Floral Scents & Pollination Systems w/ Dr. Rob Rugoso, Cornell University

Okay, welcome to another episode on the Cryme page. But Boden, it
doesn't podcasts. Today. I'm here with Rob Rogosso am I pronouncing your name?
You know? I always fuck up pronunciations, as one Italian American to
the other. Yeah, well I have no well I have no excuse.
It's it's rogosso right, rogusso god damn, and I'm always half fuck anyway,
all right, well you know it's it's on the it's on the record
now. But anyway, so I wanted to you know, we we took
this little walk in Ithaca, and within like five minutes of meeting you,
I was like, oh man, this guy's great. I want to get
him on the podcast. So that's what we're doing now. So but but
anyway, as we before we got this connected. Before on the phone,
you know, I had asked you, you know, what were we talking
about? How did you you know? On that walk? How did you
get into all this stuff? So let's just start right there as you were,
sir, Yeah, sure, I think you know for me everything sources
of natural history. I grew up collecting butterflies. I got my nose broken
one year playing baseball, and I got into plants that you know, what
could I do? I couldn't play for my team. And I started collecting
plants and I got into field guides, and I, you know, I
just had this That's how my mind worked. You know. I didn't want
to do math, you know, and figure out how aeroplanes fly. I
wanted to kind of figure out why they're you know, twenty five thousand pieces
of orchids in the world or something. Yeah, why is it like that?
Why is it like that? So you know, like what was that
quote from Huxley or somebody that or maybe it was a haul Dane that you
know, God had an inordinate fundness for beetles, right, So you know,
I spent a lot of time outdoors, even though I grew up in
suburban New Jersey. I just wanted to get to wild places. And when
I when I got to grad, I did butterflies forever. And then I
got to grad school and my advisor kind of turned me onto this sort of
your questions, like where do you get new things? Where do you get
novelty from? In evolution? You know, where do you get eyes when
your ancestors didn't have eyes? You know, where do you get wings?
Brains, you know, for God's sake, and one of the but he
was a plant geneticist. He'd worked with His name was was Aron Paturski University
of Michigan. He'd worked with this really famous evolutionary geneticist named Leslie Gottlieb at
Davis, California, and they worked on Clarkia plants. You know, side
lived in California. I worked at Stanford for two years and I took field
trips. I wasn't a botanist yet. But you know they're farewell of the
spring, right, They're pink, they're really showy. Yeah, let's let's
talk about Clarky really quick. For anyone that doesn't know, it's a mostly
Western genius. It's in the evening primrose family. So in the evening primroses
are you know, from from the really ending, you know, enigmatic fuchsias
that you get in the in Central America that are what are they primarily hummingbird
pollinated down? Yeah, hummingbird exactly. And then you get a couple of
outliers in New Zealand, which is a really weird disjunction. Right, they
get futures in Central American New Zealand. How how long will that happen,
et cetera. So that's even. And then of course the desert evening primroses
that a mothpon it open at night. And then you get Clarkia, which
is its own genus, which is mostly California. Right, it's almost yeah,
that's right. There's like one species in Chile and one spieces, two
or three species in the Pacific. There's a ship ton of diversity. There's
like a ship ton of species. And there's so many variations on this genus.
It's wild. It is. They're really showy and with one exception near
they're day blooming and be appollinated and you know, pink and lovely and they
barely smell. But you know, in this conversation with my advisor, you
know, he said, well, I'm familiar with Clarkey of brewery. It's
this you know, narrow endemic in the coast Range mountains outside of San Jose.
Oh yeah, and uh, they smell. They smell amazing. And
and there it's a derived species in the genus. It doesn't make sense,
you know, but it does make sense, yeah, as a pun and
and you know, maybe we could study it because we could do and edX
with it. They grow really fast. You can hear some seeds, you
know, get started, young man, and they smell amazing. You've experienced
this yourself and don't avenue. How would you? How would you describe them?
Joking? I mean they've they've I don't know, they're you could smell
them from quite a way as away almost is it kind of like a bubblegums
smell. I don't know, how would you? Yeah? Yeah, Like
you know how in California you go to Safe Way and the whole parking lot
is planted with that kind of praclospermum you know phony jasmine. Oh god,
yeah right, it's really cloyingly sweet. So it's got a high note of
like Ben's lacetate. You know, we know this, And so for me,
they're like the first hit of Clark. Yeah Brewer. I was like,
oh, it's like Safeway jasmine, right, and then but it's got
a chaser, and the chaser is clove. Oh you're smelling it and you're
like, oh man, this thing is dimensional. There's more stuff in here.
I don't remember that. That's incredible love it. Yeah, So so
for that was that was at my first task, right, I had to
figure out. You know, nobody, nobody that I knew, knew how
to study scent. You know. It was in the late eighties, early
nineties. It was like the realm of perfumers. It was really secretive,
and so I had to figure it out, and I had a lot of
false starts. I ended up having these. It was great, like it's
early nineties. I was the University of Michigan, like the Fab five,
We're going to the Final four, you know in basketball. It is a
really fun time to be there. And I would stay up all night and
the chemistry labs that's the only time they'd let me work there, you know,
running you know, that's not it, that's not it. I finally
got the protocol right where I was getting in chromatograms and I'd identify the compounds
and then I'd like buy them from Sigma and mix them together. I'm like,
all right, but this is cloyingly sweet and it's missing something. And
the clove oil is the thing that defeated me for like a half year until
I, you know, learned my chemistry and looked up picked up like the
market index and figured out, oh, this longass name is actually just you
know, you chemistry ease for clove oil. So you're so you're getting in
You're getting into the chemistry as sense here. I mean, you're getting into
this really because that's what I noticed when I was when we were on that
walk, is like you and Andre both, I mean, it was fucking
wild and we talk about the sense of these different flowers and you'd be like,
oh yeah, and you would break down the the you know, the
chemistry of what what's being made by the plant there, the volatile That was
so cool. It's yeah, it's it's really fun for us. You know,
it's rare to have another colleague at your own university who's you know,
who does that too, and andres amazing. You know, he's a great
I teach with him. He's a great friend. He used to like,
you know, the most passionate, honest, sincere, you know, young
biologist I know, and and he just loves discovery like I do. So
we keep each other young, and we and we can speak to each other's
language. You know. He is trained in Germany with Ian Baldwin, you
know, the very very best chemical ecologist in our field. And uh so
we just both get really excited and get out of that, Yeah, that
was what I noticed that two is like, you guys were both I mean,
you're I looked you guys up later, I was like, holy shit,
these guys are like science famous, but but you're so down to earth
and friendly and that that's such a remarkable thing because that's that's so important,
that's so good for the world. I mean, that's what teaches people,
that's what makes people want to learn. When you get someone who's a prick,
you know, just because they can be because they're well known, they
it's it's so disheartening and that, you know, people end up being afraid,
especially like young people who are trying to learn, They end up being
afraid of sounding stupid or something whatever. But you guys are so passionate and
friendly and well anyway, okay, so but going back, so let's I
don't know where to start. I mean, Clarkey abrewy was what we had
talked about in the field. That is such we should describe the habitat for
this plant too, because it grows on serpentine. It's like this. To
me, it looks like this big shield almost of a flower, you know,
four pedals, and it's just growing on these these blue and red,
you know, talus piles. That's where I've seen in at least of rock,
you know, because the way serpentine fractures. It's a really crumbly rock
and very rare on the surface of the earth. For anyone who does know
about serpentine, you just got to look that one up. I've spoken about
it so much in the past, but it's a really rare rock. It's
the state rocket California. Toxic chemistry to this rock low and low and nitrogen
low and calcium high and heavy metals, and so you already got some weird
ship going on there, cause a speciation and plants, and you only find
Clark your brewer. I'm mainly on serpentine and you know, quote unquote ultramaphic
soils, right right, Yeah, It's well, you know, a lot
of the evening for most family, including Clarky, is a kind of early
succession with specialists, Righty there like the first to colonize a disturbed habitat.
They don't compete very well, you know, they don't persist very long.
So you struggle a little bit sometimes with unless you're working on road cuts.
When you look at a herbarium record y'all go, oh, yeah, I'm
gonna drive to Idaho and find this evening promos. It's like a football stadium
and hit it's gone. Or you find them only on road cuts and then
you climb to the top of the road cut and then it's all seed brush.
You're like, oh, my plant is in here. So yeah,
Clark year brew It was interesting. Leslie got leave and Vera Ford drove me
to the populations, you know, in Pinoche Pass, for example, and
up mount up on Mount Hamilton and in jill Pretto Canyon and there they were
on the side of the road. If you get there in April, they're
there, you know. And they tend to grow in these little kind of
monoculture populations. They just dropped their seats where they are their annuals. In
a bad year, there's like one flower in the croak. Great. But
but they smell, yeah, they smell great. And and you know,
you know that habitat, you're kicking around that habitat, you're on these crumbly
rocks. It luckily, as in my twenties, I was fit when I
was working there. You know, I got big calfs. But you know,
there's cars are zooming by, and you're like, oh shit, now
I'm going to fall. And then one evening, I'm getting ready to do
my moth observation experiments and I smell this wicked like scent, you know,
sweet scent on steroids smell, and I couldn't find it. I was like,
what is that? And I'm wandering on the side of the road and
people are like, hey, man, do you lose your keys? Like
no, I'm trying to find a plant. And you know it was it
was Lynanth's dichotomus, right, which is this wicked little flocks, desert flocks.
The flowers curled, you know, they closed during the day and they
open at night. And god, it's like an animal like it smells again,
it's like butterscotch strong, but it's got this nasty undertone to it,
like horseshit. And you know the famous Roman Kaiser, you know, the
very best analyst of scent in the world, at least in the public realm
to me, and someone who was very helpful to me. He's a Swiss
chemist and a French nose actually in his training, you know, he described
a lot of night blooming flowers have what he calls an animelic note to them
where you know you can set you can smell this in jasmine and gardenia,
that it's not just cloyingly sweet. There's something nasty under there. And then
usually it's dull, which is this like mothball, like you know, intense,
you know e Coli bacteria type smell. You smell it. It's not
nice, but when you add it to sweet things, he gives it shimmer,
you know, it makes it, It gives it dimension. And so
I finally found line anthist. I was like, I gotta have this,
you know, I brought home the seeds. I grew it in my lap.
Yeah. Back in Michigan and my advisor Irun came in one night.
He has a sense of nose like my dad. He's like, what the
hell's that? And I was like, oh, I showed him. I
was all excited. I said, it's only opens at night. He exiled
me from the lab. He's like, get that out of here. Oh
wow, he was that offended by any Oh. Yeah, it was like
a f Lombardi thing. She's like, get that out of here. Yeah
that's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, I'm looking at this. I saw it
on Pinocchi road. Yeah, I saw Anthonomus Pinocchi road in twenty nineteen.
Apparently that's a huge power for the plant I'm observing here is very small.
Oh man, it's like two cotta led and leaves on a flower. You
know. It's it's but it's so intense, and it's a and it's a
fraud too. It's a liar right for all that scent. It doesn't have
a drop in nectar in it, no shit, So it's it's so it's
a faker. It just it just it's a it's a faker, you know.
N Grant and Karen Grant actually wrote about it in nineteen sixty five and
their Flox Family Book, and I remember pulling it up and I was like,
oh, wow, you know, I'm watching this thing. It doesn't
get visited very often. And then I realized why. I was like,
Oh, everybody knows it's empty. They figure it out. So yeah,
we d I ended up being able to work on it, you know,
much later on with with Gretchen laboon At at San Francisco State and her student
Sally Chess. They were fantastic to work with. They grew like eight populations
of them in a common greenhouse, and that greenhouse must have smelled incredible.
That's hilarious. Man. So well, okay, so this thing is because
yeah, where it grows. We should describe this too for anyone listening.
