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>school and then learn jiu jitsu or fucking Muay Thai
<v Speaker 1>or something, you know, because they just some herbivore was
<v Speaker 1>just destroying so many palm speed I mean everywhere you go.
<v Speaker 1>I mean some of the what was it Coco Thrinac
<v Speaker 1>species I was seeing in Dominican Republic armored as hell.
<v Speaker 1>And the way they use you know, whatever whatever they have,
<v Speaker 1>whatever tools they have, petioles, you know, leaf bracts, whatever,
<v Speaker 1>to turn into spines is remarkable. You could tell something
<v Speaker 1>was or the herbivores were basically selecting for meanor plants.
<v Speaker 1>They were they were breeding meanor plants because anything that
<v Speaker 1>didn't have these spines, they were just gnawing to the
<v Speaker 1>ground or killing. And so the stuff that evolved the
<v Speaker 1>meanor spines was what was left. So Bactris ski and
<v Speaker 1>enssce is one of these really cool bactor species. I
<v Speaker 1>saw another species of bactriss it's one of that edible
<v Speaker 1>palm species, really ethnobotanically important in Ecuador. But yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>was bactris ki and enceince and it forms these little
<v Speaker 1>palm thick it's you know what's palms are not. I
<v Speaker 1>mean they're monocuts, but they're not closely related to grasses either.
<v Speaker 1>They're the closest family is Dazapoganas, which is predominantly Australian
<v Speaker 1>and makes some really fucking cool monocots in Australia too.
<v Speaker 1>Kingya australis the one of the quote grass trees again,
<v Speaker 1>which is a bad common name. It's like elephant tree
<v Speaker 1>because there's completely unrelated taxa, completely unrelated genera that are
<v Speaker 1>both called grass tree. But one of the grass trees
<v Speaker 1>Kingya Australis, is in dazopogan Ace, which is related to palms.
<v Speaker 1>And then Dasipogon is another cool genus that I saw
<v Speaker 1>in Australia in Western Australia that's in the same order
<v Speaker 1>as palms. Another cool native plant that I saw planted
<v Speaker 1>and this elevation was probably what are we like two
<v Speaker 1>three hundred feet elevation, I think planted along the irrigation canals,
<v Speaker 1>and this really beat up their road. That was mostly
<v Speaker 1>you know, I would see a farm truck every like
<v Speaker 1>thirty minutes or something. God, it was fucking great out
<v Speaker 1>there though, and it was just hot as balls. I
<v Speaker 1>really love the heat. Now, I can really enjoy the heat.
<v Speaker 1>Just get yourself a good hat and some baggy clothing.
<v Speaker 1>None of these skinny jeans these guys are wearing, you know, Remberies,
<v Speaker 1>punk kids, the punk scene back in the fucking Bay Area,
<v Speaker 1>you know, twenty tens, show my age here. They were
<v Speaker 1>these skinny jeans, these black skinny jeans. You can't do
<v Speaker 1>that shit. And the subtropical latitudes pal all right with
<v Speaker 1>tropical latitudes.
<v Speaker 2>Uh so.
<v Speaker 1>Tababouya rosia. There was a couple species of tababuya, which
<v Speaker 1>is in Bignonia seed to Catapa family, and you could
<v Speaker 1>see it in the flowers. But these were all leafless
<v Speaker 1>because again we're in the dry season, which is roughly
<v Speaker 1>what is December to May, the dry season, when that
<v Speaker 1>that low pressure intertropical conversion zone is down in Brazil
<v Speaker 1>in the southern hemisphere, not just in Brazil, southern hemisphere,
<v Speaker 1>you know what I mean, right now, and it'll be
<v Speaker 1>coming back up. It's probably crossing the equator right now,
<v Speaker 1>coming back up. It'll be coming back to these latitudes
<v Speaker 1>in May or June when the rainy season starts, and
<v Speaker 1>so they're leafless, but they're flowering, just lit up with flowers.
<v Speaker 1>There was a couple of different tababooa species and again
<v Speaker 1>cool birds everywhere. There was Another interesting thing I saw
<v Speaker 1>was guazuma on myfolio West Indian elm, which is not
<v Speaker 1>an elme at all. It's in malvas. You can see
<v Speaker 1>it in both leaves and flowers. Really got to learn that.
<v Speaker 1>You got to learn the flower structures of different families.
<v Speaker 1>It's really worth it. Tribotany in a day, or plant Systematics,
<v Speaker 1>or just fucking download deep seek AI and ask that
<v Speaker 1>I do use deep Seak because that's the AI that
<v Speaker 1>showed up all the all the sleazy American billionaires. Alan
<v Speaker 1>got me on it. My friend Lily was busting my
<v Speaker 1>balls about it. I said, hey, you know what fuck
<v Speaker 1>you pell this is leave me alone. We each have
<v Speaker 1>our vices, so I can't She said, I can't believe
<v Speaker 1>you use that. I said, yeah, well, well I can't
<v Speaker 1>believe you.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And then I tried to think of something rude to
<v Speaker 1>say to her, but I couldn't because she's the lovely
<v Speaker 1>But uh, you know, I think it's Ai is going
<v Speaker 1>to be here whether you like it or not. You're
<v Speaker 1>gonna be eating the ship, so you might as well,
<v Speaker 1>you know, have a couple you know, delicious fruits too,
<v Speaker 1>figuratively speaking, use it to teach yourself something. Ask you know,
<v Speaker 1>I can have Ai read research papers for me and
<v Speaker 1>dig out the information I want that would otherwise take
<v Speaker 1>me forty five minutes so and if Alan Rockefellers for it,
<v Speaker 1>it can't be all that bad. You know. I trust
<v Speaker 1>that guy's I trust, I trust his uh, his intuition.
<v Speaker 1>He's a solid fucking human. Yeah, but uh, guazuma A
<v Speaker 1>my folia little yellow flowers MALVESI exerted stamens. That was
<v Speaker 1>that was abundant. You know. What I was excited to
<v Speaker 1>see was the calibash tree Crescentia kuhete. And there's a
<v Speaker 1>which is native down there. And then there's another one,
<v Speaker 1>Chrishentia a lotta, which is also big noniac, but it
<v Speaker 1>may make these fucking gourds. The fruit is like a gourd.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like a gourd, and it's what they make
<v Speaker 1>the bowls from any Amazon. You can slice it open,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta, you know, obviously have the proper tool to
<v Speaker 1>do so. I don't know if they just slice them
<v Speaker 1>with a machete. Probably not. They probably use some sort
<v Speaker 1>of you know, electric vibrating saw. That is, you know,
<v Speaker 1>sounds like a dildo, but isn't They just had to
<v Speaker 1>throw that in there. I hope you appreciate it. But
<v Speaker 1>but it's got it's it's got a weird form too.
<v Speaker 1>I thought it was like a rainforest tree, but it's not.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's dry forest tree. It's got fascicled leaves, no petiole.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like a lot of the thorn scrub plants
<v Speaker 1>that you might encounter in South Texas. But it's got
<v Speaker 1>these huge gourds. So that's what Again, these are not deserts.
<v Speaker 1>They're dry forests. They get two meters of rain a year.
<v Speaker 1>No desert gets two meters of rain a year. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, they get two meters around a year. But
<v Speaker 1>they also get six months of dry of just bone
<v Speaker 1>dry as balls throughout deciduousness. But uh god, I would
<v Speaker 1>love to grow this tree in South Texas. I'm surprised
<v Speaker 1>nobody has yet see anything. We can grow a lot
<v Speaker 1>of stuff here in South Texas. It'll because it's the
<v Speaker 1>hottest place in the United States by far, hotter than Phoenix.
<v Speaker 1>Phoenix has individually hotter days. We have more accumulated heat
<v Speaker 1>throughout the year. Phoenix gets cold. It doesn't really get
<v Speaker 1>cold where I live. But anyway, but you know, you
<v Speaker 1>can grow this stuff, but then it'll get knocked back
<v Speaker 1>during you know, the one or two days it freezes
<v Speaker 1>at five in the morning or it gets close to freezing.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, anyway, Oh you know what I saw too,
<v Speaker 1>there's fucking neme everywhere. It's it's uh, it's neem oil,
<v Speaker 1>as as that rak the Indica, And it's like an
<v Speaker 1>invasive plant in some of these some of the more
<v Speaker 1>disturbed areas, human areas. So mahogany family, you know, same
<v Speaker 1>family as that invasive China buried tree that's so bad
<v Speaker 1>in Texas, like in central Austin with those little golden
<v Speaker 1>berries pinnate leaves, horrible invasive tree. But this name is
<v Speaker 1>in the same family. It's the mahogany family. Meliac Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>as that Eacta indica, and it's you could see it
<v Speaker 1>in the flowers. Of course, if you're catching the theme,
<v Speaker 1>I've mentioned that all the time. Look at the flowers.
<v Speaker 1>Flowers are the most diagnostic. But but it's got they've
<v Speaker 1>got a really cool flower structure they do, and of
<v Speaker 1>course ethnobotanically, it's a massively important plant. Makes little droops
<v Speaker 1>as well. Are they berries or droops? I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I think cut one open to see if it's got
<v Speaker 1>many seeds or one. But they've got this white corona
<v Speaker 1>like tube with these white, five distinct petals. Neme. As
<v Speaker 1>a Directa indica, you can pronounce whatever you want. You
<v Speaker 1>speak Spanish as your native tongue, you're going to pronounce
<v Speaker 1>things differently. But we haven't even gotten to the cloud
<v Speaker 1>for us. We're just fucking around with with dry tropical
<v Speaker 1>forests yet. But that was really wonderful to see that everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>And then there was the elephant ear tree, which is
<v Speaker 1>this massive fucking legum man. I saw a whole it's
<v Speaker 1>so big. It took only three of these trees to
<v Speaker 1>cover to shade a soccer field, a dirt soccer field
<v Speaker 1>in this little town. I stayed in just little off
<v Speaker 1>the beaten map town and so it created like this
<v Speaker 1>almost like indoor auditory, indoor arena feeling with these giant
<v Speaker 1>elephant ear trees. They're a legum and terra Loobium cyclo carpum.
<v Speaker 1>Was that it was it siiclo carpum. I forget, I'm
<v Speaker 1>let me check this, yeah, And Terolobium ciclo carpum. It's
<v Speaker 1>a memosoid. So it's got these little clusters of white
<v Speaker 1>spherical inflorescences, little white, tiny white flowers, pinnate leaves. It
<v Speaker 1>looks like a lu cana, like a tepewahe or something,
<v Speaker 1>you know, one of these one of these memos sooid
<v Speaker 1>legas they get fucking the ones I saw are they
<v Speaker 1>can get huge, like really big around like three four
<v Speaker 1>feet diameter almost. And then the fruit is it looks
<v Speaker 1>like an elephant there. It looks like some sort of
<v Speaker 1>like weird baguette or croissant or something. And you cut it,
<v Speaker 1>you break it open. The seeds a r attle around
<v Speaker 1>in it, and you break it open and it makes
<v Speaker 1>like a It's got this really distinct smell to it.
<v Speaker 1>It smells sugary and sweet, kind of like a tamarind
<v Speaker 1>and the goo is really sticky. You'll get all over
<v Speaker 1>your hands. But but it's not I wouldn't. It's probably edible,
<v Speaker 1>but it's not like it doesn't smell delicious. There's like
<v Speaker 1>a smell of a little bit of rank in there,
<v Speaker 1>no offense to the tree, a little bit of rank,
<v Speaker 1>like feet and ass smell slightly slightly. It's mostly sweet,
<v Speaker 1>but there's a little bit of foot and ass smell
<v Speaker 1>in there. But you know, you crack those little crescient
<v Speaker 1>there's some crescent crescent shaped croissant leg and fruits open
<v Speaker 1>and there's some cool The seeds are cool, like they're
<v Speaker 1>they're like size, and they've got a cool design. I'm
<v Speaker 1>like tear drop, tear drop shape within a tear drop,
<v Speaker 1>a tear drop shaped striation within a tear drop shaped fruit. Beautiful,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, it'll becose. I'm gonna try to grow one
<v Speaker 1>of those in South Texas. I'm sure it's not I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure it's not prone or it's not I'm sure it's
<v Speaker 1>aceptule to frost. I'm sure it's supple to frost, and
<v Speaker 1>we get knocked back in a freeze. But you get
<v Speaker 1>to enjoy it while you can, and a lot of
<v Speaker 1>these things grow fast and if it you know, if
<v Speaker 1>you get it big enough, it wouldn't die in a freeze.
<v Speaker 1>We just get knocked back. So yeah, it'd be great
<v Speaker 1>to try it. And Cassia grandez too. So many legumes
<v Speaker 1>down here, so many legumes in these dry tropical forests,
<v Speaker 1>legumes and anti cards. There was a really cool anti card,
<v Speaker 1>Anacardium excelsum. Anacardium occidentel is the cashew which is native
<v Speaker 1>which is native to uh Southeast Asia, I think where
<v Speaker 1>is it Southeast Asia and India. But ana Ardiem excelsam
<v Speaker 1>is native to the neotropics and it's produces a cashew
<v Speaker 1>like fruit. It's got that little arrow and then the seeds.
<v Speaker 1>What what what did these fruits evolve with them? Wonder too,
<v Speaker 1>because they're really distinct and huge, and also it's got
<v Speaker 1>to be something that's not allergic to that you rush
<v Speaker 1>you all like oil. But anyway, Anacardium excelsum is the
<v Speaker 1>native one, the native neotropical one, also known as the
<v Speaker 1>espa vet, and another massive tree. They can get huge
<v Speaker 1>and you can really see it, you know, like a
<v Speaker 1>lot of members of Anacardiac the Sumac and the poison
<v Speaker 1>oak and the mango family. You could see it in
<v Speaker 1>the leaves and the leaf a nation. They've just got
<v Speaker 1>a gestalt around them, if you're interested in that. I
<v Speaker 1>did an interview with Susan Bell, doctor Susan but really, Pelle,
<v Speaker 1>Susan Pell. My bad, God, damn it. This I sound
<v Speaker 1>like fucking Joe Biden, you know with these wait wait,
<v Speaker 1>come on, man, if they did it and then ah fuck,
<v Speaker 1>we broke medicaid man, we beat medicaid man. Susan Pell,
<v Speaker 1>wonderful botanist. She's and uh she's at the uh uh
<v Speaker 1>National God damn it, my fucking memory, the National Botanic Garden. No,
<v Speaker 1>the National Yeah, that was a botanic garden. Jesus christ
<v Speaker 1>Man like remember plant names, but I can't remember someone
<v Speaker 1>I had like a three hour conversation with six months ago.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it was a year ago, Yeah, I think it
<v Speaker 1>was it. Maybe it was I can't remember when. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>was a year ago. But she studies Antacardier say, and
<v Speaker 1>it was a great conversation, soup. It was super enlightening too,
<v Speaker 1>because I learned a whole ship lot of stuff about
<v Speaker 1>that family that I didn't know. But these these we
<v Speaker 1>really get into the fyto chemistry of these plants, and
<v Speaker 1>that that conversation, which is really cool. I mean these
<v Speaker 1>compounds like you rush you all is an anti fungal
<v Speaker 1>and anti herbivalry compound and just happens to cause contact
<v Speaker 1>dermatitis and people. Same thing with litterol two. I wonder
<v Speaker 1>how many different similar compounds there are in that family
<v Speaker 1>that can cause you know, allergenic sensitivity. Okay, okay, there
<v Speaker 1>we go, there we go. Do your tight chi. Do
<v Speaker 1>your fucking tight chi. Do it? Do it in the
<v Speaker 1>morning when you wake up, go get the sun on
<v Speaker 1>your face, they get outside. Do your tight chi? You
<v Speaker 1>know this? Would you move it? Move it smooth and graceful,
<v Speaker 1>stretch those muscles. Do you do your tight chi? Do
<v Speaker 1>your fucking tai chi. Huh, what's up? I'm back. It
<v Speaker 1>took a little break, you know. Is the tight she
<v Speaker 1>really does help? You know, you get old, you start
<v Speaker 1>having you know, muscle issues take you're creatine or something.
