"The Living World" Rant & Orchid Pollination Biology

<v Speaker 1>I went down on teta faster that to buy me
<v Speaker 1>a dunk alcohol.
<v Speaker 2>I went down on tafastry, buy me a dunk alcohol.
<v Speaker 3>Told the man to put it on wall.
<v Speaker 1>Buddy wouldn't put it on drop at all. Man, I'm
<v Speaker 1>dragging my straight Alcole.
<v Speaker 3>Went robbing on down.
<v Speaker 1>Thinking about dagging my fad alcohol. But wow, no guy,
<v Speaker 1>it's JB.
<v Speaker 3>Huddle.
<v Speaker 1>He used to dance up on tables. He'd stand up
<v Speaker 1>on fucking tabletops wearing a fucking turquoise fez. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know it was turquoise. It was shimmery. It was a
<v Speaker 1>sequin fez. He dump. He jump up on fucking tabletops
<v Speaker 1>on the south side and he'd play his fucking he'd
<v Speaker 1>be stringing a guitar with a play it with that
<v Speaker 1>steel thing. Rested Peace buried in Beautiful Alsip, Illinois, at
<v Speaker 1>Restville Cemetery. Born in nineteen twenty six at Blackville, Blackville,
<v Speaker 1>South Carolina, Barnwell County, South Carolina. David, you ain't no good.
<v Speaker 1>That's a nice song. Fucking eighty three. That guy died.
<v Speaker 1>That was that was that. Those were the years for
<v Speaker 1>electric blues in Chicago, like late sixties seventies, it was Uh.
<v Speaker 1>I always had an aversion to electric blues because I
<v Speaker 1>always picture growing up in Chicago, especially post Blues Brothers.
<v Speaker 1>I was so used to seeing Caucasian dads trying to
<v Speaker 1>trying to emulate it, and it was painful to watch.
<v Speaker 1>It was really, you know, just no awareness, just you know,
<v Speaker 1>unable to read the room man. And so I didn't
<v Speaker 1>like the sound. But then I started listening to like,
<v Speaker 1>you know what it was. I shoplifted a fucking three
<v Speaker 1>CD set from a chain bookstore that has since gone
<v Speaker 1>out of business. Maybe my shoplifting from it drove it
<v Speaker 1>out of business. I don't know. Anyway, I was fucking young,
<v Speaker 1>I was like nineteenth and it was called Chicago the
<v Speaker 1>Blues Today, and it had all this good shit, all
<v Speaker 1>these electric blues artists, and it had this beat up
<v Speaker 1>picture of the L tracks, like the elevated subway tracks
<v Speaker 1>in the snow, and it was such a heartwarming photo.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it was a fucking depressing photo because I
<v Speaker 1>know what those winters used to feel like, with the gray,
<v Speaker 1>overcast skies and the brown slush stained with diesel exhaust
<v Speaker 1>and the L tracks all covered in snow. But it
<v Speaker 1>was a the shit I found on that record was God,
<v Speaker 1>it was so good. Fuck it was good. JB. Huddle
<v Speaker 1>was on there anyway, walk up to another episode of
<v Speaker 1>The Crime Pays About and he does a podcast. I am,
<v Speaker 1>I'm so tired of hearing the whining. I don't mean
<v Speaker 1>that I show up. Let me put this a different way.
<v Speaker 1>I see, the world is dark, it's terrible. There's a
<v Speaker 1>death cult that I mean, a bunch of people just
<v Speaker 1>lost their jobs. I don't need to explain to you.
<v Speaker 1>If you live in the United States especially, you see it.
<v Speaker 1>And then there's the whole mass extinction, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>people talk about climate collapse all the time and all
<v Speaker 1>this shit, but people almost never mentioned habitat loss. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's the amount of land that's just getting cleared for,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's agriculture or just you know, dumb shit like
<v Speaker 1>we do here in the United States Texas especially, like
<v Speaker 1>you know, cul the sack homes that blow over in
<v Speaker 1>a windstorm before anybody's actually living in them, thank God,
<v Speaker 1>and that well, I'm sure there's a couple of people
<v Speaker 1>that wouldn't hurt to get, you know, sandwiched in a
<v Speaker 1>house that blew over. I'm just saying that's you know,
<v Speaker 1>especially in a state like Texas, there's some fucking meatheads here.
<v Speaker 1>There's a lot of wonderful people, but people are very polite,
<v Speaker 1>but there's a lot of fucking meatheads here. I'm sure
<v Speaker 1>some of those people are beyond redemption. Like, you're not
<v Speaker 1>gonna be able to dose all of them, right, They're
<v Speaker 1>not going to have like a fucking moment of MDMA
<v Speaker 1>therapy where they're like, oh shit, I've been an asshole.
<v Speaker 1>Not everyone's gonna do that, you know, and then change
<v Speaker 1>their behavior. Some people deserve to probably get sandwiched in
<v Speaker 1>a in a house that's you know, built by underpaid
<v Speaker 1>labor with cheap lumber that was shipped up from a
<v Speaker 1>pine plantation in Chile, and uh, you know, is in
<v Speaker 1>a depressing, fucking neighborhood that paved over a beautiful limestone
<v Speaker 1>prairie to begin with with, with absolutely no respect for
<v Speaker 1>any of the things that live there, and no attempt
<v Speaker 1>to save any to save any. So I don't I
<v Speaker 1>shouldn't say, I shouldn't say think totally thank god, you know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe thank god if some people there were some individuals,
<v Speaker 1>specific individuals who did get sandwiched in a house that
<v Speaker 1>blue But as it stands, the houses that blew over
<v Speaker 1>in the windstorm up in Fort Worth, Dallas, that whole cluster.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck that cement turred in North Texas. No offense to
<v Speaker 1>anybody who lives there. You know, you gotta be honest.
<v Speaker 1>Why where you live. I'm not attacking you, just saying
<v Speaker 1>the infrastructure plan of your area is fucked. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>the point is a bunch of houses blew over and
<v Speaker 1>nobody was injured. But I forget how we got that. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>the the fucking point was. The point was it's dark times,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and politically it's just a fucking mess here.
<v Speaker 1>The left lost it's mine the last five or six years.
<v Speaker 1>They're still in denial about it. I mean, it sucks.
<v Speaker 1>It sucks. It's hard hard to see because they still
<v Speaker 1>don't get it and they just think that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they made it easy for the right to capture the
<v Speaker 1>population of gullible Americans because it's faced, you know, forty
<v Speaker 1>years of defunding education in this country. Most your average
<v Speaker 1>citizen is not too smart, and so they will be
<v Speaker 1>very easy to go into voting for people that are
<v Speaker 1>going to fuck them, which is what happened it's what happened.
<v Speaker 1>I know a couple good people who voted Trump. I
<v Speaker 1>don't understand why. I don't get it. It's fucking it's
<v Speaker 1>mind blowing to me. How you could. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>so obvious what they want to do. It's a con
<v Speaker 1>man sleep. It's like it's like if you get a
<v Speaker 1>call from someone telling you to put money in a bag,
<v Speaker 1>you know, pretending to be Like if you're old and
<v Speaker 1>you get a call from someone pretending to be your
<v Speaker 1>granddaughter saying, I need you to put this money in
<v Speaker 1>a bag at the bus stop because I'm my car
<v Speaker 1>broke down in Southwest Arizona, and this is the only way,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I met these nice men. They're gonna get
<v Speaker 1>this money and then wire it to me, and you say, okay,
<v Speaker 1>I'll do that. It's kind of like that, like you know,
<v Speaker 1>you know what this guy was gonna do. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, these motherfuckers have been wanting to defund
<v Speaker 1>the government since Reagan. This has been an economic policy
<v Speaker 1>since the eighties. The government can't do anything right. Okay, Well,
<v Speaker 1>so you're gonna involve this parasite, this sleazy middleman that's
<v Speaker 1>gonna fucking extract. Like as he's taking money from point
<v Speaker 1>A the public to give it to point B to
<v Speaker 1>provide an essential service, he's gonna skim off the top
<v Speaker 1>like it's a you didn't like. How is privatizing things
<v Speaker 1>as opposed to something being run by the government where
<v Speaker 1>it's strictly regulated. There's still a lot of bullshit that
<v Speaker 1>goes on. There's a lot of fraud and fucking. You know,
<v Speaker 1>everyone's trying to skim off that money no matter what,
<v Speaker 1>because a lot of people that's all they know. They
<v Speaker 1>just worship money. But I mean, how is a private
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, the whole public private thing you want
<v Speaker 1>to putting down? This is like a thing Reagan started
<v Speaker 1>defund the government so you can give the contracts to
<v Speaker 1>your private company friends, your corporations that your buddies with
<v Speaker 1>that have been lobbying for you. That's the other thing.
<v Speaker 1>Our whole government's bought and paid for by lobbyists, incorporation.
<v Speaker 1>So everything's just everything's dark, right, I don't need to
<v Speaker 1>get into it. You know, I've only had half a
<v Speaker 1>cup of coffees. Still I'm not very lucid. I'm winding
<v Speaker 1>my way through this fucking the beginning moments of this podcast.
<v Speaker 1>But the point is, it's dark out there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's dark out there for your for your average guy,
<v Speaker 1>your average gale, your average they them your average uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, whatever the fuck you identify as. Anyway, I
<v Speaker 1>think that was the whole big thing the fucking left
<v Speaker 1>fuck up to the fike, the fixation on identity. You
<v Speaker 1>just it's fine if you want to do it, but
<v Speaker 1>not everyone's gonna understand it, and you're gonna lose a
<v Speaker 1>large segment of the working class because you're gonna look
<v Speaker 1>like elitist academics who are talking about all this fucking intersectional,
<v Speaker 1>settler colonial. The fuck. No, no one's gonna get that
<v Speaker 1>on the fucking lower rung, and you can't expect them to.
<v Speaker 1>You got to meet them where they're at. So focus
<v Speaker 1>on the shit that affects them, right, I'm not giving
<v Speaker 1>political advice. I hate this shit. I hate thinking about it.
<v Speaker 1>That's why I focus on plants. But it's just so
<v Speaker 1>clearly obvious to me what happened. The left loss it's mind.
<v Speaker 1>They were just incompetent and they just focused on the
<v Speaker 1>wrong shit. You know, you could you could have those
<v Speaker 1>those values be a part of your belief system. You
<v Speaker 1>don't have to make them the central part of fixation.
<v Speaker 1>And also, I think I dentity is just kind of garbage.