It grows on these areas that are like barren most of the year. Like
there, it's it's you know, a lot of plants in California. You
have taken up the annual habit. That's a gimmick to get through the long
dry season. You just you know, you spend most of your time as
a seed waiting for rain. And then when you get the good, good
rain year and winter rains, you know, you germinate, put out some
veg collect you know, photosynthesize, and then putus a flower, then go
to seed and you're done, like you got a short lifespan, you know,
the annual habit and so these things, I mean that whole area Pinoche
Road too, I mean it's it's you know, barren mud hills with just
invasive grasses a lot of the time, depending on where you are. And
then when you get a good bloom, it just lights up with color.
I mean, like typical you know California super bloom type shit. You know,
so that's that's it's and that's a big California theme. Right. If
you go down to the low desert, like on Saparigo. Yeah, yeah,
most of the time a year, you'll die there, right, just
get caught out there in the middle of the summer. It is on a
drop of water. You know, you think, why would I study bought
me here? It's just sand. But those places are full of you know,
dormant seed banks, and the seed banks can go back hundreds of years
or you know, you've got these mixed demographic groups of like plants, and
you know, the grandparents and the great grandparents, all the seeds are mixed
up together. And then when you get an alnino rain like like we got,
you know, the spring, then it all goes, it goes.
You know, either you have the the bulbs like hes what's it called Hesprocalus
on Julida, right, the aha lily, right, that that thing could
live fifty to sixty years just waiting for a good rain. And then you
and then you have these desert annuals like San Vrobinus. Right, that'll just
wait, Oh my god, those fucking out of Bronia. That's what we
had talked about too. I remember being in a northern Baja when during a
good year of San Vorbinus, of that abronia, and it was just fucking
you could you were just bathing and set the whole time being there. It
was insane oceans of pink, you know, with little loaf of serious shoddy
eye poking up and you know, pack a serious poking up around it,
and just it was such an incredible I was there with Alan Rockefeller probably I
think it was twenty nineteen. Yeah, But that sense is so that a
bronia is that gets pink flowered? Is it pollinated by butterflies two or anything?
Or it takes anything? You know, it's like one of these we
sometimes talk about these like tongue tip you know flowers that they're call them like
dipstick flowers, right because anything with a with a long tongue can pollinate them
with this day open, day and night. So you know, be flies,
bombilliards, butterflies. That's a habitat where you can have thousands of painted
lady butterflies moving through right during you know, February or March and in a
good rainier in the low desert. And then then then the white lion,
sphinx, moth hit some heart. So I think they're quote unquote generalized pollinated
in the sense that they stay open in the day. You know, they'll
take a probosis, any probosis. But the scent is as you describe,
it's overwhelming. If like, if you camp and if you put up a
tent in camp in the desert neuro nebronia population, like, you're gonna have
psychedelic dreams, right, because it's pretty Yeah that come fa Yeah, well
man, that's so anyway. But but okay, so going back to this
clarkey, because there's we got more to talk about about this. This clarky
a brewery is notable because many clarkey it don't produce a noticeable scent, right,
most of them. There's like how many species ninety? But then you
get this one that produces a really pungent, distinct scent, right, Yeah,
that's right. So that was my thesis, right, My my my
job as a grad student was to try to figure out how does this work
and where does it come from? You know, coming back to the question
of where do you get something new? You know, So it wasn't the
evolution of nectar spurs, which hodges with studying and Columbines. It was the
evolution of scent from an unscented ancestry. And the way I did that is
I one of the things that Leslie got Leep loved about Clarkia is that you
can kind of force interspecies hybrids, and sometimes they're fertile. So in the
case of Clarkia Brewer, it's closest relative is clark A concinna, which has
a much larger geographic range. It grows in more music. You know habitats,
you know less dry habitats. They're kind of parapatriated around Mount Hamilton,
Mount Diablo. Their ranges, their ranges barely touched. But Leslie found that
you could actually force hybridize them in the lab and you get fertile f ones
and f twos. So I did a kind of Mendelian genetic cross and collected
scent from them. I looked at every dialectic color and morphometrics and everything.
I mean, it's fabulous to do genetics. It's just so much fun.
I was teaching it. At the time I was teaching, I was a
TA in genetics, so I was like, I should do this, I
should make mountain crosses. And so what I learned is that there's two themes,
like why is clark E. Brewer I strongly scented? Okay? One
is that it has two different pathways that makes sense. One is kind of
the citrus like terpenes, you know, the terpenoid pathway gives you like pine
needles, and you know, citronella and lemon juice and that those kind of
high soprano note you know, volatiles. And then the other ones were these
really heavy sweet aromatic compounds, benzine ring compounds, you know, oil of
winter green for example, of benzol acetate. I mentioned the clove oils vanilla.
So those are two different pathways I made in different parts of the cell
I did. I did a lot of reading about that, and then I
realized, oh wow, clark Y Concinna makes the monotypeenes and makes linolol and
its oxides, but it only makes them in really minuscule amounts, that it
only makes them in their style tissues, and you can't smell it. Like
you know, if I put twenty flowers together and collected overnight, I would
or during the day, I would get, you know, these little tiny
peaks I was like, oh wow, so Clark your brewery, if it's
derived from a common ancestor with consinta, maybe it inherited the genes to make
this stuff. But it ramped it jacked it up like three orders of magnitude
in terms of the enzyme activity and the and the gene the gene action,
gene expression. But then it also spread them out, expressing them in the
petals and not just in the style tissue, and so that really jacked it
up right, and like now you can smell it yourself without without instrumentation,
And so that was one theme. The other theme is the benzinoid compounds.
The aromatic ones weren't present in Constanta, so they recruited them day novo.
The plant's already making that stuff because the benzing ring stuff goes to like the
three aromatic amino acids, you know, tripp to phane, tyrosine, and
phenyl alonin the plants already plants already making that, Like that's what that's what
you make lignant and would right, like you just make polymers of you know,
konofral alcohol and that kind of stuff. So it's not that far from
clove oil. So what they what they did to make that stuff fall tile
is is they captured with muffle groups so that wouldn't polymerize. And so you
go from making wood and lignan to making spice. What the shit? So
it's the same it's the same base, it's the same based compound or the
same biosynthetic pathway or what. Yeah. Yeah, And and the thing that
made it happen was the major theme for bald Leslie and Iran's in a research
programs for decades, which was gene duplication. You know, so one of
the big questions implants is how do you get new stuff? You know?
One of the answers in one of the answers is tandem duplications. Right,
so you get genes that duplicate or triplicate or quadruplicate. And the original purpose
of the of the first gene that got duplicated is probably maintained by selection.
Still needs to do housekeeping or whatever, make league under whatever. But the
other the other copies are free to mutate, right, they're released from selective
pressure. And sometimes they're bad, like they you get it, you get
it, insertion mutation, it doesn't work, becomes a pseudo gene. It's
just it's just like fossilized in the genome, right, it does not express
it. So and it's what's what's what's like? For example, an insertion
mutation? What does that mean? Oh? Right? Right? So you
know genes are codes, right, so you get like a random section of
code inserted into another code. Yeah, like a virus. Yeah, okay.
And then and then it gets it gets frame shifted, it's out of
it's out of phase. So you know, if you were to look at
language, you know, language works. If I were to write, you
know, hello Joey to you, and then like insert three w's like www,
Like I started to write, you know, a website, It's like
what is this? What the ship is this? You know, I'm like,
what is it? You would you would cease to be Joey. In
fact, it would be galled the book. Right, that's called that's like
a non sess mutation. So a lot of mutations are bad, right,
a lot. It's like monkey wrenches thrown into engines. Right. But sometimes
what you do is you tweak something, and one tweak is that you might
mess with the promoter reasons so that the gene gets expressed in all floral tissues
instead of only the style for example. Okay, and if that, you
know, if that had the benefit of attracting moss at night, you know,
great, then you know you diversify your portfolios. Right and now,
but now it thrives too, So this thing starts thriving more. So you
get you quickly get that that copy of that that gene spreading them like wildfire
through a population. That's the idea that you might get a selective sweep.
Yeah, that's what you call its selective sweep. Yeah, that's it.
That's the idea that when you get a beneficial mutation or or even hybridization,
when you acquire genes from a relative and it confers upon you some adaptive benefit,
like then you go hog wild. Right then then you've got you know,
you're one up on on the on the competition, and you know you
might fill a field. You might. You know, it's like imagine the
first time that the primordial aster you know, got to Papa on its seed.
Yeah right, which is for anyone listening, that means not when dispersal,
that means now you just get around. Now you now you go to
Hawaii for vacation, right right, you get a tar weed, you know,
getting stuck in the plumage of a bird or however, how do you
think that happened? That the silver source and the tar weeds. I mean,
it's got to be birds that we're doing most of this long distance of
sports. So you get a seed stuck in the plumage and suddenly it gets
But it's just so everything's got to go right for this to happen. Right,
So that's right, and so like you know, this is a problem
Darwin had, right, people were like, yeah, that sounds great,
dude, Like how long do you need to do this? And you know,
he lived at a time when people were still wrestling with deep time.
You know, what's what's like, Okay, in a human in a human
lifetime, this may or may not happen. But you know, if the
world is really really old, you know, and if you have you know,
what's what's your written human history, like nine thousand years? All right,
then you start pissing off the church and next thing you know, they're
okay. But anyway, you know, you know something I always have trouble
explain to people because it took me a while to understand myself. So I
sympathize with them, but you know when you see a plant that looks like
a rock and people go, well, how does how does the plant know
what a rock looks like? And you have to go, well, it's
not really how it works. It's it's probably a series of baby steps and
then once it ends up working out. I mean, you got to think
long term. You have to think outside of the length of a human lifespan.
You have to think selection pressure. That's a key concept to understand for
you know, my job, of course, is explaining this to people that
have no innate interest in body whatsoever, because those are the people who got
to be converted, right, So I'm trying to explain to them. You
know, how does Ariocarpus look like the fucking limestone shale it grows on?
How does how does what's that? It's a member I forget the name,
I'll remember it later. It's a it's a desert chickory and composite right asteracy,
the chickery tribe that looks the leaves are speckled and look like the talus
that it grows on in the desert. You know how how does that?
Well, it's a series of baby steps, and then you know there's selection
pressures. You don't see all the intermediate steps. You don't see all the
ones that didn't look like that that quickly got picked off. But when you
understand it through the model of human selection, right, how you can get
a poodle from a fucking wolf, or you know, an astrophytem cactus that
looks like an entirely new species, but it is only a few dozen generations
removed from the wild species that you got the seed from. Then you start
to see it. Right, So how do you how do you explain that
to people? You know, in terms of how does the plant know what
a rocks look a rock looks like? Yeah, well, I think the
thing is that most people don't see selective pressure in action. You know that
that if you observe predation or herbivory. You know. My first job was
the Versity of South Carolina and it was a big biodepartment, was mostly marine
biologists, and they really taught me a lot. You know, a lot
of them worked in marine systems where predation is extraordinary, like everything dies if
it's not hiding or it's not talking, and really it's that rough down there.
Uh oh man, the benthos is nasty under the sea Jesus Christ.
What, Yeah, it's not it's it's it's not so much like like their
decent movies, you know. So so these guys convince me that, like,
you know, selective pressure could be really powerful. And I did a
lot of hiking and camping when I was getting started in my career, and
I would see, like I climbed to the top of Mount Gothic at the
Rocky Mount Biological Lab. It's great, it's great, hike you're up there.
You know. My wife and I sat down to have a to have
a picnic lunch, and we were surrounded by potentilla flowers, you know,
sinc foil. It's like, oh great, yeah, middle of summary,
these guys are blooming and we ptarmican, which is which is great, Like
you know, that's the that's the payoff, right, you hike up there,
you get to see some wildlife. Yeah, and these guys, these
guys just systematically moved through the mountaintop plucking every yellow flower. What's the targean?