<v Speaker 1>When you do a workout, you gotta do your taichi.
<v Speaker 1>Do your tight chi. I can't. I don't have to,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I have too too quote neurodivergent for yoga.
<v Speaker 1>I got Badie can't do yoga, but I could do
<v Speaker 1>the tight chi. So we'll do the we'll do the taichi.
<v Speaker 1>Got to go and get you smooth. And then you know,
<v Speaker 1>we're taking a little break here from talking about plants
<v Speaker 1>where we're uh, we're going down a different road now,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's a little bit different. Check this out.
<v Speaker 1>We're just gonna we're just gonna jam for seconds. Give me,
<v Speaker 1>just give me forty five seconds here, just stay with me.
<v Speaker 1>Now we're trying to learn the song on piano.
<v Speaker 2>Just got it up.
<v Speaker 1>Lobby free, surfree. How you pronounce it? How you do
<v Speaker 1>that stuff? Nika? How you supposed to play? I don't
<v Speaker 1>know how to say this stuff. But just wait for
<v Speaker 1>the chorus because you'll know the chorus because somebody else
<v Speaker 1>ripped that off. They sampled it. Here we go, Here
<v Speaker 1>we go, wait, hold on, hey, hey, stay with me, now,
<v Speaker 1>come here, stay.
<v Speaker 2>Uh uh.
<v Speaker 1>You know what that is? The originals are always better
<v Speaker 1>than the one the songs they use, the samples. What
<v Speaker 1>does it starts off in a G sharp? No, no,
<v Speaker 1>G G sharp than a then f? There you go, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>G sharp G G sharp a F. It's a banger.
<v Speaker 2>Hey, it's a banger.
<v Speaker 1>That's nice, all right anyway, So, uh, we're gonna talk
<v Speaker 1>about this is this is kind of new. This article
<v Speaker 1>just came out. A tree that benefits from being struck
<v Speaker 1>by lightning. This is wild and speaking of tropical lowland forests,
<v Speaker 1>dipturis oliifra, let's turn this. Let's let's can it for
<v Speaker 1>a second. There we go, Uh, recruitment dynamics in the
<v Speaker 1>tropical rainforest tree. Oh maybe it's a rainforest tree. It's
<v Speaker 1>not a it's not a dry forest. Oh, I'm sorry,
<v Speaker 1>my bad, dip tur This was wild. I came across
<v Speaker 1>this a couple of days ago and realized, God, these
<v Speaker 1>fucking man, these tropical trees are just blowing my mind.
<v Speaker 1>I was, like I said, I was at that one spot.
<v Speaker 1>I got a Airbnb for like thirty bucks. Didn't have
<v Speaker 1>ac but it was fine. I had a fan, and
<v Speaker 1>it was in the lowland for I was like two
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet above sea level. It was as hot as
<v Speaker 1>where I live in South Texas. South Texas is basically
<v Speaker 1>tropical for nine months of the year. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>tropical lowland and forest, and it's got the same kind
<v Speaker 1>of plant community. Doesn't get as big obviously, but it's
<v Speaker 1>that thick scrub, the same density of vegetation, which the
<v Speaker 1>dominant culture here hates. Of course they hate. It's messy.
<v Speaker 1>The plants are messy. We have to cut them down.
<v Speaker 1>We want to mow if it's messy. I got that
<v Speaker 1>fucking that that idea that the native vegetation or just
<v Speaker 1>vegetation in general is messy. It's messy, so okay, so
<v Speaker 1>what's clean? Just like concrete and brick and asphalt. Like
<v Speaker 1>you realize you live in a place where, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's such a low latitude, you're just getting blasted by
<v Speaker 1>the sun. Like, why don't you want anyway, it's such
<v Speaker 1>as not the case in these these tropical forests. So
<v Speaker 1>like even the dry forest that I was in, it
<v Speaker 1>was so the uh, it was so such a tall
<v Speaker 1>canopy and there's so much vegetation that it's shady and
<v Speaker 1>generally cool, and you can still get a nice brea ease,
<v Speaker 1>so you're out of the sun, so it doesn't feel
<v Speaker 1>as bad even though it's like ninety five degrees fair night,
<v Speaker 1>what is that? Thirty five celsias? All right? So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>this paper just came out and it's not on SI hub,
<v Speaker 1>yet I asked somebody to send it to me. I
<v Speaker 1>just put a call out.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>The only thing is, you know, I get like fifteen
<v Speaker 1>people sending me papers, and which is really nice. But
<v Speaker 1>then I have to I have to thank everyone because
<v Speaker 1>I can't just get I can't have someone email me
<v Speaker 1>a fucking paper, go to the trouble to do so,
<v Speaker 1>and then not say thank you. So then I got
<v Speaker 1>to go through fucking fifteen to twenty emails and say
<v Speaker 1>thank you, thank you, because yeah, it's just the kind
<v Speaker 1>of person I am, you know, beneath the crusty, spiny exterior,
<v Speaker 1>I'm very soft inside. And uh anyway, so when I
<v Speaker 1>put shit like that on Instagram into stories, I got
<v Speaker 1>to make sure I go in after I've received it
<v Speaker 1>and actually delete it. Otherwise I get all these emails
<v Speaker 1>and then I don't. If I don't respond to them,
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna, you know, say he's an asshole. They're gonna,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna hurt their feelings. So anyway, new Phytologists. Just
<v Speaker 1>paper just came out by Evan am Gora at All,
<v Speaker 1>Helene C. Mueller, Landoc, Casey Cushman, Janine Richard shout out
<v Speaker 1>to Jannine Philip Bitzer, Jeby Birchfield, Jeffrey Birtzfield, Poplin RD. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>how some tropical trees benefit for being struck by lightning
<v Speaker 1>evidence for dipterix oliifra and other large stature trees summary.
<v Speaker 1>Lightning strikes kill hundreds of millions of trees annually, but
<v Speaker 1>their role in shaping tree life history and diversity is
<v Speaker 1>largely unknown. Here we use data from a unique lightning
<v Speaker 1>location system to show that some individual trees counterintuitively benefit
<v Speaker 1>for being struck by lightning. Oh shit, there's pdf download
<v Speaker 1>never mind, I guess it's free. Oh no, you can't
<v Speaker 1>download it. You can look at it, but you can't
<v Speaker 1>download it. They'll take a bunch of screenshots. I don't care.
<v Speaker 1>Someone's gonna put it on SI hub anyway. Lightning killed
<v Speaker 1>fifty six percent of ninety three directly struck trees and
<v Speaker 1>cause an average of forty one percent crown die back
<v Speaker 1>among the survivors. However, among these struck trees, ten direct
<v Speaker 1>strikes cause negligible damage to dipterix olifra, while killing seventy
<v Speaker 1>eight percent of their lianas and two point one mg
<v Speaker 1>of competitor tree biomass so dipterix oliifra is an enormous tree.
<v Speaker 1>It's in the pa family Fabasi, specifically faboid subfamily, and
<v Speaker 1>it's it's got pink flowers and I guess it's a
<v Speaker 1>you know, is it a pioneer species. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>And it occurs in Costa Rica, but it doesn't occur
<v Speaker 1>in the lowland dry forest that I was in, it's
<v Speaker 1>too dry. It occurs on the east side of that
<v Speaker 1>mountain range that receives the rain off the warm Atlantic waters,
<v Speaker 1>of course, because the warm waters cause more rain than
<v Speaker 1>the colder waters and colder ocean currents, and so rains
<v Speaker 1>you know, are coming from the east hit that mountain
<v Speaker 1>range gets you know, squeezed up to higher elevations. As
<v Speaker 1>they cool and condense, they dump all their water, they
<v Speaker 1>dump all their rain, and then the air that comes
<v Speaker 1>they don't they don't reach the west, the west side
<v Speaker 1>of those mountains. So this is this is a much
<v Speaker 1>more a wetter tree, a more music tree than the
<v Speaker 1>stuff that I was seeing, you know, stuff like in
<v Speaker 1>terra Lobium cyclocarpum, the elephant theater tree, which was just
<v Speaker 1>fucking massive. Man. There was at one spot I saw
<v Speaker 1>there was like a soccer field under the under these trees,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like I said, the indoor auditorium, you know,
<v Speaker 1>And it was only like four of these massive trees
<v Speaker 1>that were really doing most of the shade. They get
<v Speaker 1>that big, they're just they're beautiful, beautiful angiosperms. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>So it occurs in wet forests, you know, rainforests northern
<v Speaker 1>northeastern Costa Rica, eastern Panama. What's the rain, what's the
<v Speaker 1>rest of the range. It goes into Columbia a little
<v Speaker 1>bit maybe, but apparently this tree benefits from being struck
<v Speaker 1>by lightning. It can it can recover, it's adapted to it,
<v Speaker 1>but it kind of sheds all the leanas. There's lots
<v Speaker 1>of leanas in these forests. I was seeing even in
<v Speaker 1>the dry force, I was seeing these massive twisting vines
<v Speaker 1>because you know there's during the even in the dry forest,
<v Speaker 1>in the rainy season, they get upwards six feet of
<v Speaker 1>rain a year. It's very wet. Stuff grows very lush,
<v Speaker 1>very tall, very dense, and so to get light these things,
<v Speaker 1>you know, this is a common growth habit, the leana's
<v Speaker 1>and the vines and so, but they can also be
<v Speaker 1>a pain in the ass to the tree. Obviously, you
<v Speaker 1>know you got like a tree with a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>shit growing all over it. It's going to be stealing
<v Speaker 1>light and also burdening it with a little bit of weight. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>we'll cut to the chase with the paper results the
<v Speaker 1>minor costs and major benefits of direct lightning strikes to
<v Speaker 1>d Olifra trees to dip direct soliffra trees, the observed
<v Speaker 1>costs of being directly struck by lightning were negligible for
<v Speaker 1>d Oliifra trees. This species survived all ten direct strikes
<v Speaker 1>to nine individuals with only minor visible injuries. And these
<v Speaker 1>are big trees. I mean they have to be the
<v Speaker 1>tallest thing in that immediate area to get struck by lightning. Obviously,
<v Speaker 1>with only minor visible injuries, damage was so minimal that
<v Speaker 1>peak crown dieback of directly struck do oliferate did not
<v Speaker 1>differ significantly from die back among the general population of conspecifics.
<v Speaker 1>Repeat digital surface models from drone photogrammetry photogrammetry what is
<v Speaker 1>photogrammar confirm that these directly struck trees did not decrease
<v Speaker 1>in crown height or crown area during the two to
<v Speaker 1>three year interval encompassing the strike date. In contrast with
<v Speaker 1>the minor damage to these directly struck de Oliphra trees,
<v Speaker 1>directly struct trees of other species exhibited high damage immortality.
<v Speaker 1>The majority sixty four percent of the other eighty three
<v Speaker 1>directly struck trees died within two years of the strike,
<v Speaker 1>as compared to zero deaths for directly struck de Oliphra trees.
<v Speaker 1>The difference in mortality between doliffer and other species cannot
<v Speaker 1>be explained by differences in mean mortality rates among species.
<v Speaker 1>Why is Diptrix olif for surviving? That's what I want
<v Speaker 1>to know.
<v Speaker 2>How is it?
<v Speaker 1>How's it doing that? How's it doing it? Stuff? I
<v Speaker 1>don't know's doing it stuff? Did they look into this
<v Speaker 1>at all? Among trees surviving after one year post strike,
<v Speaker 1>mean crown die back was five point seven times higher
<v Speaker 1>for directly struck trees of other species than for d
<v Speaker 1>oli ifra trees five point seven times higher mean crown
<v Speaker 1>die back Jesus and crown loss was three times higher, respectively.
<v Speaker 1>Lightning caused significant damage and depth to trees neighboring the
<v Speaker 1>directly struck d oliiphra. On average, direct lightning strikes. The
<v Speaker 1>d olipher killed nine point two neighboring trees and costs
<v Speaker 1>two point one mg. Is that mill graams? I don't
<v Speaker 1>know what the fuck mg means two point one mg
<v Speaker 1>SD equals to they're using units. I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>the fuck this is. This is some shit. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>schoolding of biomass on average direct lightning strikes the do
<v Speaker 1>olifer killed nine point two neighboring trees. There you go there,
<v Speaker 1>removing the competition and cost two point one mg of
<v Speaker 1>biomass mortality among neighboring trees. Oh MG, it is milligrams,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's in relation to another unit, like milligrams
<v Speaker 1>perconmet bio biomass density can be expressed as milligrams per
<v Speaker 1>unit area, you know, like milligrams per square centimeter. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>that makes sense. Now they were leaving out that centimeter part.
<v Speaker 1>Direct strikes. Direct lightning strikes that d oli ephra trees
<v Speaker 1>also reduced LEANA loads. Oh, they got a video. Leana
<v Speaker 1>abundance has decreased on all six directly struck the oli
<v Speaker 1>effer that were initially infested with leanas four others struck
<v Speaker 1>the oli effra had no leanas before. After the strike,
<v Speaker 1>the average number of leanas in a tree decreased seventy
<v Speaker 1>eight percent. So this is like, gad, this just like
<v Speaker 1>if God went in there with the hedge trimmers and
<v Speaker 1>just pruned all that shit off. Let the tree breathe,
<v Speaker 1>get a little bit more light, increase the airflow around it,
<v Speaker 1>which is very important in these very these human four
<v Speaker 1>trust too leads to less rot, more airflow, less rot,
<v Speaker 1>less fungal pathogens, less propensity for fungal pathogens to attack
<v Speaker 1>things like bark or you know, crotches of trees or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>I would assume this decrease far exceeds the expected mortality
<v Speaker 1>of these leanos over the same time period based on
<v Speaker 1>community wide rates of leano mortel. Yet duh, they're not.
<v Speaker 1>They're getting struck by lightning. They're gonna die a lot
<v Speaker 1>faster and more abundantly than if they're just you know,
<v Speaker 1>for then a control. So that's cool. So the lightning
<v Speaker 1>this tree is benefiting, is benefiting from getting struck by
<v Speaker 1>lightning and suffering minimal minimal costs. Again, that's the thing,
<v Speaker 1>minor costs and major benefits. And so now something is
<v Speaker 1>selecting for it the lightning in these tropical forests where
<v Speaker 1>every you know, I think it's like every day there's
<v Speaker 1>a thunderstorm. God, it's such a wonderful fucking feeling to
<v Speaker 1>be in these forces and hear the thunder.
<v Speaker 2>Ah.
<v Speaker 1>There's such special places. They really are. If you can,
<v Speaker 1>If you ever get a chance to visit a tropical forest,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's a dry forest or a rainforest, whatever it is,
<v Speaker 1>it's so worth it. It's so incredible. Even you can't see.
<v Speaker 1>It's disorienting and it's overwhelming because it's you know, even
<v Speaker 1>from a bondness perspective, because you can't tell what the
<v Speaker 1>fuck you're looking at half the time because the trees
<v Speaker 1>are so high up, can't see the flowers, which you
<v Speaker 1>need for identification. Every once in a while you'll get
<v Speaker 1>flowers on the ground like the you know, after their
<v Speaker 1>post mature and the corolla falls off over and shit
<v Speaker 1>is still up there whatever. But so you could there,
<v Speaker 1>you can figure it out. There's stuff you could do.
<v Speaker 1>I got this, uh you know, I use a Nikon
<v Speaker 1>of take photos. I got this. I found this old
<v Speaker 1>eighteen to three hundred millimeter lens I had purchased. It's
<v Speaker 1>like a five hundred dollars lens or some shit. I
<v Speaker 1>got it a couple of years ago, and I hadn't
<v Speaker 1>been using it because it wasn't very good for macro photography.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's like an extendable lens. But now I'm
<v Speaker 1>all about it, you know, because you know, you can
<v Speaker 1>still take decent photos even though you have to be
<v Speaker 1>you know, like a foot back from the subject, which
<v Speaker 1>if you're photographing a small flower, whatever it's, you can
<v Speaker 1>still do it. But also just for you had to
<v Speaker 1>have that telephoto capability to zoom in up to three
<v Speaker 1>hundred millimeters, which is like a you know, a really
<v Speaker 1>it's like a telephoto lens. Is great, and to do
<v Speaker 1>it on the fly too. I'm not getting like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>these big two thousand dollars burden nerd lenses or something
<v Speaker 1>like that. I would I would break that, but I
<v Speaker 1>need this stuff. I take so many fucking photos. I
<v Speaker 1>probably took twenty thousand photos when I was there, because
<v Speaker 1>it's it's a kin to taking herbarium specimens, and I'll
<v Speaker 1>use them. I learned so much from the photographs I take.