<v Speaker 1>It only goes so far. It's not the same as
<v Speaker 1>having social context for history and oppression and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>That's the same thing. They're not the same thing. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>what happened happened. You focused on this dumb shit. You
<v Speaker 1>lost the largest segment of the popular, so who snatched
<v Speaker 1>them up? The fucking corporate fascists on the other side
<v Speaker 1>of the oligarchs, and so here we are. That's part
<v Speaker 1>of what happened. A lot of other shit went down too.
<v Speaker 1>And if you disagree with me, that's fine. We don't
<v Speaker 1>have to agree. We could still just listen to the podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I don't care. I'll still buy you a cup of coffee.
<v Speaker 1>You don't like what I'm saying. Even if you're one
<v Speaker 1>of these fucking you know academics that I blame for losing,
<v Speaker 1>for the left losing the working class, or if you're
<v Speaker 1>like a Trump persons, we can get along. I don't care.
<v Speaker 1>That's the other thing. I don't give a fuck what
<v Speaker 1>you believe. If we disagree, don't talk about it. Don't
<v Speaker 1>fucking talk about it. It's really simple. Let's talk about
<v Speaker 1>the shit we do agree on. There was a guy
<v Speaker 1>who worked with He was a trumper. I loved working
<v Speaker 1>with him. He was funny as fuck. The minute he
<v Speaker 1>started talking of his political shit, his fucking talk shows
<v Speaker 1>that he was getting brainwashed and doctor and with I
<v Speaker 1>would just shut him down. Now, Chris, I don't want
<v Speaker 1>to hear it. Man, stop fucking stop. Don't talk about
<v Speaker 1>that shit at work. Let's go back to making fun
<v Speaker 1>of the company and stealing overtime. Anyway, So there's dark
<v Speaker 1>out there. I get it. I believe that, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I I used to get bad anxiety before I found
<v Speaker 1>a way to philosophically cope with horrible shit. And I
<v Speaker 1>still don't have a perfect way. I still let it
<v Speaker 1>fras on me. But uh, you know, you find what
<v Speaker 1>you can. You find a philosophical way to deal with it.
<v Speaker 1>And what helped me the most, besides a ride in
<v Speaker 1>sense of humor, was was plants. Was was fucking I
<v Speaker 1>hate this fucking word. I hate the word nature, but
<v Speaker 1>that was part of what did it. I call it
<v Speaker 1>the living world because nature sounds corny, and there's a
<v Speaker 1>there's a corny connotation with the word nature. He pictured
<v Speaker 1>some blond guy with a fucking acoustic guitar singing you
<v Speaker 1>kumba ya songs and shit and getting back to nature.
<v Speaker 1>All this corny shit. You know, it's like a meme.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a fucking it's just a It's like this subconscious,
<v Speaker 1>subliminal thing that Americans have in their mind. Maybe it's
<v Speaker 1>another cultures too, I don't know. I just talk about America,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's that's unreal too. It's like the conception
<v Speaker 1>the popular in the popular mind. In popular culture, the
<v Speaker 1>idea of nature is fucking corny. It makes me want
<v Speaker 1>to peel. It's stupid. It's not real. The living world
<v Speaker 1>is what's real. Native plants are what's real. Why why native?
<v Speaker 1>Because that's what evolved in the place where you live.
<v Speaker 1>I've said this a million times. Native plants evolve and
<v Speaker 1>why plants because they're at the base of everything. They
<v Speaker 1>literally bridge energy from the sun to the rest of life.
<v Speaker 1>So the fact that it's been turned into this corny meme,
<v Speaker 1>even before the word meme existed, is tragic because it
<v Speaker 1>you lose a lot of people. I feel like the
<v Speaker 1>word nature's just corny as fuck. The point is when
<v Speaker 1>when the world is dark and it's all the human world,
<v Speaker 1>let's be honest with what this is. It's a human world.
<v Speaker 1>This isn't something outside of humanity. This is the human world.
<v Speaker 1>What's depressing is other people. It's shit that other people
<v Speaker 1>have done. It's societies, it's value systems. It's a whole
<v Speaker 1>death cult that's created by people. It's only human. There's
<v Speaker 1>a whole other world outside of humans and nobody. So
<v Speaker 1>few people pay attention to it unless they're studying it,
<v Speaker 1>or unless they like to go burning. Do you like
<v Speaker 1>to do you like to go burning? Got a lot
<v Speaker 1>of flint today? I'm sorry, Or unless you're you know me,
<v Speaker 1>some crazy fuck who's you know, very obviously looking for
<v Speaker 1>an escape from things, from things, probably on a spectrum too,
<v Speaker 1>or something little asspy, little ass burgers. No, most people
<v Speaker 1>don't care, they don't think about it, They have no idea.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't think this. I had no conception of any
<v Speaker 1>of this stuff. I grew up in Chicago just outside
<v Speaker 1>of it. There was nothing around me. My conception of
<v Speaker 1>nature was fucking forest preserves invaded with an understory of
<v Speaker 1>buckthorn invasive buckthorn Ramnus cathartica, terrible plant nitrogen fixing, so
<v Speaker 1>it can it makes its own nitrogen. Well, the bacteria
<v Speaker 1>make it for it, the ectenomicy bacteria in the roots.
<v Speaker 1>But so it takes off, it invades the understories of
<v Speaker 1>the forest preserve. That was my idea of nature, the
<v Speaker 1>forest preserve where you'd see a creepy, overweight man in
<v Speaker 1>a mini van, probably masturbating in his car in the
<v Speaker 1>parking lot, and then you would and then it was
<v Speaker 1>mode fields surrounded by forest with an understory of invasive
<v Speaker 1>buckthorn that was impenetrable and way too many deer and
<v Speaker 1>nothing to eat them. And all the deer had ticks,
<v Speaker 1>so the tick population was huge. And you know, these
<v Speaker 1>forests used to burn two to three years, and of
<v Speaker 1>course that doesn't happen anymore since you know, the genocide
<v Speaker 1>against the Native Americans. So so it's just a fucking
<v Speaker 1>landscape of mismanagement. There was nothing left. Prairie, which used
<v Speaker 1>to be what most of Illinois was, only existed in
<v Speaker 1>a few pockets. I mean, it was like zero point
<v Speaker 1>zero six percent of one percent of the native prairie
<v Speaker 1>was left because when the death cal got there. That
<v Speaker 1>soil was so rich from millions, well thousands of years
<v Speaker 1>of plants growing and dying, growing and dying, and all
<v Speaker 1>that herbaceous material building up that soil, because that's what
<v Speaker 1>prairies are, they are herbaceous perennials. The roots stay alive,
<v Speaker 1>the top dies every year. So you've got this dead
<v Speaker 1>mass that just builds a wonderful soil, especially if it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't burn, made a really nice, a really nice tillage.
<v Speaker 1>And so they took everything and they turned it into
<v Speaker 1>depressing corn plantations, most of which is now by large corporations,
<v Speaker 1>and and and you've got that, and then you've got
<v Speaker 1>the you know, the big box stores and tracked housing
<v Speaker 1>and everything is disconnected from reality. This is entirely make
<v Speaker 1>believe world. It's all bullshit. It didn't exist one hundred
<v Speaker 1>years ago. Most of it didn't even exist forty years ago.
<v Speaker 1>It's all fake. And that's the world we grow up.
<v Speaker 1>And so it's no wonder that so many people looked
<v Speaker 1>at things like video games and porn. Well, not knock
<v Speaker 1>anybody looking at porn, but you know what I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there's a limit, there's like a healthy limit. Drugs was
<v Speaker 1>a big one too, Probably not so much. Well, it depends.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know our people still do it. You see,
<v Speaker 1>I grew up in it. You know, in the Chicago
<v Speaker 1>suburbs in a nineties, a lot of people were doing acid.
<v Speaker 1>I think it probably did n'im good. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>is there's still acid out there? Is that still big
<v Speaker 1>among the suburban youths. I know they could certainly use
<v Speaker 1>some acid down here in Texas once a while, once
<v Speaker 1>in a while. You know, you do acid once every
<v Speaker 1>three or four years. Hey, you're good, You're fine. And
<v Speaker 1>then some people, well probably just shouldn't do it at
<v Speaker 1>all because they're a little prone to, you know, fits
<v Speaker 1>of psychosis. But that that aside, I had no idea
<v Speaker 1>I was growing up in Chicago. I had no idea
<v Speaker 1>what was native there, or what a native plant was.
<v Speaker 1>There was no connection, there was no baseline, and so
<v Speaker 1>I was just I was pissed off. I was angry.
<v Speaker 1>I was getting into trouble all the time. I was
<v Speaker 1>looking for you know, I liked making art, I liked graffiti,
<v Speaker 1>I liked all this shit. I liked the adventure. But
<v Speaker 1>I had no context for anything in nature. Yes, I
<v Speaker 1>thought of nature as the corny, fucking blonde guy with
<v Speaker 1>the acoustic guitar and just corny sentiments, soft spoken in
<v Speaker 1>fucking vanilla and boring and not just nothing I could
<v Speaker 1>relate to. I was angry, Man, what the fuck am
<v Speaker 1>I gonna do with this? What am I gonna do
<v Speaker 1>with this guy? This emblem that I'm creating is a
<v Speaker 1>figment of my imagination, you know, to represent nature in
<v Speaker 1>the popular consciousness of a matrior. In the nineties and
<v Speaker 1>early two thousands, it was nothing. So anyway. Then I
<v Speaker 1>end up in California. I learn about native plants. There's
<v Speaker 1>still a lot of public land accessible there. There's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of wild habitat there. Unlike Illinois, I can go
<v Speaker 1>look at these things. I think they're fucking incredible. It
<v Speaker 1>feels good being out there. Initially, it just feels good
<v Speaker 1>being out there. I don't know what anything is around me.
<v Speaker 1>It just feels good being out there. And then I
<v Speaker 1>start looking around and I see some pretty cool shit.
<v Speaker 1>When I stop to look, I see things and I wonder,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck is that? What is this red lily
<v Speaker 1>like flower? It's the juicy flower. It's got it's fleshy,
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking big and it's growing out of a fucking rock.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck is this? What is this thing? This
<v Speaker 1>is weird? Wait, it doesn't look like it should grow here.
<v Speaker 1>It's growing out of a growing out of a rock.
<v Speaker 1>What are these weird What are these weird trees? They
<v Speaker 1>smell incredible, these weird coniferous trees. They're growing out of
<v Speaker 1>an old what I can tell is an old lava flow.
<v Speaker 1>Looks insane. It's giant black boulders that have just you know, uh,
<v Speaker 1>just piled up. Looks like a rubble pile on the
<v Speaker 1>side of this mountain. This stuff is weird. I want
<v Speaker 1>to know more about this. This is some weird stuff.