This is a kind of bird, I'm not. Oh, oh that's
great. A ptarmigan is a kind of grouseman. Okay, oh okay,
this is t t right, Ptarmigan. Yeah, and they turn white in
the winter, like they have white plumage in the snow, and they've got
like leg warmers, you know, their legs are covered with with big feathers.
And in the summer they're speckled. You know, they're they're they're they're
camouflaged against the rocks. Oh I see, okay, I looked it up.
Okay, yeah, shit, this is like some Northeast the stuff,
right. I don't think you get these too far away, but anyway,
okay, so it's like a quail. It's it's it's like, yeah,
it's like a grouse. It's got like a red eyebrow. Yeah, they're
they're fancy bird. So these guys are going just looting all the all the
potentilla flowers. Oh man, are you're thinking this plan waited all the year
to bloom. It's trying to bring in some some bees and flies the top
of the mountain it gets snow tomorrow, you know, and hear these little
bathtards, you know, plucking all the flowers. That's like wow. You
know, so who's the stronger selection pressure there? Right? Is it the
flood? Is it is it the bumble bees? Or is it the arm
again, Yeah, what the how are they doing with the flowers though?
There you know there than the foliage. So so you know, so that
happens in the world, right of Sharon Strauss of Yes, Scott arm Brewster
wrote this incredible paper organized the symposium, you know, twenty five years ago
now about how herbivores might have you know, as much or as as strong
or stronger selected pressure. I'm on the evolution of flowers and and Pollinesian.
It was. It was a big symposium at the Ecological Society, but it
had a huge spinoff, right, it started a kind of revolution in my
field, and we all started paying attention. They're like, oh, well,
who are the herbivores? The flowers too? Are their floorivores you know
that are really specialized and like you know, and so the select of pressures
might be complicated, like you might smell great, but you know that might
bring in the enemies totally. Yeah, there's a whole number of things that
play are I always use the you know what I'm telling people, just always
use the example of you know, I had this illegal garden on Mandela Parkway
in Oakland where I would plant all this stuff and I'd go in there and
weed when I was bored. I treated this whole fucking boulevard strip, you
know, one lane rode on either side like it was my my personal garden,
and I just wanted to make it nice for people to enjoy. Right,
So I'd go out there and i'd weed. At night, I'd go,
well, I'd go like do jump ropen, you know, push ups
and shit at nine pm at night, looking like a tweaker, right,
and just right here in Oakland, just doing yeah, look, doing my
exercise routine, and I'm like, well, shirtless, you know, jumping
broken whatever ship. And then when I'm done, I go and weed,
right, just like living in public. I love it, like Jane Jacob,
you know, life and Death of great American city style, just enjoying
the public sphere of the city. So I'm out there weeding, and uh
and there's a invasive It was a prickly lettuce, you know, this invasive
chickery smelled like absolute hell. You pick these things? God, I almost
never wanted to do it, you know, with my bare hands, because
your hands would just smell so bad with that white latex they bleed. So
I would pick these chickeries and and some would come up I'd pick them at
the base, the whole root would come up right, and some I'd pick
them and it would just snap, and then the plant's still in there and
so and then it can just resprout because those those roots are big tubers,
you know, they go deep. And so I realized, though, shit,
I'm selecting for plants that have a you know whatever, the structures that
that just snap instead of coming out, you know, where the roots stays
connected to the stem whatever. Like that's a great example of you know,
eventually you get those phenotypic traits being selected for in a population. You know,
that's right. So so it's good to see those things. You know
that you know that there's a lot of that going on, and we don't,
you know, we don't always see the selective the selective events happening.
And I think people get upset because they don't they don't see that, they
don't understand that it's happening all the time. You know, if if you
want to go back to your kind of Namibia Namaqua land, you know,
a touch touch point on the azoac that look like rocks and whatever. What
people think about is that for most of the year, like Baja California,
that's a coastal fog desert, right, that like there's only anything blooming there
during winter rains, when there are winter rains or fog, and the rest
of the year it's just this like really severe place, like a real desert,
not a thorn scrub, right. And so if you spend any time
there, you think, all right, what are the big animals. Right,
there's not a lot of big animals because there's not a lot of biomass
to eat. So what you see are the little peckers, right, you
see you know the oh god, you know you jackals, right, poorcupines
digging up, digging up bulbs because they can eat bulbs. Uh. And
then like these big goat things, right or they call a hemsbock and nobody
misses with them, right, They'll they'll put the four hundred pounds on the
hoof, you know, and they've got a scimitars for horns, yeah,
and they'll put it right through you. And these guys can go for days
without water, they can eat toxic stuff. They're amazing. And so you
think, all right, if you're a plant and that habitat, you know,
or a kudu. Right, if you're in the Kalahari desert, five
hundred pounds, you know, six foot at the at the shoulder, the
kudos running around and herds, you know, you better have some you know,
multiple defenses, thorns, latex, your flowers smell like carrying, you
know, anything to get to keep this this huge animal from just destroying five
years of biomass. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on,
right, Okay, yeah, sorry, I mean, you know,
I'm at the library and a study room. It sounds like there's a fucking
telethon going on next door. These ladies are having like a I don't know
anyway. I politely asked if they would try to talk a little bit softer,
but anyway, okay, So, so speaking of that area though,
and since you deal with pollination, I want to talk about that area of
the world. Uh, let's talk about the cape beefly because this is though
it doesn't deal with scent. You know, the cape beeflyers, I'm sure
you're aware, has caused has has induced a lot of flowers to mimic female
beeflies. You know, everything from the gazanias, the Gorterias and astraci to
the you know, Pelargonium tricolor. It's a it's a geranium that basically has
an embossment on the pedal to look like a female beefly. I think there's
a number of irises that do that too. What's what's going on there?
And how you know, how is this why this one insects has caused so
many flowers to evolve that resemble it. Actually it's a guild, you know.
So so going back to Grant. In Grant's nineteen sixty five book,
it is really about California. But one of the things they wrote about whether
these two kinds of beeflies in California that we're pollinating a lot of gilias.
One of them was a bombilia, right, Bombilius lanca for the little teddy
bear thing, right with the hypodermic for a tongue. And then there's other
ones where yulonkis. You know, they're in a different family. They're in
the hunchback fly family, and I saw them visiting Clarkia. Otherwise I'd never
heard of them before. And when you go to South Africa, there's three
families of bee flies. Okay, there's the bombilias like you just mentioned visiting
Gorteria et cetera. And they're they're only little bastards, right, they they
meet, they made on flowers. And that's what Gorteria and then that geranium
the pelargonium are doing. You know, they're they're providing the females a place
to get nectar and and and you know in the early morning and drink,
and then the males go there to rendezvous. Oh so they actually do provide
nectar. They're not just doing it. Yes, it's not as actually it's
not as actually deceptive flower. It's a flower. It's kind of diversified.
Oh, this is getting, this is getting, this is getting deeper now.
So when you see them, yeah, because that's that fucking geranium.
I saw it when I was in South Africa and I was like, what
the fuck? And there were male bee flies on it. I'm like,
this is insane, Like that looks it's not just the coloration. It's actually
embossed, like raised up to look a little shinier. Yep, yep.
So they're hooking up. They're hooking up in McDonald's. That's what they're doing.
You know, they're crasy and and and yeah, classic. Right,
So there's two other families of bee flies there. One are the demistry is
right, the twisted wing flies, and those are the dudes with the really
long times. You know, you've seen them on Pattinborough videos, right,
their gun metal blue that their tongues are like two and a half inches long.
They've got these huge back legs just to can't to leave the balance for
them. And there's a whole guild of long tubed, scentless, brightly colored
irises and geraniums that are pollinated by them. In fact, my favorite one
is this lap Erusia. It's it's violet with white like traffic arrows on each
pedal. And you know, lapp Erusia is a beautiful that's a cool genus.
Man. There's some fucking wild members of that, all right. They
are they are, and they've they've all got these these visual nectar guides.
And you know when when timov Andre Needen's and Steve Johnson like rubbed them out
with, you know, with with a black sharpie. In fact, what
they found was that the flies don't know where to put their tongues right there,
like following these these these road signs because their tongues are like so far
in front of them, like they're so nearsighted they can't even see it.
So and then there's a third family like the believe it or not, the
horse flies that are bandits in South Africa have super long you know, tongue
was for drinking nectar. Two. So in the Drakensberg Mountains, for example,
there's orchids and what are they gladiolas. That's it, right, there's
gladiola is up there that are pollinated by these dudes, and they're brilliant magenta
and the and the turbaned like these horse flies. You know, they've got
like the tongue for the you know, the mouthpart for second plood and the
mouth part for second nectar. Yeah, I'm looking. I'm looking at this
this long probostive nemi striated fly Prosoeca foraging, and I think it's a laparousia.
Yeah, Jesus Christ. That tongue is four times as long as the
the insects. So okay, So anyone listening explain what a beefly is,
how they're different from bees, you know, and their role in an ecosystem
basically right. Yeah, So, so I guess the first lesson is flies
are wicked diverse. You know that you can't generalize. The flies are are
a group. You know, it's an order, and they do everything you
can find a fly family that is a parasite or a predator, you know,
like like the robber flies, right if they're they're like wolves, you
know, or these but these bee flies there's four or five families of them
that visit flowers that like pollen and nectar. Uh that as adults are you
know, kind of like bees. They they learn colors and scents and they
they're good pollinators in some cases. You know, the most well known are
the kind of hover flies, the search tred flies right that that have like
yellow and black stripes on them. They look like bees until you realize they
only have two wings? Is that a four wings? Right? What's different
is, uh, they're larval stages right that for bees, whether they're solitary
bees or social bees, you know, they're eating pollen and nectar or sometimes
like oils and resins or whatever. But you know, the bee lifestyle is
basically a fancy social wasp or fancy solitary wasp that you know that doesn't that
there isn't a predator on meat anymore that they don't eat caterpillars, they don't
hunt and kill, you know, other insects. Whereas for so the different
families of beeflies, some cases we don't know what their larvae do, like
like we literally don't know in other cases. In other cases they eat,
they grow and ship, or they grow in carrying, or they're parasites.
On spiders, you know this, I kid you not in California, up
on the side of the hill study in Clarkia, you know, I saw
one of these like gun metal blue ulanka ulankas flies, long, long tongue,
yellow legs, like really conspicuous, and it was hovering under you a
man's they need. I was like, what is it doing? And I
go over there and there's a hole, it's like a spider hole, and
it's then the thing is flicking eggs into the spider bowl. I'm like,
wow, you little a little fast. Oh my god. Right, So
those grubs are gonna like hatch from the eggs and then like find the spider
and you know, dig into their body that man. Jesus, Yeah,
the spiders. The life history of these things can be like real mysteries where
they're coming from, and so growing in them alive is not so easy.
You know, people who study blowflies, for example, like grow them on
liver from rotting liver from those supermarkets. Oh my god, that's good to
recruit students. Hey, you want to work on, right, you don't
work on here, take care of these magots. Okay? So okay,
So really, so basically, what the what is it megapelp is capensus?
Is that the primary pollinator that's the black beefly that you always see in the
pelargoniums or the gorterias, is that I mean, is that such a dominant
pollinator down there, because that's what all these plants are seemingly trying to mimic.
Well, so it does go back to Grant. For in Grant,
one of the things that that that he got out of his study of the
whole California flora and of all the Flox family was this idea of pollinator climate.
Okay, and this is like older than me. I was born next
sixty five. This is when he wrote his book, you know. So
he wrote this idea that like, as plants expand their range, they might
actually leave a place where they're well pollinated by a certain kind of bee or
hummingbird and might enter a new habitat where that that pollinator isn't present, and
so one are the selective forces there, it might become self pollinating, you
know, autogamous and shrink the flour, you know, because as pollinator's gone
or it could switch to the most common or most abundant or most available pollinator
in that place. And so one of the ideas with you know, the
Megapalpus pollinated guild of plants in South Africa is they grow in places that don't
have a lot of bees, and so those plants could either be selfers,
but a lot of them are daisies. Right when daisy's self they're they're ragweeds.