<v Speaker 1>I take at least six or seven photos of every
<v Speaker 1>plant from different angles leaves, stems, pubescents on the stems, flowers,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera, habit habitat, et cetera. Both habit and habitat. So,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but if you're just starting out, get like
<v Speaker 1>at eighteen to fifteen millimeter fifty five millimeters stock lens
<v Speaker 1>and if you can afford it, like a decent one
<v Speaker 1>oh five macro. I use Nikon because they got a
<v Speaker 1>nice so they got nice software. You know, Cannon doesn't
<v Speaker 1>have nice software. It's a fucking pain in the ass.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, especially for geo tagging, Nikon is the
<v Speaker 1>only one that snaperdge app as much of a pain
<v Speaker 1>in the ass that can be at time, still works
<v Speaker 1>pretty good. So anyway, so I had this telephoto lens,
<v Speaker 1>I could, yeah, I could zoom in on all this
<v Speaker 1>shit and get photos of these leaves way up in
<v Speaker 1>the canopy, one hundred feet up in the canopy, so
<v Speaker 1>I could at least tell what it is. I could
<v Speaker 1>take a picture and then zoom in on it on
<v Speaker 1>the camera on the screen and see what it is.
<v Speaker 1>It was incredibly helpful. And also you see cool birds
<v Speaker 1>and shit, I get a photo of a bird, it's
<v Speaker 1>not going to be a fucking uh. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>not going to be like a magazine photo. I could
<v Speaker 1>still tell what it is and it's clear. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>walking down, we'll finish with the drive force and move
<v Speaker 1>on to different habitat in a minute. But I want
<v Speaker 1>to stick with these drive forces for a minute because
<v Speaker 1>they're so you know, in their own way. And it's
<v Speaker 1>also nobody was there because it's the dry season and
<v Speaker 1>it's so fucking hot. It was at least ninety five
<v Speaker 1>degrees walking around, you know, crunching on the leaves on
<v Speaker 1>the ground everywhere. But you know, the heat doesn't face
<v Speaker 1>me anymore because I live and I've gotten so accustomed
<v Speaker 1>to it living in South Texas at a low elevation
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas too, more like one hundred and twenty
<v Speaker 1>feet here at twenty six degrees latitude. So it's hot
<v Speaker 1>as balls most of the time, you know, unless those
<v Speaker 1>odd odd days in the winter you get like a
<v Speaker 1>cold front from up north. But and so I've gotten
<v Speaker 1>used to just sweating all the time. You wear baggy clothes,
<v Speaker 1>you wear a baggy shirt, you sweat all the time.
<v Speaker 1>Light colors and never fucking wear black anymore, and you
<v Speaker 1>get used to it and you just learn to appreciate
<v Speaker 1>the sweat and roll with it. But yeah, just you
<v Speaker 1>gotta watch your heart rate, make sure your heart rate
<v Speaker 1>doesn't get too elevated because of the heat, you know
<v Speaker 1>above like one forty one fifty hit the one fifty area,
<v Speaker 1>you got to stop and take it easy, you know,
<v Speaker 1>which I definitely did going uphill in some of these areas,
<v Speaker 1>Like when I was climbing to the top of the
<v Speaker 1>karst the car stereo hitting one fifty one sixty, It's like, fuck,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta take it easy because that's when you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>have an issue, So when you're gonna keeel over. But
<v Speaker 1>uh yeah, got cacti and howler monkeys, fucking nuts man
<v Speaker 1>cacti growing in the understory of forests, like tall columnar
<v Speaker 1>cacti growing in the understory of these dry forests with
<v Speaker 1>burst ros simaruba on dog tooth karst limestone that's been
<v Speaker 1>so so eroded by the rain, by the tropical rains,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in a rainy season, and you learn to
<v Speaker 1>you learned to love the heat so and it was
<v Speaker 1>cool too because a lot of those what I noticed
<v Speaker 1>is a lot of those legume seeds need scarification to germinate.
<v Speaker 1>So what I was doing. I got one of those
<v Speaker 1>dog electric nail files. It's like a you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>just a spinning grit disc, not disc, but like a
<v Speaker 1>you know, a roller. You can get them on Scamazon.
<v Speaker 1>I hate to fucking advertise it. There was a alternative
<v Speaker 1>to Scanada. You can get them on Scammazon for like
<v Speaker 1>fifteen twenty bucks. And that's you know. I usually that
<v Speaker 1>to cut the dog, to file the dog's nails down,
<v Speaker 1>because I don't want to. I don't want to, you know,
<v Speaker 1>mess them up. Back when we used to live in
<v Speaker 1>a climate that wasn't hot as balls, I would just
<v Speaker 1>take the dogs out on the bike all the time
<v Speaker 1>and they the concrete would file their nails down. But
<v Speaker 1>now I got it, and now I use this thing
<v Speaker 1>right because we're a bunch of fatties living here in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. That's what happens, you know, when you move
<v Speaker 1>to Texas, really anywhere in the South. So anyway, so
<v Speaker 1>I use that to scarify these seas. And I did
<v Speaker 1>it with Dermatophylum. Texas Mountain Laurel probably one of the
<v Speaker 1>dumbest common names that exists because it doesn't grow in
<v Speaker 1>the mountains, and it's not a laurel but a Dermatophylum
<v Speaker 1>secunda florum, really common native plant here. I guess it's
<v Speaker 1>on that band that State Bill eighteen sixty eight banned
<v Speaker 1>substances list that you know, only it's so retarded it
<v Speaker 1>could only come out of a place like Texas, out
<v Speaker 1>of the Texas politician's mouth. So some guys filing this bill,
<v Speaker 1>State Bill eighteen sixty eight. I think he was an
<v Speaker 1>accountant before he became a politician. I'm sure he's got
<v Speaker 1>a wealth of world experience. He wrote this bill banning
<v Speaker 1>all these plants that no one in their right mind
<v Speaker 1>would ever use to get high. Most of them are toxic.
<v Speaker 1>They're mildly psychoactive, like I guess a lot of poisons are.
<v Speaker 1>I guess you get I guess you feel a little weird,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in the head before you you have blood
<v Speaker 1>pressure raised and you start vomiting blood. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but but but it supposedly it's, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you have to show intent to you know, to produce
<v Speaker 1>these for consumption. But they could make that up. That
<v Speaker 1>could be easily weaponized against anybody who's growing any of
<v Speaker 1>these plants like heimiasilisifolia in the loose strife family Lithraci
<v Speaker 1>or Dermatto philem secundaflorum, which has been used for beads
<v Speaker 1>and was used for beads by native people Cohill Tecans
<v Speaker 1>among other tribes in Texas for so long. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>the mezcal bean, which is where mescaline came from, It
<v Speaker 1>was a confused with peyote a lot when Honkey Death
<v Speaker 1>Cult was you know, initially starting the first culture War
<v Speaker 1>against the natives in the late eighteen hundreds, the first
<v Speaker 1>culture war against the natives in Texas. So anyway, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but you could scarify all these things, any seeds, any
<v Speaker 1>legumes that need scarification used that dog nail file works,
<v Speaker 1>works like a charm. So before we move on, what
<v Speaker 1>are the dominant plant families in these ecosystems in these
<v Speaker 1>neotropical dry forests. Fabees, the legume family euphour bac just
<v Speaker 1>exceptionally specios, especially in you know, Brazilian and Katinga in
<v Speaker 1>Central America. You know, crotons Sapium et cetera, burser ace,
<v Speaker 1>the frankinsense family like Bursra simaruba, and burso, Graviolens, Palo Santo, apostanac,
<v Speaker 1>the milkweed and oleander family. You know, species like Espidosperma
<v Speaker 1>or genera like Espidosperma and ruby ac.
<v Speaker 2>So you know.
<v Speaker 1>That's that's those are gonna be the some of the dominant,
<v Speaker 1>dominant families that you'll end up seeing. And lots of mimosoids,
<v Speaker 1>but again like dipteryx Oliiphra is not a mimosoid, that's
<v Speaker 1>a faboid. It's from the phaboid E subfamily. And I
<v Speaker 1>we'll take a little break for some shitty commercials, all right,
<v Speaker 1>and now to talk about some of my favorite habitat
<v Speaker 1>besides deserts, is neotropical cloud forests. So anywhere in the tropics,
<v Speaker 1>elevation plays such an important part in the type of
<v Speaker 1>plant community you're gonna get, the type of clades of
<v Speaker 1>plants that is, evolutionarily related groups of plants, you're gonna encounter,
<v Speaker 1>the rainfall, the imperatures, you're gonna get it. And there's
<v Speaker 1>so much variation, all right. It's it's such a there's
<v Speaker 1>so many different kinds of habitats depending on elevation. Whether
<v Speaker 1>you're in Wahaka, whether you're in the mountains around Mexico City,
<v Speaker 1>whether you're in Sonora, Mexico, whether you're in Peru, Ecuador.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you get the you get the lowland forests,
<v Speaker 1>you get lowland dry forests, and on the in the
<v Speaker 1>rain shadow of mountains, you get tropical more tropical music
<v Speaker 1>forests where you're not in the rain shadow of mountains,
<v Speaker 1>like on the on the warm water, warm ocean current
<v Speaker 1>side of a mountain range. And then up at the
<v Speaker 1>mid elevations you get a little bit not necessarily dry forest,
<v Speaker 1>but you get you know, a different plant communities, start
<v Speaker 1>encountering plants you're not going to see down below. And
<v Speaker 1>then up at the higher elevations like eight thousand and
<v Speaker 1>nine thousand feet, you're gonna start encountering cloud forests, which
<v Speaker 1>is totally bizarre. It's unlike anything you'd ever experience in
<v Speaker 1>more temperate latitudes like the United States or Europe. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you'll see a lot of temperate lineages of plants, plants
<v Speaker 1>you would see at more temperate latitudes, but they're growing
<v Speaker 1>at tropical latitudes and they can do that because they're
<v Speaker 1>so high up. And that was where I spent a
<v Speaker 1>lot of time bodanizing and looking at plants, you also
<v Speaker 1>get a lot of cool mushrooms, many more cool mushrooms
<v Speaker 1>than you get at lower elevations. Up in the higher
<v Speaker 1>elevation forests, you know, in places like Mexico, like where
<v Speaker 1>the Monarch reserve, those are all Aby's forests, those are
<v Speaker 1>all coniferous forests. You don't normally don't get members of
<v Speaker 1>the pine family that low latitude, unless it's of course montane,
<v Speaker 1>unless it's a high elevation area, and they are of
<v Speaker 1>course Michael riislhosts to a lot of cool mushrooms, just
<v Speaker 1>like oak trees, And there was a shit ton of
<v Speaker 1>oak trees I encountered in Costa Rica at the like
<v Speaker 1>around a five thousand to six foot mid elevation forests.
<v Speaker 1>I saw Corcus in signus, one of the largest acorns
<v Speaker 1>in the whole oak family, size of a baseball kind
<v Speaker 1>of tomatos. Pubescent leaves, beautiful leaves, very coriaceous and leathery too,
<v Speaker 1>but having like a glabrous ad axial surface upper side
<v Speaker 1>of the leaf, and then a more pubescent like a
<v Speaker 1>rusty indument on the underside of the leaf on the
<v Speaker 1>ab axial surface. And of course these are huge trees,
<v Speaker 1>and they were all over this this mid elevation forest
<v Speaker 1>that roughly, I think it was like fifty five hundred
<v Speaker 1>feet what is that a meters fifteen hundred meters sixteen
<v Speaker 1>hundred meters maybe nah, probably that's a little bit higher
<v Speaker 1>than that. Seventeen I don't know anyway, but really interesting
<v Speaker 1>stuff there. But you're still getting a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>gazaniriads and interesting stuff from lower elevation wet forests as well.
<v Speaker 1>And this was right around San Jose, Costa Rica. So
<v Speaker 1>in Costa Rica, the mountains go from northwest to southeast.
<v Speaker 1>On the east side of the mountains and the lowlands
<v Speaker 1>you've got the more amusic kind of rainforest habitat. On
<v Speaker 1>the northwest side you've got the dry forest, the dry
<v Speaker 1>tropical forests where all the cool cact iron at gaves.
<v Speaker 1>There's even a melo cactus you get in the far
<v Speaker 1>northwest of Costa Rica. You know, melo cactus is the
<v Speaker 1>cake this It looks like it's wearing a FETs like
<v Speaker 1>the fucking Shriners on a big Kennedy's album, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And then you get Paramo really high up, which is
<v Speaker 1>where it's you know, summer every day, winter, every night,
<v Speaker 1>really thin air. The plants have hairs and pubescents on them,
<v Speaker 1>not because of drought like you would encounter in a
<v Speaker 1>desert like in western North America, but they've got hairs
<v Speaker 1>to protect against ultraviolet light, which is much exponentially stronger
<v Speaker 1>up there, like by an order of magnitudes stronger at
<v Speaker 1>higher elevations because there's less atmosphere for that light to
<v Speaker 1>travel through that breaks it up. And also because it's
<v Speaker 1>so high up the air is so thin, it loses
<v Speaker 1>warmth really really quickly, and so it it can get
<v Speaker 1>down to freezing, It'll be eighty degrees during the day,
<v Speaker 1>and they can get down to freezing at night, and
<v Speaker 1>so those hares act as an insulation against the freeze damage,
<v Speaker 1>you know, to deal with those drastic temperature swings. And
<v Speaker 1>I saw, you know, an illustration of the benefit of
<v Speaker 1>hairs when I was growing Helianthus argo fhylus during the
<v Speaker 1>Texas freeze. The spot I was staying at, I had
<v Speaker 1>some of these, you know, the hairy sunflower get fifteen
<v Speaker 1>feet tall. It grows in the Texas sand sheet. I
<v Speaker 1>think there's a disjunk population in Louisiana, which is cool too,
<v Speaker 1>like in coastal Louisiana somewhere on sand, but it's a
<v Speaker 1>sand endemic like many sand plants, many sand dune plants.
<v Speaker 1>It's very hairy and it gets a big taproot. And
<v Speaker 1>during that Texas freeze it got down to like twenty
<v Speaker 1>six degrees fahrenheit where I live. And Helianthus argophylus, despite
<v Speaker 1>being an annual, a non woody plant with just you know,
<v Speaker 1>soft tissue, it survived. It came out through the freeze
<v Speaker 1>because that thick layer of wool. I mean, the leaves
<v Speaker 1>are almost white Argophilus silver leaf. The thick layer of
<v Speaker 1>wool protected against the freeze. It insulated a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>It'll you know, same thing that like if citrus growers
<v Speaker 1>do they wrap their trees with frost cloth when they
<v Speaker 1>know it's going to freeze, and they're you know, in
<v Speaker 1>Florida or South Texas or something. It's a it'll it's
<v Speaker 1>not going to save the plant in a deep, deep freeze,
<v Speaker 1>but it'll buy you a few degrees celsius of protection,
<v Speaker 1>which is exactly what it did. And so that's why
<v Speaker 1>many of the plants in the Paramo are hairy. It
<v Speaker 1>was the Paramo was fucking insane. I mean, it's a
<v Speaker 1>whole other it's above cloud forest. It's like a whole
<v Speaker 1>other world. Esclonium ortilioides is the dominant tree there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>forms these short forests to like fifteen twenty feet tall
<v Speaker 1>seven meters tall, and everything's covered in epiphytes, and there's
<v Speaker 1>epiphytic liver warts, these red liver warts everywhere that don't
<v Speaker 1>they're not like the Thallus rewards the uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>not the thallus what is the word on the leafy
<v Speaker 1>liver They don't look like that. They're like they look
<v Speaker 1>more like a moss almost, but they've they're just covered
<v Speaker 1>in these they've got these these red and orange pigments
<v Speaker 1>to protect against the increased ultra violet light. Least, that's
<v Speaker 1>what I would assume, just wild shit everywhere. That pooyasilerioides,
<v Speaker 1>which is a bromeliad, was the target plant that I
<v Speaker 1>was looking for. It's the northernmost species in a genus Puya,
<v Speaker 1>which is a fucking dope genus of bromeliad. That's mostly all.