<v Speaker 1>I can't stop thinking about it when I come home,
<v Speaker 1>and it just feels good to be out there. And
<v Speaker 1>every time every time I'm in in a city or
<v Speaker 1>around other people, or in you know, the driving to
<v Speaker 1>these spots, through all the billboards and the fucking retail
<v Speaker 1>outlets on the highway. Every time I'm driving through that shit,
<v Speaker 1>I want to puke and die. It makes me feel terrible.
<v Speaker 1>It's so ugly, it's gross. I could tell these people
<v Speaker 1>worship money. I like money being coveredable. I don't worship it.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's fucking boring. I don't want a shiny car.
<v Speaker 1>I don't care about this shit. It's fucking stupid and
<v Speaker 1>it feels terrible. I look at the billboard. There's some asshole,
<v Speaker 1>you know who probably gets cosmetic dentistry, probably smells like
<v Speaker 1>cologne and farts, and there's a he's got a shittying
<v Speaker 1>grin on his face, and it's an ad for something.
<v Speaker 1>It has no relevance to my life at all, but
<v Speaker 1>he's trying to convince me that it does have relevance
<v Speaker 1>to my life because he wants to sell it to me.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck you, get away from me. You're a disease. You're
<v Speaker 1>all diseased. That's what I felt most of my early
<v Speaker 1>years getting into bodany. Before I really got into botany,
<v Speaker 1>I was very misanthropic. I hated everything, and I think
<v Speaker 1>that was a normal, healthy response to something that was sick.
<v Speaker 1>Understand why I'm telling you this, because this is what
<v Speaker 1>this is where we're at now, it's only gotten worse.
<v Speaker 1>The world still makes me want to puke when I
<v Speaker 1>look at the human world, but now I know there's
<v Speaker 1>a whole other world out there that makes me want
<v Speaker 1>to live and feel good. Why don't you get into that.
<v Speaker 1>I try to tell people this. I try to tell
<v Speaker 1>you know, you gotta look at this stuff. You gotta
<v Speaker 1>look closer. If you go out in these places, you're
<v Speaker 1>not feeling good, you're not spending enough time out there,
<v Speaker 1>or you need to get hit on the head or something,
<v Speaker 1>or maybe you just need to get those I don't
<v Speaker 1>know where find it. Find someplace. Maybe it's just maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's a fucking state park. Maybe maybe it's a national park.
<v Speaker 1>I don't even like going to national parksing where there's
<v Speaker 1>too many people, there's a fee. You're always getting fucked
<v Speaker 1>with by uh, you know, by the smoke you send there.
<v Speaker 1>Especially if you go to Big Ben. God, the fucking
<v Speaker 1>the cops they are horrible, you know, horrible. They're just
<v Speaker 1>there's they're mole security man. Well actually know Trump probably
<v Speaker 1>cut their jobs now, so maybe they're not running anyway.
<v Speaker 1>The point is you go to these places, you know what,
<v Speaker 1>Go to a fucking irrigation ditch near your house, go
<v Speaker 1>to a power lineasement. If you live in one of
<v Speaker 1>these bleak suburbs like around Fort Worth, God, I'd be
<v Speaker 1>so mad if I lived there, if I had to
<v Speaker 1>grow up as a teenager at places like that, I'd
<v Speaker 1>be vandalizing everything. I would have gotten into graffiti a
<v Speaker 1>like age nine. You know, graffiti's fun because you're combining
<v Speaker 1>vandalism with with a creative verge to express. Now, I
<v Speaker 1>will say, a lot of graffiti looks terrible. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>I don't want it on my house, you know. But
<v Speaker 1>as a child, it's it's fun. It's a fun outlet.
<v Speaker 1>You're not just I mean because I liked vandalism when
<v Speaker 1>I was like ten two. We used to go, remember
<v Speaker 1>my friend Chris Jacobs. We went and one time we
<v Speaker 1>stole a super soaker and then we stole lighter fluid
<v Speaker 1>like charcoal fluid, and we filled you know what happened.
<v Speaker 1>You know where this is going, right, And we went
<v Speaker 1>and then we just went lighting people's garbage cans. And
<v Speaker 1>I think we actually, I don't think we lit the
<v Speaker 1>garbage cans. I think we mostly just lit the lawn
<v Speaker 1>bags on fire. They had these like three foot tall
<v Speaker 1>bags of brush and leaves, so it was a natural fire.
<v Speaker 1>It was organic fire. But we were just you know,
<v Speaker 1>we went around lighting shit on fire with the facto flamethrower.
<v Speaker 1>We were like ten years old.
<v Speaker 3>It was.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, listen, I'm not saying this was the right
<v Speaker 1>thing to do. I'm just saying it was fun. Chris,
<v Speaker 1>all of a sudden, you know, I all of a sudden,
<v Speaker 1>I hear him say, die you alien bastards. Well it
<v Speaker 1>was more like die you alien bastards. Because he was
<v Speaker 1>ten and I see this huge ten foot flame shoot
<v Speaker 1>up into the air from from behind this person's garage.
<v Speaker 1>He didn't, you know. We were careful not to burn
<v Speaker 1>down any structures. But but that's where we're at. We
<v Speaker 1>were really mad. I was mad as a kid, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I just I knew that there was I didn't. I
<v Speaker 1>knew things were fucked. I just had a feeling. I
<v Speaker 1>couldn't articulate anything I was. I was an idiot, of course,
<v Speaker 1>but still I knew things were fucked. So anyway, I'm
<v Speaker 1>not saying you should go do vandalism. Well, if you
<v Speaker 1>live in a cul de Sac suburb of Fort Worth,
<v Speaker 1>maybe you should. Maybe that's a constructive outlet, but you
<v Speaker 1>should also be learning and reading and teaching yourself something.
<v Speaker 1>Don't be a jackasses. They have fucking video games. So anyway, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you gotta keep your mind exercise. That's all
<v Speaker 1>I'm saying. In video games, don't do it. Go do
<v Speaker 1>you know, go do whatever once in a while. It's fine,
<v Speaker 1>but you got to read up on something, find something
<v Speaker 1>you're passionate about. Fine would drives anyway. So the point is,
<v Speaker 1>just go outside and start paying attention to what you see.
<v Speaker 1>Go outside to areas that don't get mode, where there's
<v Speaker 1>not a lot of people. If it's just a power
<v Speaker 1>line thesemen, or a drainage dish again, fucking side of
<v Speaker 1>the railroad tracks wherever. If you live in Texas, you're
<v Speaker 1>kind of fuck because there's no public land whatever. I mean.
<v Speaker 1>Go to state parks if you need to whatever. Just
<v Speaker 1>go out there so you can get away from people
<v Speaker 1>and clear your head. That's all I was doing at first.
<v Speaker 1>I used to I would just I was just hiking around.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't even like the word hiking at the time
<v Speaker 1>because it made me think of ARII honkys, you know
<v Speaker 1>what I mean, hiking. I'm gonna go hiking. I didn't lie.
<v Speaker 1>I was gonna go take a walk in a nice spot,
<v Speaker 1>a nice spot, it's nice, it's nice. I was just
<v Speaker 1>gonna go take a walk. And I started doing that more,
<v Speaker 1>and it felt good. And I started doing it more
<v Speaker 1>and it felt good. And then I started looking for
<v Speaker 1>very specific things. I'm gonna go look for this certain
<v Speaker 1>tree that I heard is supposed to be here. That's
<v Speaker 1>kind of cool, very specific things. Then I started paying
<v Speaker 1>attention to more stuff when things slowed down. When I
<v Speaker 1>slowed down, my mind slowed down, I could start looking
<v Speaker 1>at other things in these nice places. The place just
<v Speaker 1>felt really good. I wanted to learn more about it
<v Speaker 1>felt really good to be out there. Really kept really
<v Speaker 1>kept the puke down from when I was driving by
<v Speaker 1>the retail outlets, or the billboards, or the culdest acts
<v Speaker 1>or or endless traffic jams of cars on I eighty.
<v Speaker 1>But the more that I was able to slow down
<v Speaker 1>and take a closer look, and then especially take pictures
<v Speaker 1>of it. You got you got all got these fucking
<v Speaker 1>cameras in our pocket. Take a picture of it. Take
<v Speaker 1>a picture of what you see. It's interesting. Take a
<v Speaker 1>picture of you don't know what it is, Take a
<v Speaker 1>picture of it. Take a couple of pictures of it.
<v Speaker 1>Pay attention to what it's. What's it doing?
<v Speaker 3>He is?
<v Speaker 1>What's it is?
<v Speaker 3>It? Just? Is it? Flower?
<v Speaker 1>What is this what is this part of the plant?
<v Speaker 1>What is this thing? What does this do? Just start
<v Speaker 1>thinking about it. You just start thinking about what you're
<v Speaker 1>looking at. Just start observing. And the more I started
<v Speaker 1>doing that, the more I started to learn. And then
<v Speaker 1>everything I would learn. Every time I would learn so thing,
<v Speaker 1>I'd have ten more questions, and it just became it
<v Speaker 1>just started to become so interesting. It was like one
<v Speaker 1>of those fucking trick photos that you know that you'll
<v Speaker 1>see on social media sometimes, like a bullshit clickbait site,
<v Speaker 1>where it's like a bunch of dots and you look
<v Speaker 1>at it doesn't look like anything, but the caption says,
<v Speaker 1>stare at this for thirty seconds, and then you know,
<v Speaker 1>close your eyes or something, and then there's some you know,
<v Speaker 1>some visual effect or whatever the fuck or you or
<v Speaker 1>suddenly like you can see a photo within this image
<v Speaker 1>that just that first looks like a bunch of blurry dots.
<v Speaker 1>That's the same thing that started to happen to me.
<v Speaker 1>I started to see more stuff that I didn't see
<v Speaker 1>at first. Then it became fascinating, and then I became
<v Speaker 1>addicted to it, and I started going, Okay, I'm starting
<v Speaker 1>to get what this is about. Now, and I learned
<v Speaker 1>that in California, and then I came back to Chicago
<v Speaker 1>one time, thinking, well, I learned what the idea of
<v Speaker 1>a native plant is. I wonder what native plant it's
<v Speaker 1>We're in Chicago, Chicago area must have had its own
<v Speaker 1>native plants, right, This is like twenty fifteen, maybe fourteen.
<v Speaker 1>And then I looked it, looked it up on the
<v Speaker 1>interweb and there was a side I think it was
<v Speaker 1>like Illinois wildflowers. I hate that term two wild flowers.
<v Speaker 1>It's a wild flower. It doesn't mean anything. It's a wildflower.