You know, that doesn't happens as much with with with daisies and asters
and so asteracy doesn't self that much. They're normally out users. Yeah,
yeah, because because of the structure of the inflorescence, right and you know,
the dichogomy et cetera. And so my my inference is that those flies
are really abundant there for whatever reason. And so one of the you know,
it's a simplified place for a country that's that's like hyper hyper diverse in
you know, in florid in angiosperms and flower colors and shapes and sizes,
and in pollinators. You know that winter you know that winter desert in the
in the northwest of South Africa and the border with Namibia. It's it's it's
relatively depoperate for pollinators. There's like monkey beetles or chafer beetles, and you
know, honey bees, one or two species of sunbirds. I'm guessing.
Oh, so there's a so there's a relative paucity of pollinators and that might
be what's causing or what caused mega palpas to become. So that's yeah,
that's it. That's what I'm suggested that in that happens. Whereas if you
go to the to the rich grasslands on the other side of the country,
you know, so of the Indian Ocean side of the where you get more
rain, you eat more rain, more nitrogenous, more nitrogenous soils, the
prairie productive. There, you've got must creator diversity of pollinators. Oh so,
okay, So the mega palpus thing might be related to the paucity of
pollinators, which is which which is related to the relative nutrient poor and dry.
So because these these soils are really leached, heavily leached quartzite, not
a lot of nutrients in them. There's it's just a more barren place.
And it's next to that cold ocean. So you've got the Mediterranean climate,
you know, just like in Two Lane California, you got that fucking summer
or the hottest season is the driest season. Yeah, that's right, like
you were like you were talking about in your presentation to us. So it's
a really instructive and interesting place to go. Yeah, it's not that different
from kicking around in North chilling rightly, when you're in the fog belt,
you see, like in a good year, it's a floristic bonanza, but
there's notinators there. But these are these are kind of the these dry areas
where they're so extra. Because everyone's always asking me why you into the dry
sites, I'm like, because that's where you see the wildest shit evolving.
And this kind of backs something my whole thing. I mean, you see,
you know, morphologically, you see plants that just look bizarre. You
see, especially the nutrient poor soils, the more extreme environments, you see
a lot of carnivary. Everything's got to have a gimmick to get around the
lack of nitrogen. You've got to you know, you've got to get around
the hottest season being the driest, you know, in the Mediterranean clim there's
just you know, and then you start seeing how everything's connected to how like
this exists because this cold ocean carrent is right there and because or this rain
shadow is right there. You know. It's uh, it really helps.
It's that's so cool to fucking study. Well anyway, okay, so all
kay, we'll going back. Let's get if we could zip back for a
minute to the Clark get because that was I want. I'm we're not done.
We're not done here. I look at this, at these at this,
uh the like the shot I have at these the anthers alone on this
you know it's it's it's evening primrose family. So it's got you know,
four marius flowers, four petals, four sequels, and uh am I only
seeing forced yeah forced stamens too. Yeah, that's so that's that's a that's
a that's a derived trait for for the pair of those two species. So
Clark yet consentate and brew ye I have lost you know, the antals for
condition for the whole family is eight anthers, and they've lost four of them
and we don't know why because the other clark is heavy. But the other
thing is like if you look at the Gottlieb was so interested in this,
if you look at the anther filaments on Brewry, they look like drumsticks.
Yeah, yeah, well well okay, yeah, that's or like bowling pins
almost like they're inflated. They're inflated the distal end. Yeah, so I
remember, I guess still remember the look you got in his eye. He's
like, rogus, you have to figure this out, Like, is that
where the scent is coming from? And I thought, oh, wouldn't that
be amazing? So I did neutral red staining, I dissected them. It
ends up that it's not where the scent is coming from. It was a
big disappointment for me. But one possibility, and it's just a speculation,
honestly, is that when those guys when when Brewer I shifted to humming to
hawk muff pollination, and it also gets visited by humming birds. By the
way, you know that the anthro filaments and the other clark is including a
concenta, are really flimsy. And one of the important things for humming bread
and hawk muff pollination is pollen placement. Even if you're dehissing in fish and
threads, right, you get that shit all over the place. We got
to talk about that later too, because that's remarkable. So anyway, going,
that was your that was your that was your money shot from the video
I remember. But they are compelling. You're in the field, you're watching
these these things just drool and unspool out of the anthro to peta and then
a moth visits one or two times and it just goes away with like three
thousand pollen grms. It's incredibly efficient, right, and uh so, so
my my little hypothesis, you know, just from just for me, is
at their shack ofbs orbers, and when the moth comes in, it's a
big you know, gram and a half moth two grams. It's hovering it,
you know, forty five wing beats per second. It's a big dude,
and it's got some physics working for it. And you know those big
drumstick anthro filaments maybe other shack ofs orbers that allow it to place the pollen,
you know, underneath their face and onto their wings and not just crumple
under the unto the unto the mass of the moth. Because the tongue,
the tongue length, it's just about right for the for the for the nectar
tube, for the hypantheum, for luck your brewery. So they're all inserted.
We have photos of them, you know, getting fully inserted. And
you know, and I have to say, like I studied these guys for
five years, was my thesis. I had to move on and do other
things. But my friend Kathleen kay At you see Santa Cruz, you know,
it's continued to study them herself, and you know her her research programs
amazing, and so I've had the privilege of working with her and her students
and going back to those places, and you know she's got greenhouses full of
the plants. Yeah, so I get I get to relive it a little
bit, you know, like I have these personal memories of this being my
thesis plant where I like learned how to be a scientist. But it's it's
so great to see, you know, to see younger scientists like picking it
up and doing really cool things with this so much complexity and such a such
a tiny flower and a plant that's only alive for two or three months.
I mean, it's it's just okay, well really quick, So let's talk
about the vic and Well, first off, this is a diurnal flower too.
It's it's moth poinated, but it's open during the day as well.
It stays open for three or four days. It fades pretty quickly once it's
pollinated. But it takes all comers. And that's important because you know,
as I discovered in my thesis, there are a whole years where the moths
don't come and then isn't a perennial, so it's not waiting for next year,
right, Yeah, so it's got to get hit. So if there's
humming birds around, it's got to do that too. God, there's that
cool aqua aqua leggia. No, maybe it's a it's a delphinium. I
think that grows on those serpentine barns. That's that's bright red flower. That's
a hummer pollinated too. Yeah. They grew together like like there's one there's
one little growth that I hiked up into and the and the what were they
black chin hummingbirds Archae Lucus Alexandry and then the annas, which is really common
in the Bay Area. Those guys were hitting both the clarky is and the
and the I guess I think it's uh new to CALLI so, is it?
I think so? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was
great. Like I just you know, I just hunkered down and I got
behind a blind and I set up my camera. I actually got a good
a couple of good photos. Surprise them. It's hard hard work to watch
hummingbirds. Oh god, I bet yeah. They're so wary, man,
those cute little banswards. Well, so the clarkey is, is it it's
providing nectar two or is it just a fake? Yeah? It secreased nectar
around the clock. The nectar is actually pretty concentrated compared to other pokemouth pollinated
flowers. I didn't know that until I branched out as a post doc and
started studying, you know, whole guilds of night bloomers. Typically we see
things around twenty two, you know, fifteen to twenty five percent the sucro's
content. But the clarkey of brewery nectar is it's like thirty two. Jeez.
So so it's relatively viscous. It's good. You know it's good sugar,
for sure, Yeah it was. What are the what are the majority
of other clarkey? Is how many clarkeys are there? There's is there like
ninety species or sixty species, fifty four? Fifty? Okay, only fifty
so are they but most aren't admitting that much scent. They're just providing nectar.
And what what's the what are their primary pollinators? Yeah? Well,
mostly bees, you know, and and selfing like one of the big teams,
Peter Raven, you know, when you studied the whole family, you
know, the Evening Promos family, one of the things he saw was repeated
evolution of self pollination from an outcrossing self incompatible ancestry. You know. So
and given the dry places and crap your habitats where a lot of on a
grayci grow, you know, it makes a lot of sense. You know.
You get stuck in a in a desert or a dry place, and
you know what you do is you shrink your flower and your self pollinate and
you get out of there. And that's a big, big theme. But
clarks are attractive to bees. My colleague here, Cornell Monica, gave her
and her students spent a lot of years studying bee pollination of communities of clarks.
So three or four pieces of clarks that grow together and sometimes share bees,
you know, and they might character this place. You know. Kate
Eisen, one of our shared students, did this beautiful thesis recently on when
clarks pieces grow together do they shift the time they bloom? Do they shift
their flowers size and their color and infactive they shift odor? So when I
started thirty years ago, like the equipment that we needed to study scent was
pretty rudimentary and h a few and large, like like one mass spectrometer could
fill a room, and yet the sensitivity was really very poor. So I
tended to study night blooming plants because I needed scent. I needed to collect
set that was really strewn. Yeah, so at the time, you know,
the equipment that I used and the methods that I used, the other
clark keys didn't really smell much. And but you know, now fast forward,
we've had like the War on drugs, you know, the miniaturization of
mass spectrometers CSA. You know, oh those are connect okay, so that
you're saying that's in order for testing drugs on the cops, find something,
get it tested. Yeah. Yeah. So so now the miniaturization of mass
spectrometers, you know, and the sensitivity of them due to other societal factors
you know, over the last thirty years has actually made it really easy to
study set hours, including things that we can barely smell. So, you
know, Kate through this wonderful thesis where she she grew a common greenhouse of
four species of Clarkia that didn't really smell strolling to us until like we put
them in you know, glass vessels and let them aquilibrate, Like, oh,
there's something there. But you know, when we collected scent from them
for six hours, we got chemistry, right, so there's there's something.
Yeah, so there's something there. It's just not always starting there. So
really quick there, really quick. If you got four species of clark growing
sympatrically, growing together, what's keeping them from hybridizing? Ah, that's that's
the question of like how close how close they related on the day. Right.
So there's this idea and ecology called ecological fitting. It's a community ecollege
idea or sorting. It's about like things grow together, Why do they grow
together? Do they grow together because there's no risk of of of hybridization.
Do they grow together because their niches are different enough that they reduce competition with
each other? Right, And then you can experimentally test out like you can
put things, you can grow things together in the same habitat that are too
closely related, and you see, oh, or are they wiping each other
out competing for the same b or are they mucking up each other's stigmas,
you know, with the wrong pollen? Right? And so that's that's a
big field. And I think you know, one of the possible answers for
the sympatry question is, you know, maybe those guys are less likely to,
you know, to get in each other's way. You know, we
had a should We had a post doc named Herodo Arceo Gomez who's really a
pioneer with Tel and Ashman a Pitt studying what happens when you get your pollen
on someone else's stigma, right, you know, messy, messy sloppies.
Right. And and it's kind of the rebuttal to the question, you know,
to the idea from the nineties that generalized pollmination knows always better than specialized
pomination, that like, more pollinators are better because you diversify your portfolio.
But you know there are risks of that. You know. One of the
risks is you get the wrong pollen on your stigma that blocks your pollen.
The second risk is venereal diseases, right, Like, you could get pathogens
if you have a sloppy pollinator visiting everybody in their brother in the same meadow,
right they can, they can they can deposit viruses or yeuse or bacteria
on your stigma that aren't good for you. And or they could poison,
you know, or parasitize your pollinators, you know, by dropping some might
onto onto your flower. And so this is this is good, right,
I mean, it's a nice dialectic in the field. But people that data
data don't lie. People are collecting better data now, and so I think
what those four clark is. You know, one of the issues is,
as Herodo showed, they don't really mind having each other's pollen on them.
It doesn't really affect They tolerate it, okay. So whereas if one of
those spiecies had a really close relative growing there, you know, they might
hybridize or they might have you know, more detrimental effects on pollen tube generation.