<v Speaker 1>It's all South American except for I think a couple
<v Speaker 1>of species, this being one of them. And this grows
<v Speaker 1>of course at high elevations. And what's remarkable is Pooya
<v Speaker 1>is a really drought tolerant genus, like Puya Alpestros, Puya venusta.
<v Speaker 1>You see them in Chile. They form these huge clumps
<v Speaker 1>of really razor sharp, serrated leaves that would be a
<v Speaker 1>horrible thing to fall into because they they've got these
<v Speaker 1>recurved teeth that would just turn into yours. But they
<v Speaker 1>get these inflorescences, these flowering stalks that look like wooly
<v Speaker 1>blue torches, just fucking incredible flowers, a lot of them.
<v Speaker 1>Most of them are bird pollinated. There's a whole group
<v Speaker 1>in the genus Puya and evolutionary clade of plants in
<v Speaker 1>the genus Puya a number of species that produce sterile
<v Speaker 1>inflorescence branches. So it's a branching inflorescence, but the branches
<v Speaker 1>don't produce any flowers. They're sterile. They literally just provide
<v Speaker 1>a perch for birds to hang out on so they
<v Speaker 1>can stick their heads in the flower, suck nectar and
<v Speaker 1>pollinate it. And the pollen is like this orange. Puya
<v Speaker 1>Alpestros gets these iridescent blue flowers and then gets like
<v Speaker 1>orange pollen It's just incredible. I just one I planted
<v Speaker 1>is just about to uh. One I grew from seed
<v Speaker 1>and plant that on eighteenth. The Mendela in West Oakland
<v Speaker 1>is just starting to flower. Someone sent me photos. I
<v Speaker 1>think that I already mentioned that probably who knows anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So this was Pooya dasillarioides because it looks like Dasileian,
<v Speaker 1>the genus of sodaal, which you know people make booze
<v Speaker 1>from and generally don't grow. They just go take it
<v Speaker 1>from habitat, which isn't very cool. There's got it. Come on, guys,
<v Speaker 1>figure out a way to get around it. You can
<v Speaker 1>grow Desilarians so easily. Someone started dasillian farm. It's worth
<v Speaker 1>the investment. It'd be fucking cool regardless, right, Just start
<v Speaker 1>planting a bunch of Dasillyrian, uh texanam or Leophylum, which
<v Speaker 1>are the main ones we get in Texas. You get
<v Speaker 1>Dasillarian wheeleraye in Arizona and uh Dasillarian some of the
<v Speaker 1>colescent ones that look like the Kingy Australis the Australian
<v Speaker 1>grass tree. You know, they got like a stem wild
<v Speaker 1>looking plants down in Correthoro, Mexico and tom alipis. It
<v Speaker 1>was a desialarian logisimum. I forget, well, I forget what
<v Speaker 1>they are, the collescent thesillian. But anyway, this puya apparently
<v Speaker 1>whoever named the things that it thought that it looked
<v Speaker 1>like a dasillarian, which it does. It's got a similar
<v Speaker 1>form to it, but it's it's a clumping bromeliad with
<v Speaker 1>recurved teeth. But it grows in fucking bogs. It grows
<v Speaker 1>in sphagnum bogs. It's not drought tolerant at all. It's
<v Speaker 1>it grows in Sphagnum bogs at nearly twelve thousand feet
<v Speaker 1>elevation in Costa Rica with a really cool fern species
<v Speaker 1>that looks like a psycat. It looks like some sort
<v Speaker 1>of what, you know, what you would call a sago palm,
<v Speaker 1>what a fucking layperson would call a sago palm, you know,
<v Speaker 1>which is like, you know, it's like a plant that
<v Speaker 1>gets planted. I have terrible visions of sago palm surrounded
<v Speaker 1>by blankets of Saint modes, freshly mode Saint augustine grass
<v Speaker 1>kept alive with a morphine drip of irrigation and fertilizers
<v Speaker 1>and pesticides and like the Florida suburbs. Horrible vision, horrible
<v Speaker 1>place to be, But that's a sago palm is a pycat.
<v Speaker 1>It's not a palm at all, but they call it
<v Speaker 1>sego palm. And that's what this black num species look like,
<v Speaker 1>which I guess is now in the genus Lamerio Psychis,
<v Speaker 1>and Psychis is a genus of psychad. It's a fucking
<v Speaker 1>super confusing so you would think lamerio Psychus is a psychat.
<v Speaker 1>It's actually a fern species black them black nacy is
<v Speaker 1>a very common family of ferns at lower latitudes, and
<v Speaker 1>so Lamerio Psychis Buktinia or was it blackham buctina. I
<v Speaker 1>think it's Lamerio Psychus book tinII. Now was growing all
<v Speaker 1>over the place with this puya Puya des larioides and
<v Speaker 1>cheskeaa subteslada species of bamboo. In these really low growing
<v Speaker 1>Sphagnum bogs, there was fucking Sphagnum peete everywhere, like living Sphagnum,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like red and yellow. I think it was
<v Speaker 1>Sphagnum magillanicum was the species. But there was I mean, god,
<v Speaker 1>it was just such a fucking wild habitat. It was
<v Speaker 1>so cool. You know, in these PuYas, they weren't blooming
<v Speaker 1>when I was there. I guess if you can be
<v Speaker 1>there when they're blooming. It's literally a wooly torch. The
<v Speaker 1>inflorescence is a wooly torch. There's so much hair and
<v Speaker 1>wool on theeds things to protect them against the UV
<v Speaker 1>and of course that frost. Especially Espiletti, which is like
<v Speaker 1>the iconic genus of paramo plants. It's an astorace E
<v Speaker 1>s p E l E. T I A. It's a
<v Speaker 1>fucking wild looking genus that's had an adaptive radiation. Many
<v Speaker 1>different species at the higher elevations in Colombia, and even
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple disjunct populations in Ecuador. They're very remote though,
<v Speaker 1>you have to hike to them. They're far the fuck
<v Speaker 1>out there. And when I was in Ecuador, I read
<v Speaker 1>about this disjunc population that was it was the southernmost
<v Speaker 1>population of Espaletia and it was just north of Mara,
<v Speaker 1>where I was staying. But it's again it's you got
<v Speaker 1>to like hike way the fuck in there. It's way
<v Speaker 1>in there, but it's an interesting disjunk. It's like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the rest of the population is much further north, and
<v Speaker 1>then this by the Colombian border, and there's just one
<v Speaker 1>stand farther south. But all the espialetias are. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they've got this same form that a lot of plants
<v Speaker 1>at the high elevation. It's a convergent form, an evolutionarily
<v Speaker 1>convergent form that a lot of plants that are not
<v Speaker 1>related end up evolving when they grow at very high
<v Speaker 1>elevations at tropical latitudes. The spiletti has looked like that.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they get like and they retain their old
<v Speaker 1>leaves because it acts like an insulation skirt. You know,
<v Speaker 1>as the thing grows up, it acts like an insulation
<v Speaker 1>skirt along the stem again protect it from frost and
<v Speaker 1>I guess from UV to a lesser extent. But this
<v Speaker 1>where this pooyu was growing, it was so foggy it was.
<v Speaker 1>It rained on and off, it pissed on and off. God,
<v Speaker 1>it was just so fucking cool. And all the other
<v Speaker 1>plants there there's ferns on growing on everything. It's but
<v Speaker 1>it's scrub vegetation too, and it must have been hard
<v Speaker 1>panned beneath it, because I could see it was the
<v Speaker 1>dry season now, but I could see there were areas
<v Speaker 1>where water certainly pulled up and formed little bogs. And
<v Speaker 1>I bet there's so many cool amphibians up there too.
<v Speaker 1>I came across the paper that talked about some sort
<v Speaker 1>of salamander species that uses Puya dasa leary oides to
<v Speaker 1>hunt arthropods like it climbs up the stem. But we're
<v Speaker 1>getting ahead of ourselves, so we'll talk about the paramol
<v Speaker 1>in a minute. If there's anything left to actually get
<v Speaker 1>to tons of cool lycopods and ship up there too.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, but anyway, so the main things. I started
<v Speaker 1>off in Santa Sidro General down there on the other
<v Speaker 1>side of the mountains and got like a little fucking
<v Speaker 1>Airbnb and took this little shitty sedan that I almost destroyed,
<v Speaker 1>took it up and started. You know, the road starts
<v Speaker 1>getting interesting. Right around five thousand feet. You start seeing
<v Speaker 1>gunnera and sickness with you know, the Chilean rhubarb. It's
<v Speaker 1>called a lot of plants that you see at these
<v Speaker 1>higher elevations you also see at lower elevations in Chile,
<v Speaker 1>like gunnera. That was a good it was. There was
<v Speaker 1>a couple other ones too, or at least you know,
<v Speaker 1>related species in the same genus because those temperate rainforests
<v Speaker 1>of southern Chile have some floristic affinities with the higher
<v Speaker 1>elevation paromo or higher elevation cloud forest. So Gunnar run
<v Speaker 1>Sigmas was there on five six thousand feet there was
<v Speaker 1>wigandhia urins, which is a giant borage. They can get
<v Speaker 1>like eighteen feet tall. It's one of the coolest rutural plants.
<v Speaker 1>What do I mean What do I mean by rutural plants? Well,
<v Speaker 1>ruteral comes from the word rubble, the land word for rubble,
<v Speaker 1>which which is you know, just means human disturbance. So
<v Speaker 1>like on the edge of the city or a developed area,
<v Speaker 1>a neglected area with gandy urns will pop up. It's
<v Speaker 1>got it's a fucking great plant. It's got leaves that
<v Speaker 1>are probably a foot and a half two feet, you know,
<v Speaker 1>half a meter long by out of I fuck, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what a foot wide, big peltate leaves, big
<v Speaker 1>big peltate leaves. And and they got you know, those
<v Speaker 1>little urticade hairs all over them, like so many members
<v Speaker 1>of bridge. And they see the flowers at the size
<v Speaker 1>of golf balls. They're purple. This is a really common
<v Speaker 1>plant you see in Mexico, and it's a ruteral plant
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico too, like Mexico City wahaka, especially growing on
<v Speaker 1>the side of the road. It's it's everywhere. I think
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple of trees. If you want to see
<v Speaker 1>some cool stuff and you're in California, go hit up.
<v Speaker 1>You see Berkeley Botanic Garden, right. I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>they're charging to get in there now. It's probably way
<v Speaker 1>too much. It's fucking Berkeley. I'm sure it's charging way
<v Speaker 1>too much. But there's other ways to get in. You
<v Speaker 1>can go around a bag in the fence. Whatever. I
<v Speaker 1>don't recommend that, I would never recommend it. I recommend
<v Speaker 1>purchasing a membership and then using the fuck out of it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because you get the reciprocal admissions. You can
<v Speaker 1>go to any botanic garden that they got that's part
<v Speaker 1>of that program. But purchase a membership for like eighty bucks.
<v Speaker 1>They're probably charging more the fuck no than God. Everything's
<v Speaker 1>such a goddamn rip off now, but go there. They
<v Speaker 1>just go the religious and that's you know, it's like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>you'll fucking learn something every time. One of the best
<v Speaker 1>botanic gardens in the country. None of that just esthetically
<v Speaker 1>pleasing Hallmark greeting, card board housewife shit, you know, like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>I need something to do, so I'm going to go
<v Speaker 1>volund there at the botanic No offense to board housewifse.
<v Speaker 1>But that was the thing in the fifties I noticed,
<v Speaker 1>and that's why a lot of botanic gardens are garbage.
<v Speaker 1>They're scientifically worthless, and they're just for looks. They're just attractive,
<v Speaker 1>you know, five hundred of the same thing planted because
<v Speaker 1>it applies color whatever. I've been saying this like nine
<v Speaker 1>thousand times on this podcast. But you see, Berkeley is
<v Speaker 1>not like that. You see, Berkeley's got a lot of
<v Speaker 1>good stuff, and they've got an amazing cloud force collection,
<v Speaker 1>partially because my friend Martin Grantham worked there and was
<v Speaker 1>really interested in cloud forest stuff and was collecting and
<v Speaker 1>growing a shit ton of it. And so that's where
<v Speaker 1>I encountered many of these higher elevation neotropical music forests.
<v Speaker 1>High elevation music forests, montane force, or even cloud forest
<v Speaker 1>cloud forests generally very high, like just below Parmo, the
<v Speaker 1>central Pogons, the all the cool Obelioids, you know the
<v Speaker 1>central pogon Lobilia bermistera, which is bat pollinated central pogon
<v Speaker 1>normally hummingbird pollinated. Libilia can be anything. I guess. The
<v Speaker 1>difference between Lobelia and central Pogon too, is the way
<v Speaker 1>the fruit the hisses, among other characteristics, but they can
<v Speaker 1>be really hard to tell apart. But the fruit splits
<v Speaker 1>laterally at the hisses laterally in central pogon, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like up and down the fruit and then it op
<v Speaker 1>the In Lobilia, the fruit just opens at the end.
<v Speaker 1>But I've seen lobelias that produce like a a berry
<v Speaker 1>fruit too. But in all these things, the seeds are tiny,
<v Speaker 1>and that's how what makes them so ecologically successful and
<v Speaker 1>so good at getting around. It's like the fruits produce
<v Speaker 1>tons of seeds and then the seeds can get around.
<v Speaker 1>Bermistra produces these like inflated little leathery bag fruits, like
<v Speaker 1>the size of a golf ball, maybe a little bit less.
<v Speaker 1>And then the seeds are on this little structure that's
<v Speaker 1>in the center of that air filled bag. It's it's wold,
<v Speaker 1>but the seeds are still tiny. And Bermestra bremeistro looks
<v Speaker 1>it's a lot looks a lot different than lobelia, but
<v Speaker 1>they've all got that same flower structure with the rod
<v Speaker 1>and the fused anther tube, no visible sexy parts inside,
<v Speaker 1>just that single rod sticking out of a bioletterally symmetrical flower.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so I started off with Gunnara and Signus
<v Speaker 1>and then just started photographing and stopping a check out
<v Speaker 1>everything I saw. On the way up. I was at
<v Speaker 1>like five thousand feet and on the other side of
<v Speaker 1>the mountains in the kind of a more music forest,
<v Speaker 1>you know, getting more rainfall from the Atlantic. That's where
<v Speaker 1>that quirkus in Signus was that giant oak and h
<v Speaker 1>Micuna was it or was it moocuna? Hold on, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was moocuna mcuna monte coola, which is a legume
<v Speaker 1>that produces these like bean pod fruits with this really
<v Speaker 1>weird texture to it, like it's broken up into I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, man, it's not smooth. It's not a smooth text.
<v Speaker 1>It's got a weird fucking texture. I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>that's about. But the it's a leana. So it's this
<v Speaker 1>big ass vine that goes like sixty feet up the
<v Speaker 1>tree and you'll see them draping across the middle of
<v Speaker 1>the canopy, and then when it has the flower, it
<v Speaker 1>sends down this pendent influorescence. It can sometimes be, you know,
<v Speaker 1>hanging twenty feet down from the vine, well, maybe like
<v Speaker 1>ten feet down from the vine. Was the three four
<v Speaker 1>meters down from the vine. And it's got these big
<v Speaker 1>p shaped flowers. They look like a p flower banner
<v Speaker 1>wings and keel petals, but they're they're kind of pendant
<v Speaker 1>and like a light lime green color, and they're pollinated
<v Speaker 1>by bats. I guess all the mucunas are pollinated by bats.
<v Speaker 1>But it's a cool genus that I did not know
<v Speaker 1>about until just recently when I saw it. It kind
<v Speaker 1>of looks like the jade vine, which is in the Philippines.