<v Speaker 1>You get wildflower seed packets that have a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>invasive European garbage in it. Again, it's this idea of
<v Speaker 1>just planting for beauty. It's it's attractive, it's an attractive
<v Speaker 1>Fuck that, fuck all of that. It's beautiful. What does
<v Speaker 1>that mean? Doesn't mean anything? What does that mean? It's
<v Speaker 1>Pretty's shut up. That's not the point. It's not the
<v Speaker 1>point that it's pretty. It's it's what's its role in
<v Speaker 1>its living machine? All this shit's connected? How did this evolve?
<v Speaker 1>What else is it related to? What does it have
<v Speaker 1>relationships with that live here, whether it's insects or or
<v Speaker 1>fungi or bird whatever, like, there's certain species fungi that
<v Speaker 1>specialized on a certain type of species of trees. Duff. Like,
<v Speaker 1>that's a fascinating thing, right, that fungi had to evolve
<v Speaker 1>a certain enzyme to break down the volatile oils that
<v Speaker 1>are otherwise fungi resistant in this certain conifers foliage. Perfect example.
<v Speaker 1>There's a million cases like that, and they're probably right
<v Speaker 1>underneath your feet, they're right under your nose, they're all
<v Speaker 1>around you in what little bits of habitat are left.
<v Speaker 1>So I came back to Chicago. I was looking for
<v Speaker 1>native plants, and then I learned about the prairies and
<v Speaker 1>it fucking blew my mind. And I just realized how
<v Speaker 1>much diversity there used to be and how cool it was.
<v Speaker 1>And there were, you know, the prairies were these dense
<v Speaker 1>thickets of fifty different species, well maybe thirty or forty,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Not that man. It wasn't hyperdent hyper diverse,
<v Speaker 1>but it was hyperdense. And then there were all these
<v Speaker 1>special list insects and different bees and moths and shit
<v Speaker 1>that only ate a certain type of plant, and then
<v Speaker 1>those in turn fed, you know, right up the food
<v Speaker 1>chain a bunch of different birds, and the prairie is
<v Speaker 1>also cooling the land. I could feel how much cooler
<v Speaker 1>it felt on a summer night, and you know how
<v Speaker 1>pleasant it smelled, and how wonderful it sounded with all
<v Speaker 1>the singing insects at dusk. And then I realized that
<v Speaker 1>so much had been destroyed, and I was pissed. I was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, this got destroyed to put up this shit,
<v Speaker 1>the retail outlets and the billboard with the smiling prick
<v Speaker 1>on it, really fucking morons. Who would do that? So
<v Speaker 1>then I was like, I got to start putting more
<v Speaker 1>of this out there. I gotta start planting more of
<v Speaker 1>And that's what you should do too. Learn about this stuff.
<v Speaker 1>The best way to show respect for something is to
<v Speaker 1>learn about it. And I tell people to, I say,
<v Speaker 1>go out and look at these things. Nature is the answer.
<v Speaker 1>I fucking hate the word nature, but I got to
<v Speaker 1>say it so other people aren't going to know what
<v Speaker 1>I mean when I say the living world, the non
<v Speaker 1>human world, the non bullshit world. The human world's fake.
<v Speaker 1>It's bullshit, it's all bullshit. It didn't exist. This world
<v Speaker 1>that we've created right now, this specific world, this didn't
<v Speaker 1>this didn't exist five hundred There were fucking personal injury
<v Speaker 1>attorneys five hundred years ago, or plastic surgeons or car salesman,
<v Speaker 1>any of the shit. No, it's all fake. And I say,
<v Speaker 1>look at the living world. I don't know what they
<v Speaker 1>think I mean, and they think I mean I learn
<v Speaker 1>about it, Learn about it, study it, ask questions, look hard.
<v Speaker 1>If it's confusing to you, figure out what you're confused about,
<v Speaker 1>and then try to answer that question. Fucking write me
<v Speaker 1>an email. I don't care. I'll answer if I got time.
<v Speaker 1>I'll keep it short. I'll probably use voice to text.
<v Speaker 1>It'll be filled with you know, uh, grammatical errors, and
<v Speaker 1>might get a wrong word in there too, because you know,
<v Speaker 1>the voice detect technology is not what it should be,
<v Speaker 1>especially when I'm screaming at it. But write me an email.
<v Speaker 1>What do you think? What do you think it means?
<v Speaker 1>Go out and commune with nature. Go forest bathe go
<v Speaker 1>you think I mean go forest, But don't go fuck that.
<v Speaker 1>Don't go forest? What is forest bathing? It's a corny
<v Speaker 1>asque word. Go out there and observe it, directly, observe it,
<v Speaker 1>pay attention to it. Ask questions, what the fuck is
<v Speaker 1>this take a take pictures of it and and focus
<v Speaker 1>on that, and it'll take your mind off all the negative,
<v Speaker 1>dark shit that the other bipedal primates around you are
<v Speaker 1>putting out into the world. When nature attacks you, when nature,
<v Speaker 1>when nature kills you, it's nothing personal, and it's it's
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, it's not the same as when a
<v Speaker 1>person does it. It's not the same. There's no there's
<v Speaker 1>not as much darkness attached to it. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>can think of some terrible ways to go out without
<v Speaker 1>the aid of human hands. But but still it's I'm
<v Speaker 1>just saying it's it's a much different flavor. And when
<v Speaker 1>you start looking at the world outside of people, you
<v Speaker 1>realize how much bigger it is. And you also realize
<v Speaker 1>how much you can actually do to change the world
<v Speaker 1>around you, just by by planting things, by spending time
<v Speaker 1>around these things, by gassing them up, by hyping them,
<v Speaker 1>by letting other people know that they're there. We evolved
<v Speaker 1>with these things, with these living things. We evolved interacting
<v Speaker 1>with them. This isn't This isn't a recent This isn't
<v Speaker 1>fucking environmentalism, this is these aren't corny sentiments, This isn't
<v Speaker 1>the blonde guy and with the acoustic guitar, singing soft
<v Speaker 1>folk tunes, afraid to show anger or fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>throw shit. That's saying you should throwshit. But you know
<v Speaker 1>what I mean, This isn't this isn't that. This is
<v Speaker 1>what we evolved with. This is what for two hundred
<v Speaker 1>thousand years? How what's the age of the human species
<v Speaker 1>as we exist now? Probably two hundred thousand years, maybe
<v Speaker 1>a little bit longer. I always thought it was two
<v Speaker 1>million years, but I looked the new reason, I think
<v Speaker 1>as like two hundred thousand. But again, what are the
<v Speaker 1>metrics that they're basing that on, and what's considered a
<v Speaker 1>human human Homo sapien. I don't know, maybe two hundred
<v Speaker 1>thousan years. It's very short amount of time actually, But
<v Speaker 1>for most of that time, we were directly interacting with plants,
<v Speaker 1>and we all we grew up knowing the names of
<v Speaker 1>them and using them. We can get back to that.
<v Speaker 1>We let you know, technology made us a little arrogant.
<v Speaker 1>There was also you know, separating people from their land,
<v Speaker 1>which occurred both in Europe and here. You know, the
<v Speaker 1>feudal system, hierarchy, some prick at the top enslaves everybody
<v Speaker 1>forces them off their land, takes all their shit, turns
<v Speaker 1>them into peasants and surfs. They're the whole thing too.
<v Speaker 1>That was I mean, that was I think key in
<v Speaker 1>kind of severing us from the living world. But technology
<v Speaker 1>certainly further kind of enables it. But it doesn't need
<v Speaker 1>to anyway. The point is, it's only recently that we've
<v Speaker 1>become so estranged from these things, and now we just
<v Speaker 1>ignore them and we disregard them, and we directly disrespect them,
<v Speaker 1>and we wipe them away with the brush of a
<v Speaker 1>hat or a bucket of a bulldozer, thinking it's nothing.
<v Speaker 1>That is, who gives a shit? This isn't weird? What's
<v Speaker 1>this stuff? What's this stuff? Is a bunch of brush.
<v Speaker 1>It's a bunch of it's a bunch of bushes. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's just brush. Fucking ignorant statements.
<v Speaker 3>Man.
<v Speaker 1>The roots are holding the land together, preventing erosion, sucking
<v Speaker 1>up moisture, preventing flooding, preventing runoff, also cooling the land.
<v Speaker 1>Plants our nature's swamp cooler. You got a apple, transpirational cooling.
<v Speaker 1>Not to mention all the life that they support. I've
<v Speaker 1>seen this with all the lawns I've killed. I've killed
<v Speaker 1>probably thirty five lawns now. I mean, there was something
<v Speaker 1>for that stupid TV show which they took down. They
<v Speaker 1>took down off YouTube. Someone needs to go pirate it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think anybody from birth x is even listening
<v Speaker 1>to my podcast, thank god, but if they were, I
<v Speaker 1>guess I'm okay with saying go pirate it. Somebody else
<v Speaker 1>pirate it and put it up on YouTube, and then
<v Speaker 1>it got shut down. And I had like a two
<v Speaker 1>minute segment that earth X said I could put up
<v Speaker 1>on the Crime Pays YouTube and that got flagged with
<v Speaker 1>copyright too. I could probably get it, okay, but I
<v Speaker 1>don't even want to bother trying to write someone at
<v Speaker 1>earth x, a small scale cable network that was really
<v Speaker 1>a billionaire's pet project, and I think, is are they
<v Speaker 1>still around her? They go under they don't know what
<v Speaker 1>they're doing. They don't know what they're doing over there.
<v Speaker 1>They were gonna stream, and then they decided to sell
<v Speaker 1>their content to a cable network because they wanted to
<v Speaker 1>make sure nobody could watch it, and of course that
<v Speaker 1>didn't work out for them because nobody had access to
<v Speaker 1>their content and could see what they were doing so
<v Speaker 1>they got you know, they got a quick buck in
<v Speaker 1>the in the form of that sale to cable channel
<v Speaker 1>two sixty seven. Help, I'll remember the channel to sixties.
<v Speaker 1>I'll be sure to tune in versus if you could
<v Speaker 1>just go to a website and stream it. Fucking idiotic move.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, anyway, but kill your Lawn was on YouTube,
<v Speaker 1>but it's not. I don't think it is anymore. But
<v Speaker 1>someone needs to pirate it. Maybe you could do a
<v Speaker 1>torrent of it. Anyway, I've killed a bunch of lawns,
<v Speaker 1>and I've done a bunch of just friends lawns. You know.
<v Speaker 1>I had like a friend who like to a friend
<v Speaker 1>that was a couple. They got four kids. One works
<v Speaker 1>in a coffee shop, the other's a school teacher. They
<v Speaker 1>don't have money for this shit. Said, fuck it, I
<v Speaker 1>want I just want to. I walk by your house.