I have to, like I have to say that's still a friend tear
and went in some ways that like what goes on in the style when the
pollen tube germinates. I mean, it's been study, smart people have thrown
you know, careers at this, but we still there's still a lot of
questions about like what helps or hinders pollen tubes. So like we've learned that
that heat does, heat is really good. Like a lot of the thermogenic
plants are you know, alpine wildflowers that track the sun for example. You
know, people like Peter Kevan, who was a pioneer of that field always
you know, promoted the idea that it was providing places for cold pollinators to
warm up, and that's largely true. But then like Candy Galen and Morien
Stampton showed that you know, for alpine buttercups, what it really helps is
the palen tube growth, you know, and when if you like tie down
a a you know, vernuculous and don't let it track the sun, pollen
tubes don't grow as fast, and so it's using that heat for pollen tube
growth. Basically, Yeah, isn't that cool? Damn it's really really interesting
even safe for lotus? Does this in probable places where you would think,
you know, heat should not be a problem. But it's got that really
really thick, stigmatic tissue that the pollen tubes have to grow through. God,
it's so it's that's what I t I mean, I always say every
flower is a puzzle, but it really is. I don't think you know
a lot of people who are maybe not botanists or don't you know, aren't
any of this, don't realize how complex this stuff is. And there's a
whole I mean, there's so much mystery to be unraveled. There's so much
shit to put together when you look closer at these things. Joey, Joey.
I try to tell students, especially some of my students sometimes get a
little worried about getting scooped or like, you know, they're a little secretive
about what they're working on. And I often say to them, look,
you have to you have to really understand by adversity, by the numbers.
You know, if we have a third of them, a third of a
million described spieces of flowering plants, and like one tenth of them are orchids,
you know, one twelfth of them are like coffee relative or you know,
spurges or masters. You know, one twentieth of the ore Mints.
I can't even make sense of that. You could spend like several lifetimes just
studying salviash God, I know, I yeah, man, the fucking Salvias
especially, there's like two thousand and three though, where do you stop counting?
So I think, you know, if you get out, if you
spend time in herbaria, if you get out in the field like you and
I love too, and and you just get humbled, you know, you
just see by adversity and it blows you away and you think, oh,
what a privilege to just scratch the surface of this and spend my life trying
to figure out a few of these puzzles. And it's just to share,
you know, like this so much to go around, will never will never
know all of this. And I sometimes now think of places. You know,
we've been talking about Clarkia because it's so important to my own professional training,
and it's a wonderful plant that's kind of a placeholder for the serpentine.
But I've you know, if I look back on all the field work I've
done and some of the teaching I've done, I think of almost like scents
of faries. You know, if you were to say to me, like,
what's the place where people should go to really appreciate fragrance, you know,
I would say, like, I have a really specific recommendation, Smokey
Bear Flat. I'd interest take three ninety five near Mono Lake. You know,
if you've been up there, you're on the you're on the you're on
the east, you're on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada. You're in
Jeffrey Pine Forest, and the understory is is sagebrush, and so you're already
in a place that's really fragrant. You know, the Jeffrey pine bark smells
like butterscotch. Stage brush is awesome. And then you start noticing things right,
It's the ground is all ash, is all volcanic around there, specific
between Mammoth Mammoth Peaks and Mammoth Mountain and the Devil's Postpile. So it's all
volcanic ash. It's really cold at night because it's wicked high. Even in
June, it's like freezes at night. But but then when you walk across
those flats, there's Loopin, there's Sanford Bina, there's that's like what is
it a Brunnia Urbinada. So it smells like, uh, you know,
rice pudding with cinnamon on it, and it's incredible. There's my favorite.
One of my favorite plants you know in the world is a enotherosylacrpet right,
it's a it's a it's neither primrose that that's bright yellow and you know it's
brilliant like butter yellow. But it smells like a peach, and peach odors
are really rare in flowers. So and the loopin smells really you know,
like grapy. Like everything up there smells incredible. And when you camp there,
you wake up in the morning and at first light, like everything warms
up and smells incredible and you just think, wow, what's going on in
this habitat? Like everything is scented, and those are things like like now
docent the scent travel better and drier or human. Oh that's you know,
it's an open question. I mean, I think it's about perception really,
you know, our noses work better, and humidity it's hard to small things
when it's really dry. I think in terms of of volatilization, you know,
that's that's that's really complex, Like how to scent get out of flowers.
Is it like remains a frontier question Natalia due to Rava, my friend
from Purdue University just like blew that away with her study unless she basically showed
with biophysics that it's not sufficient, you know that to to to like create
scent compounds and a pedal of a petunia. It's not sufficient for them to
just diffuse across the membrane and get out into the world. Like you have
to have active transporters to do that, and it costs the planet a lot
of energy to do that. But if it doesn't do that, you know,
those those compounds well up to such a degree that they can be toxic
for the flower. So you know, does a wedding, does a human
environment or a dry environment change That almost certainly true. But that's why it's
really startling to be in a really dry place and smell strong scent. I'll
give you a good example. Pio Pennio Sirius GREGGYI. It's one of those
like Queens of the Night cacti. It just looks like it looks like twigs,
you know, when it's not there're twigs. Yeah, yeah, So
I was really fortunate I got to study this when I was a post doc
in Tucson. I'd never heard of it. And Cindy Henzel was a master
student at the time, and I were talking about Detura one day because I
was working on Detura right eye, and she said, well, look,
I think it's got a relationship with with my cacti. Uh, they basically
live in the desert behind my house outside of Tucson. Why didn't you come
out one evening, you know, with Gary Knap Hatton, Steve Buckman.
You know, we all went out, you know, with our head lamps
to look at the flowers, and they're really weird. They bloom explosively,
They're enormous. But they bloom in the hottest, driest time in the Sonoran
Desert. It's like a hundred degrees and five percent humidity, and you think,
what are they doing? Is this a mistake? Are they in the
you know, the extreme edge of their of their range. It's not a
time when hawk mopsy are really abundant in the Sonoran Desert. But but what
but from a century standpoint, what happens is it's like a root beer float
just exploding in your face. You know, the flowers open and you're just
blown away. You're like, wow, it's almost toxic. There's so much
you know what degreed in this and it really sticks in your palette. You
walk away and you're like, you know, smack in your looks, like
wow, how did that happen? And the best we can figure is,
I mean they are at multipolitated. They don't get visited that often, but
they do get visited, and they make these egg piitaia fruits. You know,
there's big swollen red dragon fruits. Yeah, like super conspicuous, probably
because the bird birds first in birds exactly, but you know, if there's
them off, you know, and they're putting out that much scent and the
plume. You know. The other thing, if you know, if you're
thinking about physics, it's like there's boundary layers in the desert, right,
there's convective cooling. You know, it's not just like a homogeneous you know,
aerial environment. So there's probably you know, plumes of this stuff that's
just like bledding out across the desert floor. The moths, you're just cruising
around mostly males, like looking for females. Maybe they emerge from their pupa
and they're trying to find pheromone, you know, because that's what they do,
right, They cruise around and they find females. But then they like
hit this wall of you know, winter green oil, and they're like,
oh, that's interesting to me. Let's let's let's let's look into that.
You know, they fly up wint these these giant white flowers, you know,
three times bigger than the moth, and you know, and they go
they're full of they're full of nectar, like they are totally honest. They're
totally honest. Agents. God, they've got those giant those that that cactus
has those giant tumors on the ground too, that it can you know,
so I can cook up all that neck. They're just you know, because
it's got such adequate storage, you know, rains, it just sucks up,
moisture goes about, you know, and then it's got and it's because
it's got that succulent tissue. Now it can you know, it can once
the rain dries up, it can still keep going. You know, it's
still able to keep doing its thing, photosynthesizing, storing, storing carbs in
the ground and it's tissue, et cetera. Yep, that's that's a big
theme out there. You know, if you grow to tura in the greenhouse,
you realize this when the pots start to crack, you know that that
that your right ei, which is a perennial as he's enormous underground kid like
almost like like potato like roots man. Absolutely, And and so if they
get defoliated by you know, tobacco, armworm catapulists, which they do,
they just brush it off like, yeah, right, have fun, knock
yourselves out. We're gonna grow. We're gonna grow back. And and that's
common. Like if you I like Mirablis, I grow, I grow Mirablis.
For some of my experiments, you know, Rachel Levin, one of
my first students, you know, shared with Lucin to McDade back when we
were in Arizona. You know, she did her whole thesis on mirablis.
And they're magnificent. They're they're well named, right, they're miracles. But
they produce these huge corms, you know, and they just die back to
the corm they could live for decades. So it's it's a theme. You
see that a lot. Yeah, yeah, the store, the storage,
the storage to where the storage are well Okay, well really quick, just
finishing up with Clarky brew Roy, let's talk about viscent threads, because that's
a that's a synapomorphy for I think the entire family, uh Ownah, Grace,
say, the Evening Primrose family, what's up with viscin threads? Explain?
I always explained to them. They look like that that cobweb. They
kind of look like cobweb, like that Halloween decorative cobweb, uh netting that
you know, no one should be using because it's basically these putting plastic everywhere,
but and it all ends up in the ocean. But anyway, it's
it's like cobweb, cobweb like pollen. And you could see a drape,
you know, the Evening Primroses, you see it on the Fuchias, you
see it of course on this clarke Ea. Uh, what's up with that?
I mean that was that's kind of a key innovation right when this when
this evolved, it was so beneficial to the that this lineage of plants that
it's stuck around and it's derived in anything. And are there any members of
that family that don't produce it? Yeah, it's a good question. I
don't remember there was a key study in this in the seventies of identifying the
this in itself. I'm not sure how phylogenetic it was. I means maybe
some of the little selfers may not quite do it. But you know,
I from a comparative point of view, I try to teach this to my
students. It's like, okay, there are grades of pollination efficiency, right
that, so start with orchids, right, you got orchids do the pollen
package thing. You know, So if a third of all orchids are liars
and frauds and cheats, then typically you know, the their polliniers become become
you know, aware of that after a few visits and they give up.
But by then they've got like ten thousand pollen grains on their tongue, right
and in these in these backpacks. And you know, similar arguments have been
made for the for the milkweed family that you know, putting putting you know,
packages of of you know, paired packages of pollinia on on body parts
and mouth parts of insects is a good way from milkweedts to get things around.
So you know, we sometimes talk about like, well that would be
if pollinators are scarce, or if they're wary of you, if they learn
not to come to you because you get punished. Right, there's some milkweats
that kill We're talking about this the other day. You know that catch you
know, catch pollinators by there. So yeah, we gotta Oh, that's
on my list of things to ask. You. Don't worry. We're gonna
get to that. Yeah, we'll get Well, you get to that.
So if you so, if pollinators are rare, or if they're wary and
and you're abusive to them, you know, then you want to be really
efficient about packaging your pollen. So then take a step away from that and
say, all right, pollen package is evolved twice maybe maybe maybe one more
time. But I'm not thinking of what's halfway to a pollen package. It
might be a vision fred all right, so we got on a gray on
a gray division threads. They work really well. In my recent post,
dog Gordon Smith a fun experiment with hawk moths, asking like, is there
a kind of DK curve after you visit flowers that pollen starts falling off?
When he basically showed was that with enotheriad never? You know, no,
it just keeps you know, as long as until they groom, if they
grew m they're just flying around with dollsan's of pollen grains. Yeah, because
you're not just if you touch a pollen green, you're not just getting one,
You're getting the whole chain that it's connected to this thread with all these
other pollen grains on it. That's that's right. And I was I was
amused to learn when I was a student, you know, learning about potany
I wasn't the botanist originally that this has happened to other times that in the
you know, in the air casey, the rhododendrons can do this and I
didn't. I didn't know that. And then the other ones that can do
it are the c's alpinoid legumes, right, so the birds of Paradise legumes,
right, the big exploded peas, Yeah, like ces alpennia at Bowhania.