<v Speaker 1>I forget the name of the jade vine. Forgive me
<v Speaker 1>for using a common in this case, it applies. But
<v Speaker 1>jade vine's a cool fucking legume, a cool leana, a
<v Speaker 1>cool vining legum with incredible inflorescences like those iridescent blue
<v Speaker 1>anytime you see an iridescent blue, iridescent blue flower. But
<v Speaker 1>the mukuna was like in the foothills of volcan POAs,
<v Speaker 1>which we went up to but it was blowing up,
<v Speaker 1>so they had the road closed and there was like
<v Speaker 1>the fucking plastic horses they had to protect the road
<v Speaker 1>to block against going up like the plastic you know,
<v Speaker 1>road horses. They had had volcanic ashole over it, like
<v Speaker 1>grains of pumps and shit all over you. Like the
<v Speaker 1>thing was freshly blowing up. They're worried about some tourists
<v Speaker 1>getting killed, getting cooked, but you know, even just going
<v Speaker 1>up that high, there was a bunch of cool shit
<v Speaker 1>on the side of There are giant chef flearras and
<v Speaker 1>Oreo panax and god, there was where Rawia I think
<v Speaker 1>it was, what was it mont I think it was
<v Speaker 1>where Rawia montana, which is a bromeliad. There was a
<v Speaker 1>a tree. It was Drimus granit edensis. Drymus is in
<v Speaker 1>the family winter racey. It's one of the more basal
<v Speaker 1>angiosperm families. Got Appocarpus fruits. The carpals aren't fused, you know,
<v Speaker 1>typical snapomorphies and traits characteristics of the more early branching
<v Speaker 1>lineages of angiosperms, and winter Race is normally a southern
<v Speaker 1>hemisphere like almost Gondwanan genus there's some I saw some
<v Speaker 1>really cool drymis. There was drymis and dina and another
<v Speaker 1>one was it d was drymus winter in Chile, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but it's more of this Gondwana and flora. But up
<v Speaker 1>here at like seven thousand and eight thousand feet, drymus
<v Speaker 1>granted dentist was everywhere. It looks almost similar, like glabrous leaves.
<v Speaker 1>You crack the leaves open, they smell kind of like sassafras,
<v Speaker 1>which is another trait of a lot of early branching angiosperms,
<v Speaker 1>and Lora or Magnolia leis or any of those orders canalales,
<v Speaker 1>pipe rayles, Magnolia alies, loreleis, the four orders of the
<v Speaker 1>Magnoliods and winter aces and the canalales. And then you
<v Speaker 1>know like Aristolochia the pipe vines, and piper uh and
<v Speaker 1>Soroa soura lizard's tail, which is a kind of plant
<v Speaker 1>you get the Midwest and in East coast like it's
<v Speaker 1>a wetland plant. Those are all pipe raleys. And then
<v Speaker 1>Magnoli a lies is like the anonas, the pawpause and
<v Speaker 1>an ac uh. I'm really going off the fucking deep
<v Speaker 1>end here with these magnoliods, and then Loreles lorace monimiace
<v Speaker 1>athospermatase is like a southern Hamshere a lot of these plants.
<v Speaker 1>You crack the leaves open, they've got that sassafras smell.
<v Speaker 1>They've got this distinct smell that they produce volatiles in
<v Speaker 1>the leaves and dry mass. Of course, winter ace is
<v Speaker 1>u does that same thing. So that was I did
<v Speaker 1>not expect to see that genus up there either. It
<v Speaker 1>was wild, but there was a dry miss covered in bromeliads,
<v Speaker 1>which turned out to be the genus where rawi at
<v Speaker 1>w E r a u hia. And you know these
<v Speaker 1>epiphetic promeliads producing these upright stalks, these upright inflorescences everywhere
<v Speaker 1>with these white flowers that were very obviously bat pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>That was fucking cool to see, just like the perfect
<v Speaker 1>shape of a bat's head, like these flowers, just you know,
<v Speaker 1>very obviously these things didn't evolve for for bees. It
<v Speaker 1>was very obvious and probably produced a ton of starchy
<v Speaker 1>nectar too, But some epiphytic promeliads that evolved with bat
<v Speaker 1>pollination bats being their main pollinators. I'm sure there were
<v Speaker 1>probably hummingbirds that hit these things too, but uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>hummingbirds generally go for more red flowers, and then I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure the nectar chemistry will be different, like the nectar
<v Speaker 1>content will be different. It'll be a richer sugar, most
<v Speaker 1>likely for humming words. But POAs was it was wild
<v Speaker 1>they end. There was gultheria everywhere, and all these cool
<v Speaker 1>epiphytic blueberries and you know family Eric Casey, but Macleania Satyria,
<v Speaker 1>big red flowers, delicious fucking fruits. I think it was Satyria,
<v Speaker 1>or maybe it was Macleani. I forget, but I was
<v Speaker 1>eating the fruits of one of them later on in
<v Speaker 1>the cloud forest and uh in the Talamanca range, and
<v Speaker 1>it was just it was so fucking good. It was incredible.
<v Speaker 1>We were at our friend Nacho's house, who grows shittaki
<v Speaker 1>mushrooms and lives with his family, and it is an
<v Speaker 1>amazing chef. He lives in this this Qrcus coasta ri
<v Speaker 1>Kansas forest, these massive beautiful oak trees h courses Corcas
<v Speaker 1>coco coasta ri Kansas and Corcus copaiensis. Uh, there was
<v Speaker 1>a zanthoxlim. There was a zenthoxlum milano sticktum which I
<v Speaker 1>thought was uh. I almost thought was a sumac of first,
<v Speaker 1>because I had glabrous leaves and similar flowers, tiny white
<v Speaker 1>flowers in a panicle, and one of the leaves had
<v Speaker 1>black spots all over it, which I guess was probably
<v Speaker 1>just the fungus, but I assumed it was one of
<v Speaker 1>the allergenic you rush you all oils, because they tend
<v Speaker 1>to do that when they're oxidizing, so that if you see,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the same leaf structure, same flower structure, and
<v Speaker 1>you're in you know, the pinnate or odd pinnate leaves,
<v Speaker 1>tiny white flowers, a bunch of flowers in the inflorescence,
<v Speaker 1>tiny flowers, and the inflorescence in a panicle, and it's glabrous,
<v Speaker 1>like the leaves are glabrous, and you're in like lower latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>stay the fuck away. Especially see the black spots because
<v Speaker 1>it's probably in anacardiac the mango family, and it's probably
<v Speaker 1>producing one of those super allergenic oils that's going to
<v Speaker 1>give you an as rash, you know. Comocladia, of course,
<v Speaker 1>was the one I touched the Dominican Republic that really
<v Speaker 1>fucked me up. And then there's Amphipterygium and pseudo Smodingium,
<v Speaker 1>which are Mexican genera Mexican. They might go into Nicaragua too,
<v Speaker 1>Mexican genera Nicaragua hinders, the you know, neotropical genera that
<v Speaker 1>produced those same volatile oils too, and you can see
<v Speaker 1>it on the leaves some of the neotropical bamboos. The
<v Speaker 1>chiscaeas that I saw, and I was midland, those mid
<v Speaker 1>elevation cloud forests were fucking incredible too. What was it chskeaa?
<v Speaker 1>Was it piti Ei? I think they were massive and
<v Speaker 1>they had this wax on them. They had this white
<v Speaker 1>wax which made them give them like a blue hue,
<v Speaker 1>and they were like twenty feet tall. It was fucking great.
<v Speaker 1>I wish people when they want to go wild with
<v Speaker 1>bamboos in North America, I wish they'd planted some of
<v Speaker 1>the Chiskeaya species instead of the invasive Asian ones. I
<v Speaker 1>just feel like it's better to have something that's a
<v Speaker 1>little more local that at least has been on the continent,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for longer than the Asian ones. Another cool
<v Speaker 1>plant I saw, and this was on volcan poass it's
<v Speaker 1>like eight thousand feet was clebadium Surinamnse, which is astoraci.
<v Speaker 1>It's a member of the sunflower family that produces berries
<v Speaker 1>like almost like a viburnum. It looks like it looks
<v Speaker 1>like a viburnum kind of, but then you get up
<v Speaker 1>close you see those discoid flowers. They don't have any
<v Speaker 1>any rays, there's no ray flowers, and you realize it's
<v Speaker 1>a composite. It's asta Raci. I saw viburnum too, I
<v Speaker 1>think was what was it by Burnham? Maybe it was
<v Speaker 1>by Burnham coast re Kents, but that was at nine
<v Speaker 1>thousand feet on the other side of the mountains. There
<v Speaker 1>was God, there were so many cool epiphytes in these
<v Speaker 1>these trees though, in these Quirkus in Signus, especially Jesus
<v Speaker 1>Christ and the yeah, you know, so it was mecuna
<v Speaker 1>growing in Quircus in signess. And this is probably the
<v Speaker 1>lower extent of the range of Qurcason signas. You get
<v Speaker 1>Carcason signas in Veracruz, Mexico two, which is probably one
<v Speaker 1>of the closest. You know, vera Cruz has a lot
<v Speaker 1>of it's the northern extent of the range of many
<v Speaker 1>of the Central American meso American wet montane forest plants,
<v Speaker 1>and there's a lot of cool stuff and vera Cruz God.
<v Speaker 1>I'd love to fucking go there some time, So Fido
<v Speaker 1>lacar ugosa to the poke berry. It looks like a
<v Speaker 1>poke berry with more vivid pink flowers. You know, a
<v Speaker 1>poke weed. You get phytal whaca, one of the final
<v Speaker 1>locas you get in in uh in the Midwest. They
<v Speaker 1>could be really weedy. You have to eat the berries.
<v Speaker 1>They'll make you puke. I think they're toxic, but they're
<v Speaker 1>really beautiful plants. And there was there was monina too,
<v Speaker 1>which is a genus of Polygalaci. It's like a polygalacy,
<v Speaker 1>little spikes of purple flowers. Uh Polygalasis, the family and
<v Speaker 1>the peace order for Bailey's which the flowers kind of
<v Speaker 1>look like peas in some cases. Some a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>different moninas, Uh yeah, Gunnar and signats again. There were
<v Speaker 1>climbing hydranges, fourth ferns, h a bunch of acanthoids acanthace,
<v Speaker 1>and a bunch of Uh saw a few peppermias. I
<v Speaker 1>saw Heliconia torturosa right there, which is in those same
<v Speaker 1>mid elevation forests just below Volcano POAs and uh, Heliconia
<v Speaker 1>of course is ginger orders in Gibberele's heliconi ac a
<v Speaker 1>lot of them are bird pollinated. It's a fucking dope
<v Speaker 1>family of plants with you know, often bright red flowers.
<v Speaker 1>They they've got the table cale almost looking like a bird,
<v Speaker 1>a quote bird of Paradise, which you know we say
<v Speaker 1>for for Strilizia, for the genus Strilizia, which is in
<v Speaker 1>South Africa, same same order, but unrelated. Then there was
<v Speaker 1>a ton. I mean, it's like anywhere in the neo tropics.
<v Speaker 1>There's a shit ton of melostomatas University too. The melastomes
<v Speaker 1>with those anther connectives, those really in those those three
<v Speaker 1>veined leaves that are so distinct, you know, one of
<v Speaker 1>the few plant families where you could see the leaf
<v Speaker 1>and know automatically what family it's in. Okay, we'll take
<v Speaker 1>a break to listen to some shitty edge, then I'll
<v Speaker 1>get back here we go. Okay, so anyway back to
<v Speaker 1>the other side, the south side of the Talamanca Range
<v Speaker 1>where we're starting off with Gunner written Sickness. We talked
<v Speaker 1>about the mid elevation forests just beneath the POAs Volcano,
<v Speaker 1>which was closed due to the fact that wash there
<v Speaker 1>were some slight explosions, but that was you know, that's
<v Speaker 1>that's a little bit closer to San Jose. Now we're
<v Speaker 1>on the other side, a little bit south, on the
<v Speaker 1>other side of the Talamanca Range, starting off, and they're
<v Speaker 1>Sandy's Seedra de can Aral. Going up. We started off
<v Speaker 1>with Gunnerra and signus massive peltate leaves, leathery, correaceous. This
<v Speaker 1>genus of course forms a symbiotic association with nitrogen fixing
<v Speaker 1>bacteria in a genus nostoc photosynthetic bacteria cyanobacteria. Remember the
<v Speaker 1>word algae blue green algae. Remember the word algae is
<v Speaker 1>a polyphyletic term. Doesn't mean that they're related at all,
<v Speaker 1>doesn't mean they're all the same. It's just it's like
<v Speaker 1>calling you know, it's like saying birds if you had
<v Speaker 1>a word for birds and bats, just because they both
<v Speaker 1>have wings, but they're not related. You know, it's a
<v Speaker 1>polyphyletic term. The word algae is unrelated clad It's just
<v Speaker 1>means generally photosynthetic and very small. Photosynthetic, very small, generally aquatic,
<v Speaker 1>not always its terrestrial alergies too, as we see here
<v Speaker 1>with Gunnera insignus, but it was it's such a weird
<v Speaker 1>fucking lineage.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I had just seen the same plant in southern Chile
<v Speaker 1>and videos I still have to edit, which hopefully I'll
<v Speaker 1>get around with it. They get fucking massive. They've got
<v Speaker 1>these kind of prickly petioles to the leaves. They're an
<v Speaker 1>herbaceous plant, but they can be sometimes twelve feet across
<v Speaker 1>by eight feet tall, just absolutely massive. Again, if you
<v Speaker 1>want to see a good one, go to UC Berkeley
<v Speaker 1>Botanic Garden. They're also invasive, I guess in the UK,
<v Speaker 1>but hey, whatever, it's the UK, it's trashed anyway, No
<v Speaker 1>offense to the UK. There was also Dahlia imperialis there,
<v Speaker 1>which is another plant which is that I knew from
<v Speaker 1>just horticulture in the Bay Area of California. It's like
<v Speaker 1>it looks like basically like a pink, a big ass
<v Speaker 1>pink sunflower that hangs down from a stalk. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's an herbaceous plant. Well, I guess it can get
<v Speaker 1>a little woody towards the bottom, but they'll be you know,
<v Speaker 1>fifteen feet tall in some cases with these pendant flowers.
<v Speaker 1>Almost certainly evolved for hummingbird pollination. I'm sure bees hit
<v Speaker 1>them too, But it was cool to see that these
<v Speaker 1>giant dahlias, you know, and they're easy to root. You
<v Speaker 1>can cut them, and then they don't like it dry.
<v Speaker 1>They like it cool and wet, which is why they
<v Speaker 1>do so well in the Bay Area of California. But
<v Speaker 1>of course they need an irrigated garden there. They don't
<v Speaker 1>like the dry Mediterranean summer. There was a Biden's species
<v Speaker 1>as well, the same bidens that you get in a Midwest,
<v Speaker 1>East coast whatever, with those those seeds that can stick
<v Speaker 1>in your to your pants. You know, you get those bidens.
<v Speaker 1>That's the goddamn it. Thanks Joe Biden. You got those
<v Speaker 1>two prongs you know at the top of the sunflower seed.