<v Speaker 1>You've watched my dogs when I go out of town
<v Speaker 1>sometimes and i'm and my kid plays with your kid.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just gonna kill your fucking lawn. Just rent, just
<v Speaker 1>rent the sod cutter and I'll do the rest. I'll
<v Speaker 1>get all the plants whatever. And so I did. I
<v Speaker 1>killed that lawn. I've killing another lawn on the other
<v Speaker 1>side of town. I've done that. I've done that alone
<v Speaker 1>probably a dozen and a half times, which I really
<v Speaker 1>shouldn't be. I don't have time for this shit, but
<v Speaker 1>I like doing it. You could do that too, if
<v Speaker 1>you get time. Even just planting like a little patch
<v Speaker 1>it like a six x eight patch of native plants,
<v Speaker 1>like native herbaceous perennials, shrubby shit, or you know, stuff
<v Speaker 1>where the roots stay alive in the tops eyes though
<v Speaker 1>that's an actual herbasious perennial. The tops die every year.
<v Speaker 1>Do that in your yard or someone else's. If you
<v Speaker 1>don't have a yard, just be collecting seeds and sprinkling
<v Speaker 1>them along fence lines, go out and start planting shit.
<v Speaker 1>Then you know, if you just what I was doing
<v Speaker 1>last week, I was taking a gave pups and just
<v Speaker 1>planting them along fence lines near my house, taking advantage
<v Speaker 1>of a light rain that we had to get these
<v Speaker 1>things established. And that'll work. A gaves are succulent that
<v Speaker 1>can sit tight while it's dry and then grow. And
<v Speaker 1>then my benefit is a year or two from now,
<v Speaker 1>I get to see these massive things, you know, taking
<v Speaker 1>up the fence. I get more plants around, I directly
<v Speaker 1>get to enjoy shit that I planted. It's not my property.
<v Speaker 1>It might get fucked, it might get ripped up by
<v Speaker 1>some you know, moron, or just by some landscaper. It
<v Speaker 1>doesn't know any bed in that landscaper. But like land maintenance,
<v Speaker 1>a land maintenance technician who doesn't know any better, you
<v Speaker 1>could do this too. This isn't hard. I know, it's
<v Speaker 1>much easier to just sulk and say everything's fucked and wine.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not going to disagree with you. Everything is fucked.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you learn about geologic timeskill, you realize that
<v Speaker 1>it's not as fucked as it was sixty six million
<v Speaker 1>years ago. That was That was That was an unpleasant day,
<v Speaker 1>you know, when that six kilometer wide comet came down
<v Speaker 1>and hit the You contain the you contain. But you
<v Speaker 1>could do this? Why not? What else you doing? You
<v Speaker 1>work in It's fine. Steal time from your employer. Learn
<v Speaker 1>about this stuff. Steal time and just peruse I naturalist
<v Speaker 1>and look for look for what plants grow around you,
<v Speaker 1>learn about them and learn about taxonomy. You got a family,
<v Speaker 1>you got a genus? Why is that cool? Co Because
<v Speaker 1>everything's related in a family and they display similar characteristics,
<v Speaker 1>like flower shape. You learn to identify what flower, what
<v Speaker 1>the what the prototype flower is for a certain family,
<v Speaker 1>and every family has one. Then you can learn to
<v Speaker 1>identify the plants. You could see a new plant and
<v Speaker 1>see the flower, see the flower structure, and say, I
<v Speaker 1>know this is a mustard, I know this is brassic casey,
<v Speaker 1>or I know this is astoracy. Why is that helpful?
<v Speaker 1>Because then when you want to learn what the fuck
<v Speaker 1>you're looking at, you can go on a naturalists and
<v Speaker 1>just type in my area, my county, whatever, and look
<v Speaker 1>up astracy and get a list of everything that grows
<v Speaker 1>in that family. It's been documented there. Learn about the
<v Speaker 1>things around you. This isn't hard. I did it. I'm
<v Speaker 1>a jackass. I did it. I didn't go to school
<v Speaker 1>for this stuff. Anybody could do this. Learn about it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't go forrest baite. What does that mean? Just
<v Speaker 1>go take a walk somewhere nice, and once shit cools
<v Speaker 1>down and you feel a little bit better, start paying
<v Speaker 1>attention to where you are. That's all it takes. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>Now you just got to go out there and do
<v Speaker 1>it anyway. It turns out shooting pigs is a lot
<v Speaker 1>harder than you might think getting these things. This guy
<v Speaker 1>came out to thorn scrubb yesterday. He had a thermal drone,
<v Speaker 1>which was a real eye opener for me. I said, wow,
<v Speaker 1>you know, especially at night, once the sun goes down,
<v Speaker 1>the land cools off. Anything that's alive, any like any
<v Speaker 1>vertebrate is comes up as bright white on an otherwise
<v Speaker 1>dark gray background. Like we were like looking at rabbits.
<v Speaker 1>You could see bunnies from three hundred feet above them,
<v Speaker 1>and they appear as like this bright white speck. It's
<v Speaker 1>crazy the thermal imaging. It's like a six thousand dollars
<v Speaker 1>droney head. But we were looking for pigs. We wanted
<v Speaker 1>to see where they're hiding because they've been destroying so much.
<v Speaker 1>This is really a huge problem down here in South
<v Speaker 1>Texas because you can it's easy to see how quickly
<v Speaker 1>they can denude an area of the species of plants
<v Speaker 1>that they're uprooting, like in our case, this really rare
<v Speaker 1>plant called Mammillaria spherica, which doesn't have it's got big
<v Speaker 1>juicy roots, almost peyote like roots, but the top of
<v Speaker 1>the plant is covered in spines. You can't touch it.
<v Speaker 1>But what they do is they uproot it and then
<v Speaker 1>they chew on, They chew on the roots, eat the roots,
<v Speaker 1>and then just leave the thing to die. And you
<v Speaker 1>could see how I mean these things. You know, people
<v Speaker 1>hunt them and stuff, but there's so many of them.
<v Speaker 1>They breathe like rats. So you'll shoot one and then
<v Speaker 1>the twelve that are with it get away and don't
<v Speaker 1>come back to your property, to your land for another month.
<v Speaker 1>And meanwhile they're just out there destroying everything. The only
<v Speaker 1>shit that's safe is anything that's got a tall fence.
<v Speaker 1>So now we're raising money for a tall fence, but
<v Speaker 1>thorn scrub is like got a three mile circumference. It's
<v Speaker 1>gonna cost twenty five grand to totally fence. You don't
<v Speaker 1>need a tall fence, but four foot tall, you know,
<v Speaker 1>not just barbed wire four foot tall. So the deer
<v Speaker 1>can still jump in, but the pigs can't get through.
<v Speaker 1>And uh, you know, you sink it like you don't
<v Speaker 1>gotta go super deep, and they can still dig if
<v Speaker 1>they want to, Like, if they're gonna they're gonna have
<v Speaker 1>to put some work into it. But but then you
<v Speaker 1>just you're monitoring the thing. You can see where they're
<v Speaker 1>digging and then just repair it and also set up
<v Speaker 1>a trail cam. There, we got it. We got a
<v Speaker 1>trail cam, We got a pig brig. We raised money
<v Speaker 1>to get a pig brig. This this certain type of trap.
<v Speaker 1>I tried to write pig Brig and asked them if
<v Speaker 1>they would be down to do like a sponsorship if
<v Speaker 1>I did a video and they took one look at
<v Speaker 1>the channel and they were like, no, no, we're wait wait,
<v Speaker 1>that's not very that's not our flavor. You know, they're
<v Speaker 1>they're gentle, they're from the South. They're gentle, they're from
<v Speaker 1>the South. They're genteels, gentilly, they're from you know, they're
<v Speaker 1>they're they're not They don't want any association with crime PAGs,
<v Speaker 1>which I can understand sometimes I don't want any association
<v Speaker 1>with myself either. But they didn't want They were not
<v Speaker 1>into a sponsorship. So we had we had the they
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't they They didn't even give us a discount. And
<v Speaker 1>the lady wouldn't even write me back either, like Ambusher
<v Speaker 1>with a phone call on her office just to be
<v Speaker 1>not I was very polite, but I was, Oh, I
<v Speaker 1>just wanted to know were you uh, you know, because
<v Speaker 1>when I first spoke to her. She sounded so enthusiastic,
<v Speaker 1>this is great, and then she took and look at
<v Speaker 1>the channel, and the enthusiasm just it just went down
<v Speaker 1>like uh, you know, like water flushed out of a toilet,
<v Speaker 1>out of a vault toilet. Anyway, we got the we
<v Speaker 1>got the pig brig out there, we got we shot
<v Speaker 1>one of them, but it ran off. I think it
<v Speaker 1>ran off to die somewhere. I hope it's dead. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. I really hate these things. They've destroyed so
<v Speaker 1>much habitat. And you know, we'll we walk into the land.
<v Speaker 1>We find plants, mostly this mammalaria sphere good has been uprooted.
<v Speaker 1>And then you realize this has been going on for
<v Speaker 1>a decade, and you realize how much more there probably was,
<v Speaker 1>and it's all gone, and no one's keeping tabs on
<v Speaker 1>these things, and there's like, you know, the rednecks down
<v Speaker 1>here shoot the mountain lions too, so the only predator
<v Speaker 1>they would offer any hope of killing these things besides people,
<v Speaker 1>uh is is rare down here as well. So there's
<v Speaker 1>no checks on these things. There's no checks except them
<v Speaker 1>getting shot once in a while by a hunter. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, so it's it's a fuck situation. So we
<v Speaker 1>had this aerial drone. We were trying to see where
<v Speaker 1>they go during the day, because they come out at night.
<v Speaker 1>They come out at like two in the morning, and
<v Speaker 1>then during the day they're probably hiding by a water
<v Speaker 1>source or in thick brush. But it's been so drought
<v Speaker 1>stricken down here that they like, like I said, like
<v Speaker 1>I showed them a video I put up on a
<v Speaker 1>on a YouTube a few months ago, they're even going
<v Speaker 1>for peyote. They don't. They'll take a bite out of
<v Speaker 1>it and uproot it and destroy it huge clumps, but
<v Speaker 1>then and then just leave it to die. Uh but
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's it's very bitter, so they don't. They don't.
<v Speaker 1>They just destroy it basically don't even really eat it.
<v Speaker 1>Whereas the Mammalaria spherica has those big juicy roots, but
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't have those those alkaloids in it, those bitter alkaloids,
<v Speaker 1>because all alkaloids are bitter, and so they'll they'll just
<v Speaker 1>with the With the mam spherica, they can actually eat
<v Speaker 1>the roots, and that's been a hot item. So the
<v Speaker 1>only ones that are left are those that are surrounded
<v Speaker 1>by like a cage of blackbrush stems, you know, because
<v Speaker 1>black brush for Chelli rigidula gets it's like a multi
<v Speaker 1>stemmed leg humanous shrub. It's all blooming right now too.