Those guys do it, you know. So it's a it's an interesting
question like what ancestrally drove them to do that? Do they have rare pollinators
that they have big pollinators like birds? And then was that just did that
just become sort of canonized, you know as a shared derived trap for that
lineage right lost. But that's the benefit is that, yeah, you're you're
getting it's it's similar to pollinia, is that you're getting so much more bang
for your buck. You know, if you get hit, you just there's
going to be so many more fertilization events. I'm moren you know, more
seeds more so anyway, But it's it's remarkable because I mean if you look
at evening primrose flowers and anyone listening can do this. I mean you could
see look at this, look at the anthers. You could see these threads
on it like drape threads is sticky. Oh it's so cool. Okay,
well I'm okay. Well moving on from that really quick. Do you have
any idea what's going on with the mojave monkey flower or at the placasma events.
It's in pollination because these are for anyone listening, These are really really
weird looking plants. Their annuals grow in the desert around Barstow, California,
tiny bright red leaves, red flower. I always say, I always joke
it looks like a prolapsed butthole, you know, like some weightlifter, like
you know what, any it's it's I've seen almost but they're so tiny.
Do you know what's going on with those at all? No, it's such
a fascinating group. You know, people have studied memulests a lot now as
a model system because they you know, we can get at their genomes.
You know, they there's are interesting for a hundred reasons, including they just
keep ratcheting back and forth between out crossing and selfing. But there's a lot
of diversity out there, including things which basically as you're describing, you know,
they sit in the soil for years as seeds and then it rains and
they pop up to cudline the leaves on a tiny little flower and they're done.
You know what I've done, I've seen like whole again, like lava
fields or or you know, volcanic ash fields in the what is it,
Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. I think that's I think that's
it. Maybe I'm conflating that with the one in northern California, but you
know, when it rains up there, you just get these carpets of pink
flowers and they're tiny, they're like a centimeter tall. Yeah, you know,
there's probably some little helicted b that's hitting all of them and and then
it's done. Right. It probably lives like four weeks. It probably only
has a four week growing season, given like it's responding to two or three
rains and then just becomes, you know, a baking gotta have such a
it's got to have such a weird I would love to know more about what
pollen. I said. It's maybe some tiny fungus and that something small.
You know, one of my little one of my favorite plants, that that
the mojave monkey flower. Okay, well hold on, let me, I'm
gonna take a leak really quick and then we'll get back. Okay, all
right, all right, I'm back. Uh just the emptied it good.
Okay, So Rob, you're still there, I'm here, Okay, So
let's talk about because I wanted to. I wanted to get talk about the
moth catcher. Uh and some some other plants too that you know, that
psylene that does it, that man the villa. But you're you're you wrote
a paper on a plant in what was Argentina, another milkweed that does this.
You want to talk about that? Yeah, for sure, there's uh,
there's a whole group of plants that kind of I want to say,
punish their pollinators, but manipulate them. You know. Sometimes it's as simple
as getting them to visit the flower in a certain way. Other times it's
actually trapping them, you know. So there's there's a whole guild of of
flowers that trapped their pollinators in these kind of pitfall traps. Right, Aristolochias
pipelines do this. Zeropegias in the Old world do this, and they're often
thought to be deceptive, like they're pretending to be dead, right, They're
pretending to be some dead animals or fizes, So they're they're trappanee. But
this is a temporary this is temporary bondage, right, they eventually couldn't get
out or what. Yeah, yeah, they release them and the idea is
to like let them walk over the let them walk over the sex organs of
the flowers on their way out, so they actually do the do the deed,
right, they do the pollination. So so what we're talking about here
though, are like these dog banes that actually grab the probosis of a moth
when they're visiting the flower. So so my colleague Marcella More from Argentina study
this as part of her thesis where she was looking at. You know,
so many people who study relationships between hawk moths and night blooming flowers are into
the Darwin thing about the ratio of the length of the nectar two to the
length of the of the moth's tongue. But Marcella was interested in was,
hey, what about the width of the tongue, you know, because not
all moths have the same tongue dimensions. You know. What her men de
villa flowers were doing was kind of filtering out moths that had skinny tongues because
they were they were going to be kind of nectar you know, nectar thieves
and not really moved pollen around. You know. So she did this study,
uh you know with her advisor Andrea Kcucci, and showed that it's really
clever. Actually she used fishing line of different gauge sizes, right, oh
wow, that's pretty good. And so yeah, as she inserted the fishing
line of difference than she can measure what they're what they're with was into the
nectar tubes of these mandevillas and then pulled them out and and sort of determined
like what's the critical uh width of the fishing line at which they get stuck.
And then she looked at the whole guild of hawk moths that she would
like trapping at night in this habitat and the sort of dry, semi tropical
Argentina, and asking, well, which ones of them have the you know,
have the width that's most similar to the fishing line, and those right
and those are the guys who were carrying the pollen on their tongues. So
this this is kind of like it's like, you know, Okay, you're
gonna come, you know, come here, drink some of this, drink
some of its neck, their buddy, and then I'm gonna put a little
dab a pon on you. But it's actually being like, no, drink
some of this nectar weight. I'm not done with you, and then keep
continuing to like pat the thing's face with pollen, like, hold on,
I'm not done. We gotta doll you. We gotta get more of this
up, you know, we gotta dab more of this sign. So it's
kind of making sure that these things carry more pollen. I guess that's the
benefit. I'll give you some sugar, but you're gonna do some work for
me. Yeah, you're gonna do some hard work for me. So this
but this paper you sent me is it's the invasive moth catcher. How do
you pronounce it? A r a u j i or aka? It's a
so right, it's a It's a South American plant that's invasive in South Africa,
and so it drew people's attention because it grows along fence rows. It's
it's it's very it's very rugged and attracts a lot of South African moths.
And what you find sometimes in the morning is a dead moth hanging from its
tongue, stuck in this planet. And so it's a little cruel, right,
you think the first your first thought is like, what's that really necessary?
You know, what'sn't what's the flower doing? It's bad enough that it's
invasive, why is it killing these moths? But you know the idea is,
well, no, it didn't evolve here, right, It involved in
Argentina, where it's probably a filtering mechanism you know, for which moths pollinated
and which months don't. And you here it is in South Africa. Were
the moths of different tongue sizes and they're you know, and they're not attuned
to this plant. And they're kind of they're understensory traps, right, They're
being attracted by the scent, and they're bright white, and they do have
nectar and then they can't get their tongues out, and so from a plant
pollinator standpoint, is simply a morphological mismatch. But you know, from the
kind of sympathetic observer standpoint, it's like, oh, well, the carnage,
you know, what are you killing as it killing these insects for yeah?
Yeah, right, but it's but what's this this? It's because the
paper is the invasive mothcatcher coops native honeybees as its primary pollinator. How's it
doing that? Yeah? I don't know, I have to reread that paper
that. You know. One thing you remind yourself when you're in South Africa,
like in the United States, we see honey bees pollinating things and there's
like an asterisk on the back of the bee like, yeah, you know,
I'm not from here. I'm invasive. I do a lot now,
I'm feral, but I'm but I didn't evolve with the North American flora.
Like we all as pollinatian biologists would think about that, like, all right,
honeybees kind of make a mess of things. But they're here. They're
here for good. You know, we got them. When you're in South
Africa, you remind yourself, Oh, they're from here, right, They're
part of this environment, They're part They evolved with these plants right right there.
They are a major player in the evolution of the South African flora.
So so I have to read that paper. I suspect that they're just strong
enough to pull their you know, to pull their mouth parts out and not
get stuck. Yeah. Right, But let's let's talk about this though.
About this the whole idea of catchment of pollinators, because you get that in
Stylini, right, the cash flies. You also get it in that man
devilla. We have talked about that MANDEVILLEA macrosciphon, which I know you're pretty
familiar with. It's a night bloomer. It's from the Chihuahua Desert. It's
like a little shrub I got one of my front yard actually, and it
blooms at night. You know, has these big trumpet like flowers. The
long the long tube you know tells you, okay, this is probably getting
hit by moths. Uh, but it traps you. You mentioned it,
Uh, specialist type of pollination begin with the c forget the word, but
it traps pollinators. Yeah, yeah, so it's I think of it.
It's like one of those those finger toys, right, like the paper finger
toys where you put your finger it in this little hoop of paper and then
you try to pull out and it grabs it and and it's it's kind of
about the the subtle change in diameter of the of the paper cone that and
that's kind of the way that the I think that the analogy I made was
like it's like a cam. Right, the conifent anthers of the of the
mandevilla like sit on top of the receptive area of the column of the flower,
and it's inside the nectar tube where so the muff can't see any of
it. It's this beautiful pinwheel. It smells great. You know, the
tongue goes in, they probe all the way the bottoms a little bit of
the nectar at the bottom of the tube. You know, it's like any
other night blooming flower in the Chiwawan Desert, except on the way out the
tongue gets stuck. And so the CAM mechanism is that like it lets it
lets the probosses go in easily, but on the way out it catches it
right. And and that friction is what if I understand this correctly, the
column kind of secretes a sticky substance onto the tongue and then it's it smears
over the po the loose pollen grains, so it kind of cements the pollen
to the tongue. And these photos I sent you show you that there's this
band that's it's visualizable as white when you when you petgraph the moth that's tongue
out about how about a third of the way up the or down the down
the pollen down the down the probosis from the mouth or from the men to
face rather you see this white band of pollen. So it's almost like it
was a pollen package, right, And then when it visits the next flower,
it just rubs off right on the stigma. So it's a really nice
mechanism like if if if that plant is sharing you know, so again come
back to vern Grant. Verne Grant was really interested in the fact that there
was a guild of night blooming plant plants in the Chiawan Desert, a class
Anthies morabilis. To these long, really long tube flowers being pollinated by moths
of long time. That's a fucking that is a cool genus. Yes,
Vern Grant wrote the book on plant speciation, right, like he literally wrote
a book called plant speciation. Oh oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you
know, and he was really into columbines, monkey flowers, and ipomopsis because
they all showed these patterns of rapid speciation in the American West associated with switches
between hummingbirds and hawk moths as pollinators. And you know, so like he's
looking at this in the in the herbarium, are going out on field trips.
But then you realize from a community standpoint that these guys are growing together
and from the moth's standpoint, like this is its food. These are the
things you can visit from the hummingbirds standpoint, like this is my buffet lunch.
Right today, I'm doing monkey flowers or I'm doing you know, column
byes, or I'm doing skyrid right what are we having tonight? Right?
Yeah? Right, right, So so I think what's going on how I
interpret this mandevilla is it's growing with eating from roses, just growing with that.
It's growing with the claasanthes and each of these plants is putting pollen on
slightly different parts of the moth. All right, So so the mendeville is
putting on the middle of its tongue. Nather is putting it all over its
face and its legs as well. At this time we should describe for people
listening too, is like the length of the moth, if not longer,
oh longer longer? Yeah, you know. So, so the moth we
study, the tobacco and tomato hornworm and the sweet potato moth. They're all
about two grams, so like they're the body mass of the smallest toumming birds,
right, and their tongues vary from like eight to twelve centimeters long.
Okay, so in inches that's what like four or five inches, So that's
when when the tongues are out, they're like dipsticks right there, there's long
dangling tongues. They've got an elbow halfway through, so they're they're they keep
it sort of kinked. And then if you videotape them or if you photograph
them with flash, you end up seeing these big wads of pollen hanging from
the tongue. They're like, wow, that's how it's getting around. And
when they're visiting many flowers in succession, they don't coil it up again into
their between their their labial palp, by their lips and their face. They
just they just leave it out, so they really are like hip sticks.
They're just dipping into the flower again and again. That's incredible. It's so
cool. This Yeah, this photo you sent me is fucking wild man.