<v Speaker 1>Bidens is in the sunflower family. Asked the racy. But
<v Speaker 1>this was this Biden's was like a scrambling shrub. It
<v Speaker 1>was almost like a Leana Biden's reped hands and it
<v Speaker 1>had you know, it was just like like like yellow
<v Speaker 1>sunflower with less rays, less ray flowers with less rays
<v Speaker 1>around the flower head. But yeah, it was fucking like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, twelve feet tall, like twelve feet scrambling through
<v Speaker 1>another plant. That was pretty uh, pretty cool to see,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just the variations on a theme. That's the
<v Speaker 1>main reason I traveled to see this shit is to
<v Speaker 1>see what evolution is produced in all these different climates, latitudes, elevations,
<v Speaker 1>different environments, cast of pollinators, cast of antagonistic fungi and
<v Speaker 1>herbivores and insects whatever. So anyway, so that was that
<v Speaker 1>was fucking wonderful. Still only like six thousand feet, So
<v Speaker 1>we keep going up and then the alders appear, Yes,
<v Speaker 1>the tropical alder all this Acuminata which also has nitrogen
<v Speaker 1>fixing bacteria that it associates with. It associates with nitrogen
<v Speaker 1>fixing actino my seat bacteria actino my seat because it
<v Speaker 1>was thought to be a fungus for the first like
<v Speaker 1>eighty years that it was now to exist, I think,
<v Speaker 1>and that was later realized to be kind of a
<v Speaker 1>mycelium producing bacteria essentially is what it is, a filamentous bacteria,
<v Speaker 1>but in the genus Frankia. But they produce, they can
<v Speaker 1>fix atmospheric nitrogen using nitrogenase enzymes, and they still require
<v Speaker 1>root nodules because that nitrogenase enzyme requires a low oxygen
<v Speaker 1>environment to function. But all alders do this so far
<v Speaker 1>as I know, so all the Sacuminata is no exception,
<v Speaker 1>and it was growing when I first encountered it. Here
<v Speaker 1>was growing in kind of a waste theea. It looked
<v Speaker 1>like a quarry, like it had once been a quarry.
<v Speaker 1>There was disturbance there. There was rock talus everywhere, but
<v Speaker 1>there was also a lot of cool shit growing, including
<v Speaker 1>Hemichina fruticosa, which is a monkey flower if you know,
<v Speaker 1>aaryth rant, and the plachis and the genus Mimulus. They're
<v Speaker 1>all monkey flowers because I guess because the flower head
<v Speaker 1>looks like a monkey. I don't fucking know. It does
<v Speaker 1>maybe really cool and specios uh out West, very species
<v Speaker 1>rich out West, Like in California, there's a Death Valley
<v Speaker 1>monkey flower. There's a there's a mojabbi monkey flower. There's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking uh the play is pict This is like
<v Speaker 1>the really rare looks like a rat fink, you know,
<v Speaker 1>bloodshot crackhead eye monkey flower. The flower head looks like that.
<v Speaker 1>And there's a bunch of earth rant species you get
<v Speaker 1>in Chile as well as in uh all over California.
<v Speaker 1>There's a couple of earth rants we get in UH
<v Speaker 1>Texas to UH and then you get you know, the
<v Speaker 1>genus Frima. Anyway, frim Ac is the family order is
<v Speaker 1>lamey A LEAs so opposite leaves bi ledosymmetrical flowers for
<v Speaker 1>stamens Hemmikina fruiticosa. Again, it was another plant that I
<v Speaker 1>had seen in Wahaka. Tends to colonize disturbed sites, roadsides,
<v Speaker 1>gets five feet tall, big yellow flowers, probably bumblebee pollinated,
<v Speaker 1>I would assume, but it's very sticky, like incredibly sticky,
<v Speaker 1>uh and just a really fucking cool plant. Another plant.
<v Speaker 1>I think they used to sell it at Antie's annuals
<v Speaker 1>or something in the uh I wander whatever happen in
<v Speaker 1>that place and in a Bay area and it was
<v Speaker 1>in It was another plant that was you'd find in
<v Speaker 1>like San Francisco Botanic Garden or Berkeley Botanic Garden. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it was nice when the botanic gardens used to be
<v Speaker 1>free and you get you know, everyone from like graffiti
<v Speaker 1>kids to just any degenerates going They're like, hey, let's
<v Speaker 1>go hang out in the botanic garden like they would
<v Speaker 1>just you know, because it was a culture to just
<v Speaker 1>like to fucking be around plants, even they didn't know
<v Speaker 1>what they were, you know, so you get like fun
<v Speaker 1>people to hang out with. You just degenerates and mischievous
<v Speaker 1>bastards whatever, going to enjoy the botanic garden. Surely probably
<v Speaker 1>taking forties and smoking weed in there, but still enjoying
<v Speaker 1>the botanic garden. You know, much different get up than
<v Speaker 1>you might expect, a much different demographic than you might
<v Speaker 1>expect to see botanic gardens. You know, the region to
<v Speaker 1>a country, you know where you might get kicked out.
<v Speaker 1>You tried it edit Chicago Botanic Garden. I'm just kidding.
<v Speaker 1>They got a nice library. Shout out to the region.
<v Speaker 1>Stein Library. I had a dream that it was closing.
<v Speaker 1>But then when I gave that presentation in Chicago last month,
<v Speaker 1>I talked. I spoke to somebody who works at the
<v Speaker 1>Botanic Garden and she told me that they're not closing
<v Speaker 1>a fucking reagan Stein Library, Reagan Stein, Reagan Stein Stein.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway you get so if you get a membership,
<v Speaker 1>you get in there free too, reciprocal admissions. They can't
<v Speaker 1>throw you out unless you're peeing in the bushes like
<v Speaker 1>they did to me. Where is the security guard that
<v Speaker 1>kicked me out. However, long ago in two thousand and nine.
<v Speaker 1>He kicked me out in two thousand and nine because
<v Speaker 1>I was peeing in the bushes. He he accused me
<v Speaker 1>he was exposing myself to old ladies. I said, hey, pal,
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know they were in that trailer. Why the
<v Speaker 1>fuck are they looking at me? I didn't know there
<v Speaker 1>was a trailer. Donal way. I don't think they could
<v Speaker 1>see my schlong though I was. I was pissing in
<v Speaker 1>the bushes. It was, you know whatever. Maybe they were
<v Speaker 1>just they called the cops to me because I peed
<v Speaker 1>in the bushes. Which if you do that to someone
<v Speaker 1>who pees in the bushes a botanic garden, you're dick
<v Speaker 1>because that person's nourishing the plants. They're providing nitrogen and
<v Speaker 1>as long as the irrigations on that spot, it's not
<v Speaker 1>going to burn the plants or be too much. It's
<v Speaker 1>they're doing a favor. Yeah, fucking prude, somebody's somebody's genteels.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you gotta you gotta know, you gotta dose them,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta do something with them. I can't take them.
<v Speaker 1>I can't take these fucking people, these stiffs, these prudes,
<v Speaker 1>these genteels, these pearl clutchers, you know, I want to
<v Speaker 1>live in a world that's free of them. Anyway. Uh
<v Speaker 1>hesperomile's uh ubtusifolia was there as well, which sometimes has thorns,
<v Speaker 1>sometimes doesn't like other members of the rose family, the
<v Speaker 1>rose a see. But I'm not thinking about it. Don't
<v Speaker 1>think about roses. I'm talking about, like, you know, Pyracanthus
<v Speaker 1>probably one of the worst there's plants I've ever encountered
<v Speaker 1>in my life. I'm sure they're great where they're native.
<v Speaker 1>They're not native in North America, but people they'll plant them.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why they cause not only do they
<v Speaker 1>jab you with this razor sharp spine. They're in the
<v Speaker 1>rose family rose cy, but they also can be really
<v Speaker 1>hard to get rid of. They form colonies, they spread
<v Speaker 1>by rhizomes, send up shoots, and once that thorn goes
<v Speaker 1>in you, it like breaks off and it hurts for
<v Speaker 1>like six days after. It's fucking wild. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>if they're I doubt they're injecting anything, but maybe they
<v Speaker 1>just leave little pieces of barbed you know, woody tricomb's.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know who knows, I don't who the fuck
<v Speaker 1>knows anyway. Hesperomilees is in the same family Hesperomiles of
<v Speaker 1>two sifolia cool flowers, edible fruits as well white rosaceous
<v Speaker 1>flowers rose cy typical flower morphology the rose c five
<v Speaker 1>white petals, dentate leaf margin, they're glabrous. I also saw
<v Speaker 1>this same species, just like escloni and Murdalloides, growing in
<v Speaker 1>eck at higher elevations as well. That Dahlia imperialis was
<v Speaker 1>all over this quarry site on the side of the
<v Speaker 1>road too. I saw a white flowered phenotype which was
<v Speaker 1>nuts and then there was Fuschia piniculata, evening primrose family
<v Speaker 1>on a graycie. But it forms these dense clusters of
<v Speaker 1>pink flowers, four petals, four sepals, a prominent pink stigma
<v Speaker 1>and style indicating you know, exerted out of the flower
<v Speaker 1>indicating it's hit by hummingbirds. Lots of hummingbird pollinated plants
<v Speaker 1>in the cloud forest, lots of reds, lots of pinks,
<v Speaker 1>lots of orangish reds, whatever, you know, because the hummingbirds
<v Speaker 1>get going.
<v Speaker 2>There's that.
<v Speaker 1>David Edinburgh had a nice documentary on his stuff. He
<v Speaker 1>talked about why hummingbirds tend to prevail in higher altitude
<v Speaker 1>montane neotropical areas because it's generally a little bit cooler,
<v Speaker 1>especially because that air is so thin. Cold air at
<v Speaker 1>higher elevations is not the same as cold air at
<v Speaker 1>lower elevations. You've got that much thinner atmosphere at higher altitudes,
<v Speaker 1>which means that the air is not as dense, it
<v Speaker 1>can't hold as much heat. Things cool off a lot quicker,
<v Speaker 1>there's more UV, et cetera. So anyway, now we're going up.
<v Speaker 1>We're continuing to go up in these forests in the
<v Speaker 1>Tallamaca range, and it's getting it's getting darker. Well, the
<v Speaker 1>trees are getting taller, uh, and it's it's we're starting
<v Speaker 1>to see some really cool stuff. Massive oaks start appearing.
<v Speaker 1>There's a tree carrot, a member of the carrot family
<v Speaker 1>apac Merhidendron M. M y R R H I D
<v Speaker 1>E N D R O N Donald Smithy I was
<v Speaker 1>the species that I saw, I believe, but there's quite
<v Speaker 1>a few species in a genus looks like a giant angelica.
<v Speaker 1>It's got the whole leave, it's got the leaves and
<v Speaker 1>the floral structure and the inflorescent structure of the carrot
<v Speaker 1>family of a partially celery carrots, et cetera. But it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking eighteen feet tall. And one of these I saw
<v Speaker 1>later in the paramo, growing above a little pond. It
<v Speaker 1>had a trunk that was easily a phot across. It
<v Speaker 1>was wild. I mean, these are massive forms. Plants that
<v Speaker 1>are normally herbs or small perennials in more temperate latitudes
<v Speaker 1>turn into giant trees and take on these arborescent forms.
<v Speaker 1>Not giant trees, giant shrubs, small trees and take on
<v Speaker 1>arborescent forms at these higher elevations in the lower latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>these neotropical montane forests. This mirodendron was massive, though. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>this thing blew my mind. It was so obviously you
<v Speaker 1>see and you're like, that's a fucking carrot. It's an apac,
<v Speaker 1>it's got leaves like an angelica, it's got influorescence, it's
<v Speaker 1>got you know, the compound dumble looks like an umbrella
<v Speaker 1>that's been blown upwards, like blown upside down. Just just
<v Speaker 1>wild shit. And I'm sure it's got tons of phyto chemists,
<v Speaker 1>like toxic phyto chemistry, weird chemicals. It's it's synthesizing. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>to be that big and not be getting chewed on
<v Speaker 1>by giant ground sloths, you have to evolve some chemicals,
<v Speaker 1>some fucking chemicals, my friend. Many members of APAC, of course,
<v Speaker 1>are toxic or can produce photodermatitis, you know, compounds that
<v Speaker 1>upon exposure to sunlight, burn your skin and cause blistering,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. I don't know. Maybe so with myrodendron. And
<v Speaker 1>of course there's tons of cool obeliads everywhere, centripogons. There
<v Speaker 1>was a fucking raspberry. I don't rubis is such a
<v Speaker 1>nightmare of a It's such a cluster fuck of a
<v Speaker 1>They all look the same except for very subtle differences,
<v Speaker 1>all the raspberries and blackberries. This was very obviously a
<v Speaker 1>native one, though it was clambering up a tree night shade,
<v Speaker 1>a tree solanum, you know, that was probably the so
<v Speaker 1>I think it was Solanum storky. It was probably like
<v Speaker 1>fifteen feet tall, like five meters tall. This raspberry or
<v Speaker 1>BlackBerry produced delicious fruits, though fucking delicious. There were a
<v Speaker 1>number of native blackberries that I encountered here. You can
<v Speaker 1>tell their native because they're not forming these massive monocultures
<v Speaker 1>and overtaking things. They're kind of just you know, taking
<v Speaker 1>their place amongst the other species. And they were all delicious.
<v Speaker 1>They were all incredibly delicious. They produced delicious fruit. They
<v Speaker 1>had cool flowers, pink flowers. I think this one I
<v Speaker 1>saw had white flowers. I saw one later in the
<v Speaker 1>Potocarpus forest. I couldn't believe there was potocarps there either,
<v Speaker 1>these massive Jurassic fucking conifers in the cloud forest. There
<v Speaker 1>was one in the potocarp forest I saw later in
<v Speaker 1>near Eyok that had big pink flowers, just stunningly gorgeous,
<v Speaker 1>all cords, all kinds of fucking jupatore, you know, the
<v Speaker 1>Stevia tribe of Astraci, the joe pieweed tribe of Astraci,
<v Speaker 1>with those long styles, large shrubs, opposite leaves, big leaves.
<v Speaker 1>I mean just this is a really pleasant environment to
<v Speaker 1>grow in if you're a plant. I'm sure there's ample moisture.
<v Speaker 1>It never gets too hot, it never gets too cold.
<v Speaker 1>This is why I love these forests. There's so much diversity,
<v Speaker 1>and they're so cool, and there's tons of epiphytes too.
<v Speaker 1>It never freezes, it'll freeze up in the paramo maybe
<v Speaker 1>at twelve thousan thirteen thousand feet, but down here at
<v Speaker 1>eight thousand feet elevation, nine thousand feet elevation, it's not
<v Speaker 1>going to freeze. Well, maybe sometimes it can, and it's
<v Speaker 1>not going to get too hot either. I'm sure you
<v Speaker 1>can get upwards in ninety degrees on certain certain days,
<v Speaker 1>maybe certain hot days, but otherwise it's not going to freeze.
<v Speaker 1>I went and saw. I knew it was there. I
<v Speaker 1>wasn't looking for it, but I went to this one
<v Speaker 1>area that was again really boggy. There's sphagnum. It probably
<v Speaker 1>just didn't drain for whatever reason. There was a black
<v Speaker 1>num there. Another Lamerio Psychis species looks like a psycha,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a fern. It's got distinct vegetative leaves and
<v Speaker 1>then distinct sporophylls. The sporophyll is like a rusty orange
<v Speaker 1>leaf that comes up in the center of the plant
<v Speaker 1>that doesn't you could tell. It's not built for photosynthesis
<v Speaker 1>as much as the vegetative leaves are. This is a
<v Speaker 1>leaf that's just built predominantly for shedding spores, for shedding
<v Speaker 1>those haploid spores so that the fern can reproduce. But
<v Speaker 1>this fern was I don't know, eight feet tall, almost
<v Speaker 1>three meters tall, you know, six foot spread on it,
<v Speaker 1>two meters spread in a fucking bog with just such
<v Speaker 1>a cool habitat man again, they look like psychads. They
<v Speaker 1>look like some sort of short palm. Palms and psychads,
<v Speaker 1>of course are not related, but they have that same
<v Speaker 1>similar form. And down on the ground I realized was
<v Speaker 1>this member of the coyote bush clade, the Backerus clay,
<v Speaker 1>but it was a spreading herbaceous plant, the creeping crawling
<v Speaker 1>herbaceous plant, Talamancaster saccharanas, which was I guess just describe
<v Speaker 1>in twenty seventeen. But you look at the flowerheads and
<v Speaker 1>they look like backars flowerheads. They've got that very distinct
<v Speaker 1>yellow little rod. This looks like a you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>the pollen pushing pollen pushing rod, a little style poking
<v Speaker 1>out of it. And I think there was only one
<v Speaker 1>other observation on I naturalist that I had seen up
<v Speaker 1>to this point, and it was just described in twenty seventeen.