<v Speaker 1>It's most really good. It's all blooming despite the drought.
<v Speaker 1>It's so fucking dry. It's brutal like everything. Some stuff,
<v Speaker 1>some of the shrubs we're seeing, like snake eyes Texas
<v Speaker 1>snake eyes follow famous some of those. I saw some
<v Speaker 1>snake eyes yesterday. It didn't even look drought dormant, because
<v Speaker 1>a lot of this stuff just goes drought dormant. It
<v Speaker 1>just looked dead like it just looked like it died.
<v Speaker 1>Like we need like a good soaking rain. And there's
<v Speaker 1>fog out there every morning because it's so humid. It's
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. Member it's not really desert, it's it's thorn
<v Speaker 1>thorn scrub. But uh god, I just hope we get rain.
<v Speaker 1>It was so lush there the first time I saw
<v Speaker 1>this land was so lush, and the cicadas were out
<v Speaker 1>and sounded like psychedelic, and the miskeait was all green.
<v Speaker 1>It was such a beautiful piece of property. And then
<v Speaker 1>six months of a rough summer and drought and pig
<v Speaker 1>damage just really fucked it. So hopefully we can get
<v Speaker 1>it back up and running. But we're getting a shade
<v Speaker 1>structure built, which is exciting. We'll actually have a place
<v Speaker 1>to hide from the brutal sun which is coming. Man,
<v Speaker 1>it's coming like April. It's gonna be out there, and
<v Speaker 1>it's just fucking miserable every day. I mean, it's really
<v Speaker 1>nice in the mornings, it's like eighty degrees at six am,
<v Speaker 1>but then by one pm it's one hundred and five
<v Speaker 1>and you can't be outside without just like sweating and
<v Speaker 1>melting and it feels very uncomfortable. So anyway, but were
<v Speaker 1>trying to find these pigs, and I think again, at
<v Speaker 1>some point, we're just gonna fence the whole thing, which
<v Speaker 1>is again gonna be probably twenty five, which sucks. It's
<v Speaker 1>just this is an expensive project, but uh, you know
<v Speaker 1>that's why we got the the nonprofit status. So uh,
<v Speaker 1>hopefully we can get grants or something. I don't have
<v Speaker 1>time to write grants. I don't know shit about this.
<v Speaker 1>How do you write a grant? How do you do this?
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to do that. Stuff that doesn't sound
<v Speaker 1>but you go beg beg organizations for money. Yeah, I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure in an age when the federal government is firing everybody,
<v Speaker 1>because that's been their plan all along, Fire it and
<v Speaker 1>give it, give it aver to the private sector. And
<v Speaker 1>if you fire people, then that means you can there's
<v Speaker 1>less money that you have to spend, which means you
<v Speaker 1>can give more tax cuts to the rich pricks who
<v Speaker 1>helped get you elected too. So that's another benefit of
<v Speaker 1>cutting all these federal jobs. I mean, sure, you might
<v Speaker 1>be making your pop your population dumber, and make sure
<v Speaker 1>they have less access access to science and to national
<v Speaker 1>parks and nature and all the nice things that some
<v Speaker 1>people and other world countries have. We can't have those
<v Speaker 1>in America because we have these rich pricks that own
<v Speaker 1>everything and run everything. And also because the left fumbled,
<v Speaker 1>the left fumbled so bad, got away from working class
<v Speaker 1>issues and just focused on all this identity bullshit. I'm
<v Speaker 1>so mad at that, man. I mean, and you know, whatever,
<v Speaker 1>say whatever you will, it's not even about the issue itself,
<v Speaker 1>the identity stuff. It's not even like whether I agree disagree.
<v Speaker 1>It was just so fucking dumb. It was so tone deaf,
<v Speaker 1>and it is It's like you have to live in
<v Speaker 1>a bubble to think that shit is gonna fly with
<v Speaker 1>working class people. And I'm not talking about just standing
<v Speaker 1>up for people's rights. I'm talking about pushing it so hard.
<v Speaker 1>I'm talking about making it central to everything I'm talking about,
<v Speaker 1>you know, expecting, you know, some working class schmuck to
<v Speaker 1>know what words like intersectional mean, intersectional, non binary, pan sexual, disabled,
<v Speaker 1>chronically ill. I mean, people know what chronically disabled means.
<v Speaker 1>But you you know what I mean, the whole shit
<v Speaker 1>that there's just this fucking focus on settler colonialism, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the you know, I mean, who the fuck talks like this,
<v Speaker 1>Like Jesus Christ man, I just and I would hear it,
<v Speaker 1>and it was so obvious when you'd see these stupid
<v Speaker 1>posts on social media using all these words, going back
<v Speaker 1>and forth, and it was just it was I felt
<v Speaker 1>like I was watching the effect of people farting into
<v Speaker 1>a wineglass and sniffing it like the same thing.
<v Speaker 2>Like we're part of this club. We know what all
<v Speaker 2>these words mean. We've been educated in the social sciences
<v Speaker 2>and humanities, and God, just shut up, man, Just focus
<v Speaker 2>on getting people health care and education and preventing them
<v Speaker 2>from getting fucked by the oligarchs.
<v Speaker 1>Just focus on those all this other shit. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>saying you don't have to focus on it, but just
<v Speaker 1>let it go into the background. It could still it
<v Speaker 1>could still be like a static volume in the background,
<v Speaker 1>but don't make it central to your platform. And they didn't,
<v Speaker 1>of course, I mean the fucking elites on the left.
<v Speaker 1>The Democrats killed Bernie, killed Bernie's chances of getting elected.
<v Speaker 1>And then I feel like everyone else, like the younger
<v Speaker 1>the younger folk, were just on social media talking all
<v Speaker 1>this like academic buzzword bullshit and repeating each other's ideas
<v Speaker 1>and just you know, but there was hope. Luigi gave
<v Speaker 1>us hope. Anyway, I talk about this all the time.
<v Speaker 1>You're probably tired. I don't care. That's fine. You don't
<v Speaker 1>need to agree with me again. You just listen to
<v Speaker 1>tuning for the Plants. But I lived in ground zero
<v Speaker 1>of all this academic, the academic American leftism shit, and
<v Speaker 1>saw how fucking retarded it. God, I'm sorry it was.
<v Speaker 1>It was so just borderline insane and just like tone
<v Speaker 1>deaf and just obnoxious. Again, not even the ideas, just
<v Speaker 1>the talk, the like the fucking vernacular, the attitude like
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna like lecturing people and privilege, like, yeah, that's great,
<v Speaker 1>that's a great way to you know, you could it's
<v Speaker 1>like getting again, it's like getting a dog to take
<v Speaker 1>a pill. You slip that in after, you know, don't
<v Speaker 1>be a dick, be nice, give them the hot dog first.
<v Speaker 1>It's got the smoky flavor to it. I'm not even
<v Speaker 1>saying you need to like not talk about that stuff.
<v Speaker 1>That's real. Privilege is real. There is a you know
<v Speaker 1>in most cases. But like that's just you sound like
<v Speaker 1>a dick. You sound like a cunt. I'm sorry. Just
<v Speaker 1>slip it in after. It's the pill in the hot dog,
<v Speaker 1>and just be nice. Don't be a dick. What do
<v Speaker 1>you think, Like, you know, the sixties were successful because
<v Speaker 1>people weren't doing this shit to this extent. The shaming
<v Speaker 1>and the shit talking and the it was just scot
<v Speaker 1>It was so obnoxious to watch. And of course now
<v Speaker 1>look what we got. You turned off such a segment,
<v Speaker 1>such a huge segment of voters with your crazy bullshit
<v Speaker 1>that they voted for fascists. Oh god, and they're still
<v Speaker 1>in denial, Like, there's still so many people that are
<v Speaker 1>in denial. It's just like, you know, I was, I
<v Speaker 1>was part of the working class. I had a fucking
<v Speaker 1>blue collar job. I saw the way people talk. They
<v Speaker 1>weren't bad people. A lot of people got easily duped.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Sorry, I know, I keep going back
<v Speaker 1>to this, but I'm just blown away and it's gonna
<v Speaker 1>get so bad here. But all he's saying is just
<v Speaker 1>go out and look at flowers. It's all he's saying,
<v Speaker 1>just go out and look at flowers. And it's a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of bullshit. There was a post there was I
<v Speaker 1>remember I did some post with Means TV, who I'm
<v Speaker 1>not I don't really care for too much anymore. But
<v Speaker 1>they had something they had to kill your Lawn. They
<v Speaker 1>were really supportive of kill your lawn initially, and they
<v Speaker 1>put this post up on kill your lawn and in
<v Speaker 1>all these just like career political analysts in the fucking comments,
<v Speaker 1>all lefties were like, oh, yeah, what a liberal thing
<v Speaker 1>to says this is you just got to guard Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>change the world. They're gardening. He's like, God, you're fucking idiots.
<v Speaker 1>You don't even get it. You're so disconnected, you fucking clueless,
<v Speaker 1>you don't even get it gardening. Shut up, you go
<v Speaker 1>fucking go outside. What do you. What do you do?
<v Speaker 1>You just like what you just on fucking line all
<v Speaker 1>day like you just again just like sniffing farts, using
<v Speaker 1>big words, reading social theory with no understanding of like
<v Speaker 1>natural sciences or biology or evolution, like you've just you know,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta get off that stuff, man, you really do.
<v Speaker 1>It's not good for you.
<v Speaker 3>It's bad.
<v Speaker 1>It's bad stuff. It's like that high fruit thus corn syrup.
<v Speaker 3>Shit.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, we're gonna take a little break. Call my friend
<v Speaker 1>Peter Burner, doctor Peter Bernher, who studied uh he originally
<v Speaker 1>he's a Mobot. He's got a little cubicle at Mobot.
<v Speaker 1>They put him up there on the third floor. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what he's doing up there. He's studying floristics,
<v Speaker 1>so he's writing a book. He studied orchids in Australia.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna call him. He's a dear friend of mine.
<v Speaker 1>I love the ship out him. Here we go, We're
<v Speaker 1>gonna give him a little call. He's not picking up
<v Speaker 1>picking up there he is picked up. There you go.
<v Speaker 1>You're I wasn't sure if you put your phone down
<v Speaker 1>I call you. You know I was calling you. I just
<v Speaker 1>talked to you and I eat a sandwich.
<v Speaker 3>Oh okay, okay.
<v Speaker 1>We're on a hot you're on a hot mic right now. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>we're talking. How's it going.
<v Speaker 3>Uh, I'm a little cold, but it's warming up here.
<v Speaker 1>Why are you cold?