It's like this thing is just hovering with this big white flower of the Manda
villa. And then you can really see the pollen, you know, I
mean up this it's got to be what a two or three inch long probosis
this thing happened. There's just a little clump of pollen midway up it.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's impressive. But I have to say this,
there's I mean, I study these guys as a scientist, but there's a
magic to it too. Like if you're at if you're out at dusk in
the desert, which is a magnificent time to be in that place. Right,
it's cooler. It's the pink light, you know, as son of
set flowers are opening the set to starting to walk over you. It's getting
it's a little bit of breeze essentially intoxicating, right, it is really special.
And that's when the moths appear like magic. You don't see where they're
coming from, right because there's this wide open but suddenly they're in front of
you and they're visiting these flowers like they like they just appeared out of air.
And you can hear them too. I mean, just like the way
you can hear a humming bird. You know, you can hear this,
You can hear them flying. That's a really good point. Sometimes you hear
them before you see them. Yeah, and the light is really timed,
so at first you're like, is it hummingbird? How many of them are
are there? And the like sometimes a good night there might be four or
five that come from at the same time, you know, and and they're
like aware of each other. They're not social animals, but like you know,
you would think logically, if there's a moth in front of you visiting
this totterough flower, you know, when it's done, there's not gonna be
any nectar in there. But months are really interested in what other moths are
doing. So like the leaders just like there's this queue, right, these
guys queue up and they'll hit the same flower and I'm screaming at them from
behind my video camera, like what are you doing? That was empty,
man, go to the next That's such a great thing to do. So
it's just I mean, I got just to just to lurk and you know,
in the desert and I see what pollinators are hitting a specific species.
I was doing that with with peyote in South Texas in March, like March
and April when it's still hot as hell on here, but before it's gotten
like the really brutal dog days of summer, and just just I photographed like
four or five different species of bee and then there was like a wood boring
beetle, a small wood boring beetle, just all hidden peyote flowers. It
was so cool because no one really knew what their you know, major pollinators
were down here, and I couldn't find any papers on it, and so
yeah, I just went out and looked. And I've got a friend who's
got like, you know, thousands growing on his property, so that worked
out nicely. But let's talk about it emitting scent at night, because that's
the thing, I mean, especially in the tropics and in deserts. That's
a common trait that a lot of plants employ. What's up with that?
What's up with with blooming at night? And also not only that, but
not emitting scent during the day but then beginning to emit scent at night.
Yeah, well, you know, for so many years we just looked at
it as a pollinator niche right, just like what they do their moonflowers.
They're pollinated flowers and cacti, right, And it's just you know, those
are different animals that can pollinate you. But we weren't really thinking about it
from the plant point of view. You know, Renee Borgeous, my friend
and colleague in India, you know, how to workshop about a decade ago
about night pollination, And she and Elmot Kelber and Judy Bronstein were talking about,
you know what, how can we think about night pollination from the plant's
point of view, And they start to think about, like, you know,
plants that have cross elasian acid metabolism, right, their photosynthesis happens kind
of schizophrenically, right. They they do the water react, the light reaction
during the day, but they do carbon fixation at night because they live in
deserts. And if they had their stomata open in the daytime, they just
you know, they dry out right, So so they have this kind of
delay gratification for for solving you know, carbon fixation, and you know they
tend to be succulent, right. Then this is this is how people discovered
cam photosynthesis that were happening in a gaves and cacti in things, and as
well as cross elasias for which they're named. And I think Renee asked the
question of like, well, wait a minute, you know what if there's
a correlation between night blooming and night pollinating and CAM, you know, orchids
are CAM, right, Look, bromelias are CAM. There's a lot of
like epiphitic plants that living rainforests that that also kind of have all the water
going by them on the way to the ground, and they actually do CAM
photosynthesis too. So I think I think they found in this paper that there's
a kind of preponderance of night bloom, of night blooming and nocturnal pollination and
plants that are doing their photosynthesis at night. That's a really cool idea.
It is it is, you know, with CAM. I mean, I
guess it makes sense. And a lot of epiphytes too, because though you're
growing in a humid place, you're still not growing in soil, so you're
still somewhat limited. You know, you've you've colonized this niche where you can
get up above the competition figuraively and literally by growing up in the canopy.
But you know you can't now you've got to deal with the fact that there's
not any soil up there and you're just growing as an epiphy like you're growing
attached to something. Your roots are mostly you know, in the case of
bromelia, it's facultative anchors. You know, they're drinking with their leaves.
So you know, CAM you've got you've got out of gimmick. It's so
cam you know, minimizing waterlaws, closing your still modeled during the day,
being able to store store all that moisture is you know, are in the
case of orchids, they have pseudobulbs, right, they could store a lot
of the epidendrids, they could store all that you know, moisture and carbs,
et cetera. They've technically succulent, you know, so that's anyway going
yeah, sorry, so yeah, no, So it's you know, that
it comes back to us. Like I've said before that like you know,
whenever people think that we've answered all the questions or all the low front,
low hanging freedom been plugged, you know, somebody comes with a new idea
or a new technology or a new point of view. You know. That's
like the benefit of diversity, right, It's like you don't get don't get
stale with old ideas. You know, the world, the world is incredibly
complex, infinite complex, and you get a new idea and it just blows
open, you know, a whole new area for research. And so you
know, again, like what if what if plants are night blooming because in
the daytime the flowers are getting are getting creamed by by diurnal fluoriforce. You
know, what if that was the driving force to make things open at night
instead I was thinking it would just be the heat or something in these subtropical
environments. But you're I mean, that's yeah, that's another whole that's a
whole other thing to think about. Is you know, maybe there's stuff eating
just eating the flowers. It's just like beetles going it down on the flowers
if you're open during the day. Yeah, and and and vice versa.
Right there, there's uh, you know, we talked briefly during your visit
about the kind of love hotels. Right. These these these really hot smelly
chamber flowers like philodendrons and Queen Victoria's like water lily, right, that are
just they're just brothels, right, they open at night, are hot,
they're thermogenic, they smell amazing, and all the like scara beetles in the
world go in there and just made to their hearts content and to make a
mess I eat they eat all the pollen, and this is like Jurassic pollination.
Right. People have known about this for a long time. It's evolved.
There's a whole guild of tropical plants that do this. But those beetles
make them. You know, those beetles are really bad floorivors when they visit
flowers like my flowers like de Tura and enotheray that aren't that aren't like structurally
reinforced and waxing. Yeah, you'll see them nibbled on, you see,
you know, half eaten flowers. Yeah. Oh yeah. So so another
way to think about the love hotels is, you know, if you're stuck
with these beetles and they're going to they just have a traveling feast every night,
you know, traveling orgy. You know, at least you could do
is make them work for you. So, like, what are the traits
that put them to work? You know, you have to you have to
reinforce structurally, reinforce your flowers so so they do what they do, but
they don't destroy your flowers. And then you know, maybe you can close
after they visit, so you keep in there all night, you know.
So when a lot of beetle pollinated flowers, you see, like a magnolia,
Like the petals are not dainty. These are like almost leathery, very
stiff, hard, harder than most floral tissue, case in point, case
in point. And their chambers too, if you look at it. Magnolias
are are dynamic. They're not just open all the time. They close.
They open, they trap beetles. They participate in this, you know,
the Mexican Sierra Madre magnolias our our love hotels too, So so it's they'll
bell cast a new light on things. Yeah, but I think again,
like you know, we've we've I think we've been refreshed a little bit in
the pollination world. By thinking about the natural enemies. I have a lot
of friends who study squash, you know, at wild wild squashes and pumpkins
are really fascinating plants. They've such an important role in human history and prehistory
in the in the America because you know, they're one of the holy trinity
of agriculture in Mexico, right, And their flowers are enormous, like you
have them in Mexican soups, you know, and my my Sicilian you know,
grandparents used to make fritters of them, like zucchini flowers, you know,
in fritata, and uh, they're sweet, they gush with nectar.
But like, why are they so large if they're pollinated by bees, you
know, and why do they form chambers also? And they're monoecious, right,
So you have like a whole pumpkin plant full of male flowers and they're
all enormous, and then when it gets big enough, it makes a female
flower and that's the pumpkin, right, That's that's what's going to be the
pumpkin. But it's got no pollen. And you know, anybody who's studied
squashes, you know, I have so many colleagues who do this. They
just get trashed. They get filled with these cucumber beetles, you know,
and it's and it's a it's an orgy for them. But like they're vectoring
this horrible wilt you know, bacteria and and and and they they do with
their feces. So they made in the flowers and they defecate. Ah,
Jesus Christ God, it's at least you can do. The whole family is
cool. What is it? There's a succulent member of Kukurbatasi that's from Sokultra.
That's really cool. Oh, they're awesome in Africa and Africa they're incredible,
Like they're they're rainforest vines, and you know, the flowers look nothing
like you know, American squashes. And then then you look at the fruit.
You're like, okay, that's a cute comp Yeah, yeah, that's
that's a family. I want to I want to study more because I don't
know much about you know, I don't know much about the other diversity.
We get Ibervillia lyndheimeride done here in Texas with you know, it forms a
big, big tuber in the ground and then just has these you know,
these the vines. You can barely see it grows up through all these other
desert shrubs. But god, that's cool. I want Okay, well we
only got we only got a little bit of time left. But I wanted
to, uh, really quickly, I want to ask you about about sense
you know, how do you how do you study these sense? I mean,
there's so much shit I want, Daddy, I wanted we didn't even
touch on like carrion flowers or flowers, it'd smell like hell or shit or
whatever. But I want to ask you about the sense. You know,
how do you oh, you know what? Really quick Before that, I've
noticed, and I think we talked about this to some of the white flowers
in ah. Forget what plant we've specifically seen, but I've noticed some of
the white flowers in astoracy, like galc Nadia and and some of them end
up smelling like feet, like a weird starchy smell. Is that to attract
flies or what's the benefit of that? Yes? I think so, you
know, like we were we were laughing about how many Bogonias and Salvius there
are. I think you can say the same thing for Sidney Seos, right,
you know. And I have a friend Eric Knoxy, who studied for
his career, like the giants and sios up been you know, the volcanoes
of Eastern Africa. But there's a sinsio that does everything, and a lot
of them smell like bad cheese or or you know, stinky feet. No,
it's remarkable, man, it is. And so we have this pool
in my lab. It's it's a fun thing, you know. It makes
it easier to learn how to study scent. Is that we use similes,
you know, and something smells like, you know, bad socks or cheese
or you know, like, uh, what's a good example of Joshua tree?
Yuckus? Right, they smell like gorgonzola cheese. The flowers are nause
eating, you know. So when we when I'm training my students had to
collect scent, you know chemically, we always throw in a control. We're
like, all right, if it smells like gorgonzola, you have to bring
in some gorgonzola. Right. If if you've got sophora, you know that
that grapy thing from Texas, you know, smells like grape kool aid,
you know you've got to bring in some grape koolid. Yeah, yeah,
I mean what the flowers that smell like feet. I should know, they
still smell floral like dark nadia still smells kind of sweet, but you notice
and off like again, it's the afters the feet or cheese. It's so
weird. So the fun the fun thing about that is like when you do
the chemical analysis, you see all of it. The mass spectrometers don't lie,
and you know, including like you see sunscreen, you see cologne,
you see you know, if there's all kinds of forensic forensic goodies, you
can learn by by you know, asking well, who collected this set,
Jim was it you? You know, what were you wearing that night?
What were you doing? Right? But when you have a complex scent blend
that has this like sweet based notes and then you've got these like stinky cheesy
notes, like then you can identify them chemically, You're like, oh okay,
the cheesy things are typically carloxy like acids, right, So capric acid,
caproic acid. These are like literally in the in the food industry,
these are cheesy odors. But you can buy that stuff, right, So
you could do an experiment in the field where you buy capric acid and I'll
say, for example, in the in the high alpine in the Rocky Mountains
is a whole group of plants that smell cheesy and they're pollinated by by flies.