<v Speaker 1>The taliman casters are a relative. I think it's like
<v Speaker 1>six or seven speaks and the genus some are much
<v Speaker 1>larger than this. This was tiny. It was just a
<v Speaker 1>little spreading, creeping plant, but it was still cool to see.
<v Speaker 1>It was, you know, this little known plant endemic to
<v Speaker 1>Costa Rica, only described in twenty seventeen, and a relative
<v Speaker 1>of the coyote bush. The bacharis was in the Baccaris
<v Speaker 1>claye of astrac and I love the fucking bacharis. I
<v Speaker 1>love that clay. Whether it's backers Helmutholia that I saw
<v Speaker 1>growing on the Newtown Creek and Queens and near my
<v Speaker 1>friend Pauli's illegal houseboat, or whether it's backris pillolarius, which
<v Speaker 1>used to come up in the destroyed fucking mad Max
<v Speaker 1>like train yard in West Oakland, which later turned into
<v Speaker 1>like a massive bummy camp, a bummy camp and tweaker.
<v Speaker 1>It was like an outdoor tweaker lab. You know, they
<v Speaker 1>would have tweakers and it was a chop shop too.
<v Speaker 1>There were all kinds of cars there. They'd flip over.
<v Speaker 1>You know, why would they flip over these cars that
<v Speaker 1>were stolen, because that they didn't have a lift and
<v Speaker 1>that was the easiest way to pull parts off the bottom.
<v Speaker 1>So they'd flip the fucking thing over like a tortoise
<v Speaker 1>on its shell. And then you know, looted for parts.
<v Speaker 1>Oh that brings back memories to twenty nineteen, when you
<v Speaker 1>know where I used to live in West Local, My
<v Speaker 1>neighborhood really got just fucking wrecked. And it was all
<v Speaker 1>because housing prices went up, rent went up. People got
<v Speaker 1>pushed out on the street, and when they get on
<v Speaker 1>the street, they get into dope, you know, heroin or
<v Speaker 1>meth or fentanyl. Obviously no one does hero anymore. It's
<v Speaker 1>all fendanyl. That's why people just dropped. They just turned
<v Speaker 1>fucking zombies. And then of course there was this ment
<v Speaker 1>that just came out. God, this is what drove me.
<v Speaker 1>I'm all for harm reduction to a point, but when
<v Speaker 1>it comes to the point that people are shitting in
<v Speaker 1>the park, like shitting on like children's playground equipment, and
<v Speaker 1>like setting fire at the oak trees, like these beautiful
<v Speaker 1>seventy year old oak trees that have been in the park,
<v Speaker 1>you got to you gotta crack down a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>You gotta be you can't do this. You're destroying the commons.
<v Speaker 1>Like a harm reduction my ass. At that point, you're
<v Speaker 1>just enabling fucking degeneracy. You gotta there's gotta be some
<v Speaker 1>some level of discipline now in stigmatize Fuck that, if
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna it's more not stigmatizing homelessness, We're stigmatizing shitty
<v Speaker 1>behavior that ruins the park for everybody. You know, how
<v Speaker 1>did I go from a cloud forest in Costa Rica
<v Speaker 1>to talking about, uh, you know, the bummy camps and
<v Speaker 1>mad max degeneracy of the homeless problem caused by the
<v Speaker 1>obscene hustle for wealth in the Bay Area and these
<v Speaker 1>grotesque housing prices by these shitty corporate landlords and investment
<v Speaker 1>firms that base caused the homeless crisis. And then, like
<v Speaker 1>the fucking weird blend of all that shit, those Republicans
<v Speaker 1>say too. I hate it that they're right about some
<v Speaker 1>of this stuff. I fucking hate it because it's they
<v Speaker 1>have so little experience and so much of this stuff,
<v Speaker 1>but on some of that stuff they absolutely are right.
<v Speaker 1>Like the shit I saw in California just got got
<v Speaker 1>it got so gnarly, man, it got so crazy. Pardon
<v Speaker 1>the pardon the digression. You'll be all right, don't worry
<v Speaker 1>about it. Shut up. I don't want to you whine
<v Speaker 1>about it. I'm talking. I get a chance to vent
<v Speaker 1>now too. That's how I keep this that's how I
<v Speaker 1>could do a two and a half hour podcast. It's
<v Speaker 1>not all you, okay, part me too. All right, I'm
<v Speaker 1>I'm treating like my therapist. It just got so gnarly, man,
<v Speaker 1>God damn like it just would look like everyone was
<v Speaker 1>living in RVs, of course, because you know, rent cost
<v Speaker 1>five thousand dollars for a fucking two bedroom, and they
<v Speaker 1>were living in RVs and then like every once in
<v Speaker 1>a while. But then at the same time they were
<v Speaker 1>on meth in fentanyl. So it was just you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you've ever been around junkies, I have. I've had
<v Speaker 1>plenty of friends that are now dead that got into
<v Speaker 1>heroin or whatever, you know, wise life choice. They decided
<v Speaker 1>to make no offense to them. I always love them,
<v Speaker 1>but for fuck's sake, man, And so anyway, so if
<v Speaker 1>you ever been around and you see the behavior, just
<v Speaker 1>totally shit the bed and go down and you just
<v Speaker 1>see the fucking trash. They start like pack rat style
<v Speaker 1>behavior like bringing garbage home and just I mean, I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna use that one day, I'm gonna I'm gonna do something.
<v Speaker 1>And then in these failed projects everywhere that they swear
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna do, you just watch as you watch their
<v Speaker 1>life fall apart, and did you so you just get
<v Speaker 1>these explosions of garbage spilling out of these RVs like
<v Speaker 1>cartoon style, you know, like a water balloon that got
<v Speaker 1>filled up too much, and instead of water, it's just
<v Speaker 1>like garbage, the detritus of consumer society.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>God, it was gnarly though. But when they set the
<v Speaker 1>oak tree on fire in Remande Park, that really bumm
<v Speaker 1>me out that way. I said, this is fucking too much.
<v Speaker 1>Like you can't go to the park anyway. Used to
<v Speaker 1>like to go to the park and hang out, walk
<v Speaker 1>the dogs, whatever, just to like have some open space.
<v Speaker 1>You can't do that anymore because there's human shit and
<v Speaker 1>like rigs, needles and anyway. I don't know how I
<v Speaker 1>got to talking about it. I need event though, so
<v Speaker 1>you know we're gonna keep going and just let that go.
<v Speaker 1>I don't I don't know how we got anyway. We
<v Speaker 1>were talking about back rists. So telemancaster Saccharinus sakkaranus was
<v Speaker 1>growing all over this boggy area and it was like
<v Speaker 1>an opening in an otherwise thirty foot tall canopy forest
<v Speaker 1>ten meters tall canopy forest. But it was God, it
<v Speaker 1>was just so cool. I think it was mostly Escalonia
<v Speaker 1>murteloides the main tree, but again just covered in moss,
<v Speaker 1>bryo fights, probably a few orchids I missed, just wild shit, bromeliads,
<v Speaker 1>there was a Greggia species and you know, and I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure there's a peck and other things. There was some
<v Speaker 1>animal that was producing a lot of shit that we've seen.
<v Speaker 1>We've seen the turts, I've seen the evidence. Pal you know, tapeiers.
<v Speaker 1>Did the tapeiers go up to the high elevations? You
<v Speaker 1>bet your ass they do. The tapers do go up
<v Speaker 1>to the high elevation. So does pecori ta jaku? What
<v Speaker 1>is that? Does have a lina collared pecory the muskhog anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so that is uh, what is them? I'm looking at
<v Speaker 1>the mammal diversity and igh naturalist Jesus got puma con
<v Speaker 1>color bassariskus Suma crasty. What is that?
<v Speaker 2>What is that?
<v Speaker 1>Weird little man? It's just ringtail. Coco missile is a
<v Speaker 1>primarily nocturnal, arboreal omnivorous member of the carnivor the pro scionage,
<v Speaker 1>the raccoon family of course, the pro Scionage prosyonity. It
<v Speaker 1>just looks like a ringtail, but I guess it's like
<v Speaker 1>a lower latitude neotropical ringtail. The cocko, missile cake, a
<v Speaker 1>missal basariscus, Sue mccrasty, Jeffrey's spider monkey. That's got to
<v Speaker 1>be at lower elevations. I don't think they're up in
<v Speaker 1>the parmo. I've seen those guys, leopardess part Dallas. What
<v Speaker 1>is that? Ocellent? My high naturalist is set to use
<v Speaker 1>scientific names only because I fucking hate common names, especially
<v Speaker 1>for plants. They don't help me. But obviously with this
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't. The mantled howler, Oh there's that howler monkey?
<v Speaker 1>Is that the same one? I don't think that's the
<v Speaker 1>same one I seen. That's a terrifying sound they make.
<v Speaker 1>Listen to this, Listen to this, Okay, that's one. That's
<v Speaker 1>the difference. I think there's a couple of different species,
<v Speaker 1>because the ones I heard didn't sound like this. They
<v Speaker 1>sounded like a damn giant cat. It was terrifying. I
<v Speaker 1>mean this would be terrifying too, But okay, yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>is what I this is, This is what I heard.
<v Speaker 1>There's a different species. You listen to this, Okay, this.
<v Speaker 2>Is the fuck?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? It's terrifying. It's not a howl, it's like
<v Speaker 1>a guttural. It's like being it's like being accosted. It
<v Speaker 1>sounds like some sort of fucking horror movie, you know,
<v Speaker 1>all right? Anyway, yes, anyway, the point is there were
<v Speaker 1>tapers up there. They were shitting, so, uh, they were
<v Speaker 1>shitting a lot. It must have been a tapers up
<v Speaker 1>there at ten thousand where we had ten eleven thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, so up now I'm getting to the paramo,
<v Speaker 1>and there's the forest has all but disappeared. Now I'm
<v Speaker 1>going up. I'm high enough up the paramos disappeared. And
<v Speaker 1>I actually went to this little outcropping to see if
<v Speaker 1>I could look over this hill which looked like looked
<v Speaker 1>like it went for miles, to see if I could
<v Speaker 1>see any of this puya or any of these bogs.
<v Speaker 1>I knew it grew in bogs. It grew with the
<v Speaker 1>corded area, a pampas grass and a chiskeaa, and that
<v Speaker 1>bleck num which is now lameriopsychis that coalescent tree fern
<v Speaker 1>looking black num. And when I climbed up to uh,
<v Speaker 1>there was a small outcropping with one a single tree
<v Speaker 1>of Esclonium or todya on it that was otherwise looking
<v Speaker 1>over all this scrub vegetation, and on that tree was
<v Speaker 1>a species of Epidendrum, a flowering pink orchid here at
<v Speaker 1>what had to have been eleven five hundred feet so
<v Speaker 1>roughly thirty three hundred meters. And it turned out to
<v Speaker 1>be Epidendrum pastifolium, which is only known. It's a Costa ricanandemic,
<v Speaker 1>bright pink flowers. It's hummingbird pollinated. It's an epiphyte. It's
<v Speaker 1>growing on Esclonium murder looides again. And I think the
<v Speaker 1>only other trees there there was bud Laya Nightada bud Leya,
<v Speaker 1>the butterfly blues genies. But this is a this is
<v Speaker 1>a wonderful but layd. This isn't a bud lay It.
<v Speaker 1>It's gonna make you see red and want a sept
<v Speaker 1>fire at that the home deepot garden section. This has
<v Speaker 1>got little orange flowers and very white pubescent leaves, almost
<v Speaker 1>tomatos leaves that grows in the parimo. I mean it
<v Speaker 1>grows further down too. I saw it at my friend
<v Speaker 1>Nacho's house at the nine thousand feet with camaro staphless arbutoids,
<v Speaker 1>which is again a Kamara staffless arbutoids I. I haven't
<v Speaker 1>really talked about that much, but the mushrooms that come
<v Speaker 1>up beneath that tree and some of the quircus in
<v Speaker 1>that habitat have got to be fucking incredible. There's got
<v Speaker 1>to be so many different mushrooms. There's probably silasiby, maybe
<v Speaker 1>even new species of silasibe because there are some endemics,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in terms of just plants and fungi that
<v Speaker 1>have apparently have been isolated in these mountains in Central
<v Speaker 1>Costa Rica enough long enough to not have spread very far,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or to be physically distinct, morphologically distinct from
<v Speaker 1>you know, the mountains to the east in Panama or
<v Speaker 1>Nicaragua doesn't really get any tall mountains like this. I
<v Speaker 1>guess Honduras gets some pretty tall mountains similarly tall mountains,
<v Speaker 1>but uh but yeah, you know, and then of course
<v Speaker 1>most of eastern Panama's lowland. So these mountains right here
<v Speaker 1>from central Coasta Rica that go south into southeastn to Panama,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they're kind of an isolated little island. So
<v Speaker 1>there's going to be some endemics. But that Kamara Staphlis
<v Speaker 1>Arbuti's I don't think it grows up into Mexico. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>it does a little bit. Maybe it does a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>I would assume it does because the berries are bird dispersed,
<v Speaker 1>so there's probably some birds making the long flight. They
<v Speaker 1>don't take a shit, apparently, probably if they're you know,
<v Speaker 1>or maybe it takes a long time for them to
<v Speaker 1>pass the seed. But when I saw this Camaro staphlus.
<v Speaker 1>Now we're out of the Paramo, we're back down at
<v Speaker 1>nine thousand feet. Will I distract you from talking about
<v Speaker 1>the paramo to talk about this fucking oak forest because
<v Speaker 1>it was so cool. I'm trying to cover a lot
<v Speaker 1>of material here. So we're back down at nine thousand feet,
<v Speaker 1>we're not at thirteen thousand feet where this epidendrum was.
<v Speaker 1>And U Camara Staphlus arbutoids. When I saw it, I
<v Speaker 1>thought it was a madrone. I thought it was arbutus.
<v Speaker 1>That's the name rbutoids because it looks like an arbautist
<v Speaker 1>looks like a madron. But of course all these this
<v Speaker 1>ar buttoid clade of the blueberry family Eric Casey, the Manzanitas,
<v Speaker 1>the Arctostaphalos, the Kamara Staphalus, the arbutus, the Texas madron,
<v Speaker 1>and all the cool manzanitas you get in California and
<v Speaker 1>highlands of Mexico, et cetera. They are all they they
<v Speaker 1>all form endopitic relationships with or endo micro hizel relationships
<v Speaker 1>with Ecto micro hyzol species. So they kind of let
<v Speaker 1>these ectomycro hizel species penetrate the cortex of their roots
<v Speaker 1>and form associations with them, like me and Allen saw
<v Speaker 1>happening with the Baja bird bush or not those staphlos
<v Speaker 1>in northern Baja and the chaparral of northern Baja Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>Baja California, Mexico. And so I would assume the mushroom
<v Speaker 1>diversity there is insane, because you know, the oaks and
<v Speaker 1>this Kamarastaphlus are all micro hizel, they're all ecdo micro hizol.
<v Speaker 1>They form, you know, relationships not just with the glomero miceats,
<v Speaker 1>the small fungi that don't produce fruiting bodies that you
<v Speaker 1>can't see, not just with those micro risey, but with
<v Speaker 1>the Ecto micro rise that produce a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>choice edible mushrooms and some of the toxic amanitas and
<v Speaker 1>some of the edible aminitas et cetera. So I want
<v Speaker 1>to go back this summer and check out some of
<v Speaker 1>the the fungal diversity there because it's got to be nuts.
<v Speaker 1>And some of these oaks are just fucking massive. There's
<v Speaker 1>such cool oaks Corcus Coast, three Kansas. I believe that
<v Speaker 1>is an endemic oak. It might it might go on
<v Speaker 1>the Panama a little bit. But this Camaro staffleus was
<v Speaker 1>really cool. Camara stafflus. I think we only get one
<v Speaker 1>species in the United States. It's in California. There's quite
<v Speaker 1>a few in Mexico, and then of course this, but
<v Speaker 1>you know there's shrubs there, like the one in California
<v Speaker 1>is a shrub or a small tree. This was like
<v Speaker 1>a forty foot tall, maybe fifty foot tall, you know,
<v Speaker 1>fifteen meter tall tree. It was nuts, but it's still
<v Speaker 1>got those ersy lit flowers, those white blueberry shaped flowers.