<v Speaker 3>Uh? Say? My wife prefers the temperature of a house
<v Speaker 3>to be at a certain level, but I'm I I
<v Speaker 3>prefer it to be a bit more tropical.
<v Speaker 1>It's chilly up there. Yeah, well, you know, I I uh,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you
<v Speaker 1>because where I live, it's it's gonna be like fucking
<v Speaker 1>ninety three today. Oh my god, it already sucks. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's not nice. So I'm like blast and ac I
<v Speaker 1>gotta be like seventy four. I gotta get air circulation on.
<v Speaker 1>I got a dehumidified, this little cheap d humidifier because
<v Speaker 1>it gets so muggy inside, you know, and then the
<v Speaker 1>dogs are oh yeah, it's already hot. I was out
<v Speaker 1>at our conservation property yesterday, conservation property, and it was
<v Speaker 1>already hot. We were like putting up the remainder of
<v Speaker 1>this fence, and.
<v Speaker 3>How was the property doing.
<v Speaker 1>Uh, We've got to shoot a bunch of pigs. There's
<v Speaker 1>pigs that run. You know, we're next to a few
<v Speaker 1>other properties and so these pigs just we need to
<v Speaker 1>raise We need to raise money to put you know,
<v Speaker 1>pig fencing around the whole thing. But they've destroyed there's
<v Speaker 1>a number of rare plants that were plants that are
<v Speaker 1>now rare, like Mammalaria spherica and Mammalaria hydrae. They uproot them,
<v Speaker 1>eat the roots and then leave them to die. And
<v Speaker 1>they've got big juicy roots too.
<v Speaker 3>So okay, it sounds like I better write another check.
<v Speaker 3>It sucks.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, thank you by the way for that man, seriously, thank.
<v Speaker 3>You for That's fine, that's fine.
<v Speaker 1>But we had this guy out there with with a
<v Speaker 1>thermal imaging drone. We were out there after sunset. God,
<v Speaker 1>it's so beautiful though. The Parakis are you know what
<v Speaker 1>parakis are? These birds they're like they're in the night
<v Speaker 1>jar family and they have this they have this really
<v Speaker 1>beautiful call. They come out at night. Yeah, and they'll
<v Speaker 1>like hang out in the middle of a dirt road
<v Speaker 1>and uh and then when you approach, they like fly away. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>they're really nice bird. But they're out already. It's hot
<v Speaker 1>as fucking yeah. It was it was warm, but we
<v Speaker 1>couldn't We couldn't see the pigs. So like they you know,
<v Speaker 1>they're probably a few properties over, they've got probably long ranges,
<v Speaker 1>but they can't. They show up at like three in
<v Speaker 1>the morning and then during the day they're hiding somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>So we're trying to find where they're hiding. So we could,
<v Speaker 1>you know, figure out if we could get over there
<v Speaker 1>and shoot them. But they're horrible. They just you figure
<v Speaker 1>the amount of damage I've seen them do in six months,
<v Speaker 1>and you figure that over ten years they could easily
<v Speaker 1>completely extirpate a species from a given area. It sucks,
<v Speaker 1>it's brutal.
<v Speaker 3>Geez wow.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, anyway, I got your paper. You sent me
<v Speaker 1>the pollination and Andrew Ford structure of some Amazonian licythidacy.
<v Speaker 1>So let's talk what's going on here with these flowers, Peter,
<v Speaker 1>with this family licithidacy order Eric Cayley's I've still never
<v Speaker 1>seen any of these, but I read that they've got
<v Speaker 1>a very complex flower structure. Actually, first off, we're we
<v Speaker 1>uting this how they tell everybody why you got into
<v Speaker 1>studying flowers, right, because I think there's this this and
<v Speaker 1>you've written a few books too. There's this this unfortunate
<v Speaker 1>image of flowers being associated with Hallmark greeting cards in
<v Speaker 1>Valentine's Day, and just the image in the popular consciousness,
<v Speaker 1>which I don't like, that turned me off from them.
<v Speaker 1>But then when you realize the structural morphology of these
<v Speaker 1>things effectively makes them, you know, puzzles. There's strategies here
<v Speaker 1>that enable the plants to produce, them to reproduce, and
<v Speaker 1>they become a lot more interesting. How did you get
<v Speaker 1>into looking at the flowers and stuff? It's stuff.
<v Speaker 3>It's based on indecision. It's based on when I was
<v Speaker 3>an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Oswego,
<v Speaker 3>and I was thinking about graduate school, but I couldn't
<v Speaker 3>decide what I wanted to do. Did I want to
<v Speaker 3>be a botanist like my major advisor, doctor James Sego,
<v Speaker 3>who is recognized as a famous root morphologist, or did
<v Speaker 3>I want to be a zoologist? So when I went
<v Speaker 3>on to graduate school, I met a person who was
<v Speaker 3>temporarily my advisor, doctor Jean Bobear, and she said, well,
<v Speaker 3>maybe what you need is pollination biology, because you're studying
<v Speaker 3>interactions between animals and flowers and I went, oh, yeah
<v Speaker 3>about that. So that's sort of where it began. And
<v Speaker 3>I think I made the right choice considering my interests.
<v Speaker 1>I think you did too. But it you know, to
<v Speaker 1>a lot of people, not you know, not anybody I
<v Speaker 1>would associate with, but to a lot of people, that
<v Speaker 1>sounds like it might be a boring field of study.
<v Speaker 1>How did you get interested me? Well hold on me,
<v Speaker 1>let me finish.
<v Speaker 3>To deal with But it's fifty years.
<v Speaker 1>Well hold on, hold on, it's not though. It's not
<v Speaker 1>a boring it's it's fascinating as hell. And you were
<v Speaker 1>one of the people who helped me see that how
<v Speaker 1>cool this stuff can be when you look closer, you know,
<v Speaker 1>when you realize that, you know, orchids are producing sex
<v Speaker 1>pheromones to dupe insects, or Aristolochia flowers are trapping flies
<v Speaker 1>and resembling rotting organic matter to do it, and then
<v Speaker 1>trapping them with these little tricombs, you know, for like
<v Speaker 1>a day or two to get them to pollinate. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of cool stuff there. And I think
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the initial averse to looking at plants
<v Speaker 1>this way and being so almost willfully ignorant of it
<v Speaker 1>comes from the way that popular culture has portrayed flowers
<v Speaker 1>and flower structures over the last hundred two hundred years.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's quite unfortunate. Actually we might disagree here,
<v Speaker 1>but I think it's quite unfortunate.
<v Speaker 3>You know, No, I agree with you. And you know
<v Speaker 3>one thing about what I've been doing, it gets better
<v Speaker 3>all the time because the technology gets better. For example,
<v Speaker 3>I learned over a week ago that there are there
<v Speaker 3>is new equipment to suck the odor out of flowers
<v Speaker 3>and get it identified. The technology for those continues to improve.
<v Speaker 3>There is a woman who you need to talk to,
<v Speaker 3>Monica Carlsenberg at the Missouri Botanical guard who's who's doing
<v Speaker 3>a project in which she removes the scent from the
<v Speaker 3>flowers and the climate fron And also this is a
<v Speaker 3>tie in with Thomas Krowitz and thorium collection.
<v Speaker 1>So the protogenists, the proto gess aeroids, aeroids have a
<v Speaker 1>fucking weird florobiology too, beatles mostly.
<v Speaker 3>But I haven't really worked on them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well, you know, maybe you need to buddy. And
<v Speaker 1>I'm kidding. I'm sorry, I'm just joking. What you're doing
<v Speaker 1>is fine. You're studying Australian orchids especially, But I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>My hope is that this is you know, that more
<v Speaker 1>people start coming around and seeing this, and I just, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's getting better.
<v Speaker 1>It has been ruined, though. It has been ruined because
<v Speaker 1>the associations, the cultural associations with the zeitgeist, at least
<v Speaker 1>in America, you know, connects it to is other things beauty,
<v Speaker 1>which is so stupid. It's the lowest common denominator. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's that doesn't mean anything, you know. I see a
<v Speaker 1>painting of a Chase bank on fire. That's a thing of.
<v Speaker 3>Beauty to me.
<v Speaker 1>Well, a flower is like so much more complex than that.
<v Speaker 1>There's so much more going on with the reproductive morphology.
<v Speaker 1>You could figure out what it's related to. Uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>we group plants, we group families by floral structure. There's
<v Speaker 1>all these snapomorphis that make these things. They're just so
<v Speaker 1>fucking fascinating when you look close at some of these
<v Speaker 1>some of the things that exist. I mean, there's a
<v Speaker 1>flower in Cuba that what is it, mark Gravia vigna
<v Speaker 1>that produces radar dishes for the bats that pollinate it.
<v Speaker 1>The leaves literally turn into like a little kite dish.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, oh, you're putting it in your book. Yeah, Now,
<v Speaker 3>let me explain about that. I have a book that
<v Speaker 3>will be out by February next year. The working title
<v Speaker 3>is Unloved Pollinators and Their Flowers, and I'll be looking
<v Speaker 3>with each chapter at flowers that people have tended to ignore,
<v Speaker 3>and they have a number of pollinators that people don't
<v Speaker 3>like very much.
<v Speaker 1>Can I can I recommend the name? Let's let's put
<v Speaker 1>the name. You could put that that title in there,
<v Speaker 1>but I'll put study Unloved Flowers.
<v Speaker 3>Uh no, no, no, no, Unloved Pollinators and their flowers.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, study Unloved Pollinators and their Flowers, or I'll club
<v Speaker 1>you with something rusty. How's that for a title?
<v Speaker 3>Good? Good, good. I approve with that.
<v Speaker 1>That would be my I'm going to write this the
<v Speaker 1>second part to that book. It'll be about Okay, sorry,
<v Speaker 1>go on, I'm just kidding.
<v Speaker 3>Well, that's okay, mcgravia. That I well, the last chapter
<v Speaker 3>is the bat pollinated chapter, and so we will be
<v Speaker 3>uh it looks at bat pollination in the tropical Americas,
<v Speaker 3>but also in Fiji, where there's a little bit of
<v Speaker 3>a problem there because they're one of the trees seems
<v Speaker 3>to be losing its pollinators because the locals are eating
<v Speaker 3>the bats.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus. Okay, so these are flying foxes probably.
<v Speaker 3>Right, Remember with that you deal with once you get
<v Speaker 3>into the old world, most of the pollinators tend to beteropids.
<v Speaker 3>Those are the flying foxes. That's right.
<v Speaker 1>Is that a family or what is it?
<v Speaker 3>It's a family?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? And so what went? Go ahead? Go ahead, I'll say, well,
<v Speaker 1>I was going to ask you what I'm curious about
<v Speaker 1>the chapters? Then like what what what pollinators are you
<v Speaker 1>focusing on? Then?