So what you can do is like you can make artificial flowers and anoint
them with with these, with these, with these cabric asides, and then
see like, oh do I get you know, and you can and you
can come with so cool, So you can you can test the different elements
right of the smell and see what visits is that's right, And we've done
that. Are my friends and my colleagues and I you know, and who
who have worked with carrying flowers, for example, have done this by identifying
like dimethyl disulfide is the odor of like rotting meat, and it's found around
the world and carrying flowers, and when you add it to a flower that
doesn't have it, you start getting carryon flies coming there. That's so cool,
man, It's so it's so predictive. It's so it's so cool.
What really quick the Okay? Well, so like with moth pollinated flowers,
I've noticed they all smell the same from brakemanzi is to deat terrors. I
mean those two are related. That's kind of a given. To be expected.
But then you know the epiphyllums, those epiphytic cacti that produced moth pollinated
flowers like Epiphylum oxyd pedalum I think is one I used to have in my
porch in Oakland. And this thing, I mean, you could smell them
from ten feet away, you know, some of the some of the other
a CLIs anthes, they there's a smell to mouth pollinated flowers. It's very
specific. What is that exactly? Yeah, No, that's a that's a
great question. It was the it was the question that motivated my post stoc
actually at Arizona is I felt like, hey, this is really cool.
The you know, the whole guild of hawk moth pollinated plants in the Scenarian
desert, they all smell sweet. I wonder if it's conversion evolution. And
so I did this work twenty five years ago. And there are elements like
there are compounds in there that some you know, not all of this,
some of them share. So these are like phenolic compounds or what Yeah,
yeah, yeah. If you if you cut open a kiwi fruit and smell
that, like it's a really distinctive odor, right, and if it wasn't
green. If you close your eyes, it might be the same odor as
wild cherry or cherry juice. And that's a compound called methyl benzoe. And
you know, so my colleague Jeff Riffle got really into how tobacco horn or
moths, antennae and their brains respond to methyl benzoe. So that's one of
the compounds that turns them on. But it's not universally present. So then
there's another compound little all that I would studied from my from my thesis,
it smells like real gray tea, and that's really common in that glooming plants,
but it's not always there, and not all the moths, you know,
respond to it. So I was a little disappointed that in fact,
maybe the message is things that smell sweet and perfumely to us. It might
be an artifact of the fact that they don't smell more distinctive. They don't
smell like grape juice, they don't smell like dead animal smell like they don't
smell like horseshit. And maybe what's maybe sweet, it's not really that meaningful
a descriptor in terms of chemistry. I think that I hang my hat on
that after thirty years of doing this, Yeah, it's sweet. Sweet is
not really helpful that sweet encompasses so much that it's not really predictive. Well,
this in the case of moth pollinated flowers. So there is a specific
signature that they you know, I can tell that's got like this alcohol.
It almost smells like alcohol kind of. I don't know, I mean it's
but it's yeah, you're right, it's not just sweet, it's it's a
very specific scent. Yeah. So Roman Kaiser really defined it, you know.
He you can imagine that he studied every white night blooming perfumy flower in
the world, and most of them are mouth pollinated, you know, because
you were for a perfume company with fishibodan, and so he kind of came
up with a template. He said, all right, there's often these turpene
alcohols, okay, like gerennial and little wall They're not sickle, they don't
smell like pine needles. They smell more like lemon juice, you know,
or lemon rind. They smell eccitrus. And then there's these heavier phenolic compounds,
usually esters and alcohols might be winter green oil, might be metyl benzoy
might be clove. And then there's these nitrogenous compounds that alone smell really animal
like and not really great. But when they were combining with these other two,
like themes or notes, you know, they give it kind of they
make it sintley. And so he called this the white flower accord. And
so it's it's his you know, his career showed him this that across the
world, night blooming hawkmoth pollinated flowers kind of had these elements in common.
And who is this guy, Roman Kaiser? Okay, he's an amazing,
amazing generous guy, you know, trained as a chemist and also trained as
a nose like super helpful and kind, and he's really sampled most of the
most interesting owners acol job is that alcohol set and just like hydroxyl groups and
I mean what yeah, but but specifically in in non cyclic terpenes, so
things like parnasol nearlidl geraniol, you know, linolol. These are the molecules
are don't make a ring, they're linear, and then they have an alcohol
group on one end and those are like lily of the valley, Like if
you wanted an image to think of in your mind, you know high citrus,
you suite lovely, that's it only the valley right or or or or
like orange blossops. Okay, that's something that any anybody listening to this can
can identify with, like the you know, if you want to end a
historical note, you know the thousand and one Nights. You know, the
authors of those great stories from ancient Damascus and Baghdad. You talk about these
night blooming gardens full of jasmine and lemon. You just imagine them perfumed with
these lovely high surpress odors. And these are the white flowers that we're talking
about. Yeah, God, it's man, your job sounds so fucking cool.
I mean, I just I mean said, when I was with you
in the field and I'm like, oh, this guy in the world and
this and this smell too, I'm you know, I'm being with you in
the field being like, oh this smell, and then you you tell me
exactly what it is. It was, so to end it really quick,
We've only got a few minutes before they kicked me out of this little study
room here at the library. Uh. When you're when you're studying these when
you're trapping scents, you're using like glass tubes to basically let these scents build
up and then running them through like a carbon filter and then extracting that and
then running it through mass spectrometry or what yep, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, so we need a headspace chamber in the lab. We use glass
or like recycled If we want to be really green, we use like pet
plastic bottles for mineral water, right or spring water like the Poland springs.
Great, you know, we just use those bottles and we use them over
and over again. But if I'm in the field, I use oven bags,
like I get the rentals oven bags, and I have a seal of
meal so I can make the right sizes for the fun absolutely like well people
used the ship weeding yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, and
so that I put them over the flowers. I've got a little portable battery
operated pump. I use a pastor pipe pets to make a kind of cigarette
filter, you know where I've got activated charcoal or a polymer sandwich between two
wads of glass wool, and then I just suck the fragrance from the bag
across this filter for like an hour or two hours, you know, I
wash it out with a solvent usually hexxinge, keep it cold. I get
back to the lab and then I concentrated and injected into the gas chromatograph,
which separates it off into their component parts. And then the mass spectrometer gives
me the bar the bar code, you know, it gives me the graph
of like what what are each of these peaks comprised of? So I tell
everybody what a peak is though it's where a certain charge was picked up or
what Yeah, well it comes down to chromatography, right, Like the best
example I have of this is like spilling tomato sauce on a white shirt.
Right. If you're like, let's say you go to a dinner, you
have a pasta, you spill wine or tomato sauce on your shirt, but
you want to dance, so you get sweaty and your shirt starts right and
you're sweating through your shirt and by the end of the night you've forgotten about,
you know, the tomato sauce or the wine because you had a good
time. Then you take your shirt off and you notice, oh, wow,
here's where this Here's where I spilled that stuff. But now I've got
these rings of these different pigments expanding across my shirt. That's chromatography, right.
We all did that in high school, where you like we you know,
take ink and put it a dott it on a filter paper. I
spilled pasta sauce on myself all the time, Mara, and I'll drink Mar
and Lara out of a fucking jar. You know a little? Did you
little? Did you know that you're a chromatographer. So, so all chromatography
works that way. You separate blends into their component parts by differences in molecular
weight or insolubility, or you know, in water versus an organic solvent,
et cetera. And so the way the gas chromatography works is you inject a
blend of sense and then it gets stuck on a long column in an oven,
and as the oven heats up, as different components of that blend hit
their boiling point, they make the transition from the liquid phase to the gas
phase. And then helium, which is getting pumped through that long tube,
it just sweeps it out the end into the mass spectrometer is a detector and
as soon as that bolus of molecules comes into the mass spectrometer, that gets
zapped by electron beam and they fragment, and then the electromagnets in the mass
spectrometer measure the positively charged fragments and they give you and they give you a
bar code of those. Yeah, that's so cool. But then you've still
got to you've got to have something to calibrate that too, so you know
what those peaks are, because that's right, what specific molecular chemical. Yeah,
that's the art. That's the art of it, right, is that,
like you got to buy that stuff or borrow it, and then you've
got to make your own calibration curves. And then you start learning the mass
spectral like you were learning you know, like a foreign script, like you
were learning cyrillic or kanji or something. And then you start reckonizing. You're
like, oh wow, benzaldehyde almond odor always has a seventy seven and one
oh five and one. So every chemical corresponds to a certain peak, right,
or a certain it's got its own second signature basically. So so there's
it's like a it's like a code. It's literally like translating a fucking hobo
code or something. This means this et cetera, yep, yep. So
so you know when I was when I was a kid. People used to
get those like you know, uh, those those those mystery you know,
spy books where like you use lemon juice to reveal codes and things. Yeah,
you know that solve mysteries. That's what it feels like. Now.
That's like I smell the flower. I'm in the field with someone like you
or one of my students, and I go, oh, geez, that
smells like molasses. I wonder what makes something smell like molasses? And then
I collect it, you know, a half hour later, I've got the
answer. I'm looking at it. I'm like, wow, you know who
it was? Who knew it was? Guaya call? You know this happened
to me. He is in South Africa with Steve Johnson. We were in
nord Hooke, you know, near Cape Town, and there's a He says
to me, Oh, there's this Ferraria crispa. Is that it's an iris
growing on the beach. See it right, you've seen ferrari incredible. Yeah,
it's like it's like a fish called wander. Like he named his daughter
after a car name and iris after car. So there's Ferraria crispa and it's
looking like it's gonna smell like dead meat or something, and it smells like
molasses. And I fell over, like, Steve, what the hell pollinates
something that smells like molasses? And he's dead pins me, He's like a
molasses fly. I'm like, I don't know, what do you have?
Molasses flies? So that's the fun part of what I do, and and
it translates really well and to teach an outreach as everybody has a different sense
of smell. Uh you know, have you ever, Joey, have you
ever gone to one of these like tighten aarrowm blooms? Oh yeah, oh
yeah, oh god right, yeah yeah. It's like being It's like an
Edgar Allen post story, like like you got buried with a corpse and you're
gonna live forever and you can't get away from it. And and my kids
hate me for it. They're like, Dad, why you know this is?
This is like smelling the worst parts in the world. And and and
yet you know it's it stops being chemistry, it starts being like emotional,
We're ready, starts moving you you know, you have like some people cry,
right they they you know, Andre started talking about Andre Kessler before like
Andre Is moved literally moved to tears when he smells amorphophilas contact because it's got
ammonia in the sense and it just makes him cry. And you know,
when you you're teaching something like that, it's just not akandemic anymore. Right,
it's experience, and that's you know, human literature is full of bowl
examples of scent triggering memory. Oh god, yeah, I was gonna say.
I mean when you were saying, you know, talking to me,
I was like, oh my god. Yeah, this the sentimentality is brought
up so often by scent, like this certain scent brings me back to a
certain age, experience whatever. Yep. Yeah, it's it's universal and all
cultures have it, and it's really marvel as it travels well, you know,
when I give seminars and go teach workshops around the world, people love
scent. But but it's it's interesting though, too, because every scent that's
out there is there for a reason, Like that molasses scent isn't just there
by chance. It was selected for via evolution. And you know, however,
many millions of years evolving with that pollinator in that environment, et cetera.
And that's another right there, there's more puzzles to solve. Yeah always
yeah, that's so cool man. All right, well i'll let you go.
We might have to do a part two at some point. Thanks so
much for your time, Rob and uh yeah, hopefully we get it.
It's a pleasure. I'm a real fan and this was a really fun conversation.
I'll be back to it to cume my friend. We'll go out.
We'll go out together, you know, or you're ever in Texas hit me
up please, absolutely cool man one. All right, you too, man,
thanks so much, Bye bye, all right, everybody, that's all
I got. I have a good rescue day. Go fuck yourself by