<v Speaker 1>That whole habitat down in that oak forest was just incredible.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I saw Nasa speciosa hiked down in this ravine, three
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet down this ravine, super steep. It was good,
<v Speaker 1>though I needed it was like a Brazilian butt work up.
<v Speaker 1>Get down to the ravine. There's Nasa speciosa down there,
<v Speaker 1>which is a member of Lois sace, the Loasa family.
<v Speaker 1>The Menzilia family known for the stinging hairs. Sevalia sinuata,
<v Speaker 1>which we get in Texas, is a member of the
<v Speaker 1>same family. Savilla is the only one that stings. Yuk
<v Speaker 1>Nitie and Menzilia don't sting. Menzilia get. You get a
<v Speaker 1>couple in the Midwest to it, but they generally all
<v Speaker 1>like dryer sites. They're more like a Western plains, Western
<v Speaker 1>plains like the northeast end of their range. California there's
<v Speaker 1>a ton of diversity. Deserts there's a ton a ton
<v Speaker 1>of diversity. Mexico there's quite a bit of diversity. Chile
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of diversity. There's a one disjunct species
<v Speaker 1>in the Mibia in South Africa that's got really cool
<v Speaker 1>little helicopter like fruits like it's got those the sepals
<v Speaker 1>form these little propellers. But the whole family is cool.
<v Speaker 1>It's got little barbed hairs, the velkral leaf family and
<v Speaker 1>so this. But this Nasa was it's evidently hummingbird pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>It's got a big you know, baseball sized orange flower.
<v Speaker 1>The whole thing stings like hell. And it was just
<v Speaker 1>growing in this one of the few sunny openings in
<v Speaker 1>this otherwise dense forest near this creek, at the bottom
<v Speaker 1>of a ravine that certainly seems like, you know, it
<v Speaker 1>gets a lot of puma traffic. It certainly seemed like that.
<v Speaker 1>I definitely had nightmares day, nightmares of being pounced on
<v Speaker 1>by a large, you know, two hundred pound cat in
<v Speaker 1>this forest. And anyway, so this isn't in the forest.
<v Speaker 1>Then when I came back out and hiked back up
<v Speaker 1>past all these cool aeroids, I mean, the cloud forest aeroids,
<v Speaker 1>cloud forest and thorium, there was Chiscaia everywhere. It's all shady,
<v Speaker 1>it's all generally cool.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And I get to the top of the redge again,
<v Speaker 1>and then that's where I saw. I saw this viburnum,
<v Speaker 1>a fucking viburnum coaster ricanem again one of these more
<v Speaker 1>temperate latitude ude genera. But this is growing in the
<v Speaker 1>tropical attitude. But it said, again, it's at nine thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>That's how can do that? Really really cool? I did
<v Speaker 1>not expect to see if I burn them there, it's wild.
<v Speaker 1>It's always cool being in the tropics but at high elevasions,
<v Speaker 1>and then seeing these more temperate North American or temperate
<v Speaker 1>South American lineages just so cool. Then you think about
<v Speaker 1>the biogeography, like how they got there, were they you know, uh,
<v Speaker 1>how is it? How how long did it take, how
<v Speaker 1>their distribution spread, how did they speciate once they got there,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. I remember seeing Klethra too, which Clethra is
<v Speaker 1>in Clethracy order Eric Hayley's blueberry order. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what clethrough species it was, but it certainly had the whites,
<v Speaker 1>the spikes of white pendent flowers almost they almost look ersiolate.
<v Speaker 1>And there's I think, I think Clethra in the United States,
<v Speaker 1>it's almost all eastern US, right, It's like southeast pretty sure,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, you get Clethra. The only places I've
<v Speaker 1>seen it was in Mexico, so another I think it's
<v Speaker 1>a neotropical genus. There might maybe there's Asian species. I
<v Speaker 1>saw a Loopinus two up there. Anyway, So this is
<v Speaker 1>we go from the forest now to up to the Parrimo.
<v Speaker 1>So now we're back up at thirteen thousand, twelve thousand
<v Speaker 1>feet thirty two hundred meters thirty three hundred meters scrub
<v Speaker 1>vegetation interspersed with like this short these patches of short
<v Speaker 1>canopy forest dominated by Escalonia myrtiloides. There's cordaderia there. There's
<v Speaker 1>entire thickets like you can stand on a ridge and
<v Speaker 1>look out over this thicket of chiskeya bamboo, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like corn maze height, like six or seven feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>seven to eight feet tall, maybe corn maze height, and
<v Speaker 1>it's just the thicket of chiskea that extends for three
<v Speaker 1>hundred four hundred yards. There was a Loopinus species I
<v Speaker 1>saw there as well. I forget what it was. And
<v Speaker 1>then I went up to this. I hiked up to
<v Speaker 1>this like little TV tower area, looking again, just looking
<v Speaker 1>to see what I could find, what wild shit I
<v Speaker 1>could find. Getting a little hypoxic, losing a little bit
<v Speaker 1>of steam, you know, the lack of oxygen, the low
<v Speaker 1>air densities getting to me. But uh, you know, as
<v Speaker 1>I keep going up and I just start seeing more
<v Speaker 1>weird ass members of Astorasi, but they've all got arochoid leaves.
<v Speaker 1>What do we mean by arochoid leaves? Leaves like in Erica,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like the genus erica like you would see
<v Speaker 1>in South Africa and some of these Mediterranean climates. You know,
<v Speaker 1>these these you know, that kind of candelabra shape sometimes
<v Speaker 1>or monocolus a single stem, but then the leaves looking
<v Speaker 1>like almost snake scales around the shoot. No petiole, glab
<v Speaker 1>you know generally sometimes glaber's up top and then pubescent
<v Speaker 1>down below. There was a couple massive thistles uh circium,
<v Speaker 1>I think it was pretty sure was circium, circium subcoreacium.
<v Speaker 1>There was another member of the coyote bush lineage, the
<v Speaker 1>Backerus leneas Lino Kylis coast three knses had that same form.
<v Speaker 1>It was well, it was mildly. It was mostly glabrous
<v Speaker 1>on the top surface of the leaf, mildly plute, pubescent below.
<v Speaker 1>This is obviously so it can shed water, doesn't You
<v Speaker 1>have hairs in the top of the leaf. Water is
<v Speaker 1>going to collect Your leaves are going to be more
<v Speaker 1>likely a rat and the stomata are generally on the
<v Speaker 1>underside of the leaf anyway. Lino Kylas coast three kinches
<v Speaker 1>it was a shrub six foot by six foot, but
<v Speaker 1>like purpleish flowers, coyote bush looking flowers on it in
<v Speaker 1>a panicle, but or a syme rather, but they had
<v Speaker 1>this kind of purple texture to them. There was monte
<v Speaker 1>Kellia two, another genus of Astoraci, which is in Sinisio,
<v Speaker 1>the Sansio tribe, so unis syriat you had multi syria fieries,
<v Speaker 1>yellow flowers, but same general leaf structure like no petiole
<v Speaker 1>glaber's up top, smooth up top and then pubescent beneath.
<v Speaker 1>Monte Calia fermipes was up there too, just wild stuff.
<v Speaker 1>There was Jamisonia, that cool fern up there as well,
<v Speaker 1>and and what other shit? So this is so yes anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so we're this is again parmel vegetation. I'm looking out
<v Speaker 1>over all this just scaya. There's hesperomalles of twosofolia. I
<v Speaker 1>saw some of that cora, liking that pisidio lichen that
<v Speaker 1>looks like it's almost a little shelf mushroom, but it's
<v Speaker 1>like papery and it's just growing on the ground with
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of other lichens. So it's a basidio like
<v Speaker 1>in instead of a asco my seat lichen. It's meaning
<v Speaker 1>its forms a relationship with basidio my seat fungi instead
<v Speaker 1>of asco my seat fungi. There was Gaeodendron punctatum, which
<v Speaker 1>is a parasitic shrub hemiparasitic shrub in Lori anthesi, the
<v Speaker 1>tropical misletal family. But it was growing in a much
<v Speaker 1>different form here, like it wasn't forming a shrub, it
<v Speaker 1>was forming these little stems of opposite leaves and they
<v Speaker 1>were all red and yellow, probably probably due to the
<v Speaker 1>increased UV, remember, because there's there's much more intense, exponentially
<v Speaker 1>more intense UV up here. And there was a wine
<v Speaker 1>mania two q nona, which is not surprising because you
<v Speaker 1>generally see wine manias in similar climates, like you know,
<v Speaker 1>Lose New Zealand temperate rainforest. You know, they like it
<v Speaker 1>chili and wet. And then you know, getting to the
<v Speaker 1>Puya dass larioides spot was once I finally got you know,
<v Speaker 1>I started seeing the inflorescences from thirty or forty feet away,
<v Speaker 1>those stalks, you know, those so tall like stalks, and
<v Speaker 1>that's when I knew I was there and just lost
<v Speaker 1>my shit, lost my absolute shit. It was just felt
<v Speaker 1>like I was on another planet, just the wildest flora.
<v Speaker 1>And then of course that red Sphagnum mog bog mad
<v Speaker 1>mog that way that Sphagnum peats fag the magillanicum. I
<v Speaker 1>got this fish eye lens too, so I was taking
<v Speaker 1>much of cool habitat photos. Fucking great for doing that.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you could feel like you're like a nineties
<v Speaker 1>like a nineties alternative CD cover, but you could do
<v Speaker 1>it with habitat shots, which was great. And then it
<v Speaker 1>was there that I realized my macro lens took a
<v Speaker 1>shit and the little plates that spiral around to change
<v Speaker 1>the aperture size were fucked and fell off. So I
<v Speaker 1>got to send that in. But but overall, I mean
<v Speaker 1>the whole day I went so hard. I went from
<v Speaker 1>like eight am to like eight at night. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the sun's only out from five to five pm. But
<v Speaker 1>I was fuck it. You know, it's the sun going
<v Speaker 1>down at five point thirty like it does in the
<v Speaker 1>tropics is not going to affect my my botanizing. Those
<v Speaker 1>those red liver warts were nuts too. It's so weird
<v Speaker 1>to see again again. Why red y orange because of
<v Speaker 1>that increased UV intensity. They're protective pigments. You know what
<v Speaker 1>else I saw too, There was that uh Gentian that
<v Speaker 1>neotropical gentian genus. Let's see where the fuck did it go?
<v Speaker 1>Where was it that neotropical gentian genus? I saw it
<v Speaker 1>in Ecuador too. It's another paramol plant. They'll be videos
<v Speaker 1>out on all these. It was, where the hell did
<v Speaker 1>I put it? I hit it thought, oh, hold on,
<v Speaker 1>that was it Helenia. Yeah. I wonder if it's I
<v Speaker 1>wonder if that's how I parasitic because it looks like
<v Speaker 1>it's not producing as much chlorophyll a is it otherwise?
<v Speaker 1>But it's not as green as you would normally expect.
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't find anything Helenia aqualgiella because I guess it's
<v Speaker 1>supposedly looks like aqualsia, a little bit like columbines. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, some of those Gentians and Gentian ac like
<v Speaker 1>especially the Voyrhea clad are micoheterotrophic, so they're parasitizing fungi.
<v Speaker 1>But some, I mean, Helenia is not in that clade.
<v Speaker 1>But it certainly looked just the just you know, the
<v Speaker 1>same way you could look at some members of oor
<v Speaker 1>bank cacy and tell that they're they're a little parasitic.
<v Speaker 1>There's just the there's just the look about them when
<v Speaker 1>you look at the leaves at the veg they're not
<v Speaker 1>as green as they could be, or they're off they
<v Speaker 1>look kind of you know, there's something about like that
<v Speaker 1>helenia that I made me wonder is it partially mico heterotrophic.
<v Speaker 1>It's obviously it's got chlorophyll in there, so it's not
<v Speaker 1>fully mico heterotrophic. It's not fully parasitizing fungi, but maybe
<v Speaker 1>it is a little bit. There's no studies. It does
<v Speaker 1>grow in shady ass environments, so form where you know,
<v Speaker 1>in a place where forming a symbiosis with fungi or
<v Speaker 1>parasitizing them a little bit taking more than you give
<v Speaker 1>would prove beneficial. I mean no doubt. Genti and ac
<v Speaker 1>is you know mico rhizals. So it's there's fungi doing
<v Speaker 1>someone the work. There's an exchange there, but is it
<v Speaker 1>an unequal exchange a little bit? I wonder it would
<v Speaker 1>make sense because where it's growing is very shady, so
<v Speaker 1>who knows. Anyway, I could keep going on and on,
<v Speaker 1>We'll say for another podcast. It's been two hours and
<v Speaker 1>a half the paramo. It's fucking wild. Look for the video,
<v Speaker 1>which should be out. I'm trying to figure out what
<v Speaker 1>I should do, like a long ass just go fucking nuts,
<v Speaker 1>like totally insane, do an hour twenty minute video which
<v Speaker 1>nobody will watch, or like break it up. I'll probably
<v Speaker 1>break it up. But because I filmed a lot of
<v Speaker 1>footage that day, and I don't cut a lot of
<v Speaker 1>stuff unless it's repetitive, I just I'd like to put
<v Speaker 1>everything in there, because there's so much. You never know it.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, the coast of Greek is pretty protected, but
<v Speaker 1>you never know what will happen, especially in the US,
<v Speaker 1>or especially in Texas or in other places in Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>What'll be what habitats will be gone in thirty forty years,
<v Speaker 1>maybe even sooner. So anyway, hopefully got something out of that.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't even talk about the herb farm that I
<v Speaker 1>went to, This guy, Harrvor Thomas, wonderful man. It was
<v Speaker 1>growing i boga. He had the little sacred garden area
<v Speaker 1>with a whole bunch of cool psychedelic plants in there,
<v Speaker 1>which are all legal, those three tabern anti boga and
<v Speaker 1>Banisteriopsis and really cool, really cool guy, really cool garden,
<v Speaker 1>really wonderful spot. That the giant cicadas were out. They
<v Speaker 1>were fucking insufferable, But I love them just in saying
<v Speaker 1>they were just so loud. It's amazing. I love it.
<v Speaker 1>It's so pleasant, though, it's so I'd so much rather
<v Speaker 1>hear loud, obnoxious cicada noise than than the the noise
<v Speaker 1>you hear in dense population centers, human population centers that
<v Speaker 1>you just become accustomed to, and you don't realize it
<v Speaker 1>until you're like standing on a boat, you know, in
<v Speaker 1>the in the San Francisco Bay looking at Oakland, or
<v Speaker 1>in the you know, the the East River looking at
<v Speaker 1>at New York, and you hear that that rory, Like God,
<v Speaker 1>I live in that What the fuck? That horrible road
<v Speaker 1>noise and fucking morons with their stupid revving engines and
<v Speaker 1>oversized cars and shiitas, oh, you know, all the sounds
<v Speaker 1>that just start debilitating. It blows my mind that people
<v Speaker 1>find shit like Cicada's annoying, and then they live and
<v Speaker 1>some of the loudest, most insufferably just like offensive, cacophonous shit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the fucking car noises, especially, God, it's such
<v Speaker 1>an awful, awful noise, you know. I just I find
<v Speaker 1>so much about our current predicament as humans just totally revolting.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's like every day I just I hear
<v Speaker 1>people say shit, whether it's on a form of media
<v Speaker 1>or in person, that just blows my mind. God, it's
<v Speaker 1>the dumbest shit I've ever that's like the most or
<v Speaker 1>it's just the most vile shit whatever, you know. And
<v Speaker 1>then of course the places we build, at least here
<v Speaker 1>in first world America. Who doesn't love car dealerships and billboards?
<v Speaker 2>Eh?
<v Speaker 1>God, may they may they all burn and fall over. Anyway, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>that's all I got, have aggressive day. Probably do another
<v Speaker 1>podcast here next week following up on this, talking more
<v Speaker 1>about a little bit more about the Parmo and some
<v Speaker 1>of that more cool Lowland forest shit. Alright, have a
<v Speaker 1>gross to day, Go bike