<v Speaker 3>Okay, So the the the chapters in this will go
<v Speaker 3>the pollinators of flowers will will go into flies, then
<v Speaker 3>into wasps, then into very dingy night moths, and then
<v Speaker 3>finally into into bats. That that tends to encompass the
<v Speaker 3>animals a lot of people really dislike. But I make
<v Speaker 3>a point that we do tend to benefit from this.
<v Speaker 1>No beatles beetles.
<v Speaker 3>Oh sorry, bega, oh thank you. Yes, yes we do beatles,
<v Speaker 3>but we do them from the standpoint of some of
<v Speaker 3>my past research with Peter Goldblatt on the flower beetles
<v Speaker 3>of South Africa, which I know you've seen.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, Oh, that's great. You got mega Palpis caapentus
<v Speaker 1>in there in the fly section.
<v Speaker 3>No, no, not this time. We I wanted to refer
<v Speaker 3>to Leonard Tine, who we lost a couple of years ago.
<v Speaker 3>Professor Leonardtine. He was the one who had a very
<v Speaker 3>close look at mosquito pollination of the of one of
<v Speaker 3>the Canadian American orchids. This is this is an old
<v Speaker 3>story and I like to do that because it gives
<v Speaker 3>us a chance to see what a torch race research is.
<v Speaker 3>This all goes back to a woman named Ada Deets
<v Speaker 3>in the early part of the twentieth century. Who she was.
<v Speaker 3>She was looking at the plants in a particular area
<v Speaker 3>and she noticed that that the mosquitoes were wearing little
<v Speaker 3>yellow dots on her on their heads, and she reported
<v Speaker 3>this to an entomologist. And so this is going on
<v Speaker 3>like every twenty or thirty years, somebody has more to
<v Speaker 3>say about the Uh it is a it is a platanthra.
<v Speaker 3>It is you know, yeah, yes, uh up to sata
<v Speaker 3>I believe is the species. Unfortunately you're interviewing me at
<v Speaker 3>home and at the age of seventy two, I tend
<v Speaker 3>I tend to forget some of the species.
<v Speaker 1>That's okay, man, I forget the fall the time. But
<v Speaker 1>people could just I mean, it's fine, they could. I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure they could look it up. It's still an interesting
<v Speaker 1>I think getting it down to genius is good enough.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah. But and well, I just want to say I'm
<v Speaker 3>from there. We go into some of the research. I
<v Speaker 3>did it Australia with Wendy Grimm and song sing Rim Wren,
<v Speaker 3>and we look at the midge orchids of the Australia
<v Speaker 3>suburb and how they are pollinated by I flies and
<v Speaker 3>Fritz flies. These are insects. People really don't like. What
<v Speaker 3>the no, what does the name I flies suggest Jesus
<v Speaker 3>Christ that.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't catch That's terrible. Are you know the flies
<v Speaker 1>like the ones that.
<v Speaker 3>No, no, no, no, no, they're They're not the TC flies.
<v Speaker 3>These these are tiny. These are only about on a
<v Speaker 3>good day, a fat floor open fly is about uh
<v Speaker 3>two millimeters in length, maybe three. And it's an interesting
<v Speaker 3>story because and you can see this on YouTube. Uh
<v Speaker 3>Doctor Songs and Wren. Uh. You can tell readers to
<v Speaker 3>go to YouTube and look up Peruna stylus. These are
<v Speaker 3>orchids in which the lip pebal has a joint and
<v Speaker 3>they flipped up and down as the breeze goes by.
<v Speaker 3>We've been wondering about that.
<v Speaker 1>Karunas stylus is an Australian name for the sharp and
<v Speaker 1>midge or so these. But the point is, and this
<v Speaker 1>is something that I think a lot of people, just
<v Speaker 1>your average citizen has no idea about, is that it's
<v Speaker 1>not just bees that do pollination. There's I mean, people
<v Speaker 1>are so ignorant of the living world. I don't fault
<v Speaker 1>them for it. You know, they've although the habitat's been
<v Speaker 1>destroyed and they've been disconnected and severed from it. They're
<v Speaker 1>kept from it in many places, but they don't even
<v Speaker 1>know that flies. I mean, I had a there's a
<v Speaker 1>really cool Texas native Senegaliara Mariana flowers smell fucking incredible.
<v Speaker 1>It's got those little catcloth thorns on it. It gets
<v Speaker 1>they can get like twenty feet, but the one in
<v Speaker 1>my yard is like ten feet. The whole thing last
<v Speaker 1>year when it was blooming, which smelled really nice to
<v Speaker 1>walk by, it was covered in flies, but not just
<v Speaker 1>like the shit flies. All different kinds of Diptero.
<v Speaker 3>Right.
<v Speaker 1>Diptera is the order of flies, right, Yeah, and it
<v Speaker 1>was really uh it was. It was exciting for me
<v Speaker 1>to see because I was you know, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I just I assumed it would be bees. I also
<v Speaker 1>like seeing the native bees that come by. I've gained
<v Speaker 1>kind of a contempt for European honeybees. They kind of
<v Speaker 1>bumm me out. Castilla erecta simaru Basi was blooming yesterday
<v Speaker 1>at our conservation property and there were a lot of
<v Speaker 1>honey bees on it, which means they're Africanized. They're the
<v Speaker 1>aggressive ones if you get near their nest. But the
<v Speaker 1>sweat bees I love where I figure when the last
<v Speaker 1>time I saw a sweat bee was speaking of insects
<v Speaker 1>that come and land on you, like the like the
<v Speaker 1>eye flies. The sweat bees are kind of cute. I
<v Speaker 1>don't mind them so much. They come and they just
<v Speaker 1>they literally just lick your sweat. They got kind of
<v Speaker 1>a nice color to them. Anyway, did you finish this
<v Speaker 1>book already?
<v Speaker 3>Yes?
<v Speaker 1>God, damn, I didn't know you were even working on it.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I knew you were working on it, but
<v Speaker 1>when did you start?
<v Speaker 3>Well, actually I started it. It's now close to three years.
<v Speaker 3>It's a COVID book. You know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it made me feel bad about myself. My
<v Speaker 1>book is not neither one is done yet.
<v Speaker 3>All right, well it was done. I basically wrote it
<v Speaker 3>over a over a suburb. But then there was a
<v Speaker 3>problem getting getting a publisher. I never had that kind
<v Speaker 3>of trouble before. But boy, look, the publishing industry isn't
<v Speaker 3>a mess for a number of reasons. You don't want
<v Speaker 3>to go into that. It's not that kind of if.
<v Speaker 3>This is not that kind of audio.
<v Speaker 1>No, no, no, let it beat his kind of audio. Because
<v Speaker 1>they are there. It's like everything they're cutting jobs. One
<v Speaker 1>of the publishers I'm working with has been great, she
<v Speaker 1>gets back to me, and then the other one, literally,
<v Speaker 1>this poor girl, she's like twenty six. They hired her,
<v Speaker 1>they're underpaying. And then the guy who was supposed to
<v Speaker 1>read the manuscript I submitted, which I ended up I'm
<v Speaker 1>only going to use like twenty percent of it, not
<v Speaker 1>even never fucking read it. And then she was pushed
<v Speaker 1>It was pushed off on her, and I feel bad
<v Speaker 1>for her, and I always have to tell her, like,
<v Speaker 1>my problem is with the publisher, not with you. I'm
<v Speaker 1>really you know, I have to make sure she understands like,
<v Speaker 1>I've got no beef with her because I tend to
<v Speaker 1>be kind of healthy and complain a lot. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's a mess, man. And this my book was supposed
<v Speaker 1>to be done last year. I submitted. They didn't even
<v Speaker 1>read it again, thank god, because whatever. And then the
<v Speaker 1>guy that they got doing the layout, he makes the
<v Speaker 1>fucking the pictures look like a health insurance brochure. It's not.
<v Speaker 1>It's horrible, So I'm gonna have to do it. That's
<v Speaker 1>what Michael Simpson, who wrote Plant Systematics, told me too.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, if you don't want it to get fucked up,
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna have to do the layout yourself. You can
<v Speaker 1>have to teach yourself in design and do the layout yourself,
<v Speaker 1>which means I'm doing it for free because they're not
<v Speaker 1>going to pay me anything else. So anyway, it's a mess.
<v Speaker 1>But you've written what were the three other books you've
<v Speaker 1>You've written two books in one, you've edited one. Let's
<v Speaker 1>go through there for everybody listening.
<v Speaker 3>The first book, which is still in press, that came
<v Speaker 3>out in nineteen eighty nine, that was Wildly Violence and
<v Speaker 3>Underground Orchids.
<v Speaker 1>What's the underground orchid species? What tell everybody, because this.
<v Speaker 3>Is from Raisin Fella Riisin Fella. And in fact I
<v Speaker 3>wrote that chapter before I had actually seen the orchid.
<v Speaker 3>I did not get to see that orchid until nineteen
<v Speaker 3>ninety when I temporarily joined the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney,
<v Speaker 3>and I was asked to write a part of a
<v Speaker 3>small part of volume four of the Floor of New
<v Speaker 3>South Wales. This is.
<v Speaker 1>Right, sorry, so get it out. That's good, get it out.
<v Speaker 3>It's just sinuses this time of the year. But there
<v Speaker 3>is a genus of orchid in Australia called Riisin Fella
<v Speaker 3>riisin fella meaning root flower it and it does not
<v Speaker 3>produce chlorophyll. It has a very complex relationship with melt
<v Speaker 3>with the with a fungus that is an endosyndiant or
<v Speaker 3>is it an ecdo cyndia. I never remember of broom honey,
<v Speaker 3>myrtle mel luca. So the orchid is benefiting off of
<v Speaker 3>the symbiotic relationship. It's it's basically a parasite of the fungus,
<v Speaker 3>whereas the fungus is looking for bush.
<v Speaker 1>It's a Michael heterrotroph But tell everybody what pollinates this
<v Speaker 1>this weird ass plant. Tell everybody what pollinates what ponies?
<v Speaker 3>Uh? It appears to be leansy forid flaw. Uh. Gee,
<v Speaker 3>that's a new one on me. No, I don't think
<v Speaker 3>I believe it's it's it's fought. We will have to
<v Speaker 3>look in look into that. What happens is that the
<v Speaker 3>the orchid lives underground all its life, but when it
<v Speaker 3>decides to have sex, it produces a flowering cup at
<v Speaker 3>its top, which just casually pushes up the humus and
<v Speaker 3>detritus on the forest floor, leaving little cracks for the
<v Speaker 3>flies to enter.
<v Speaker 1>But it flowers like basically underground.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, it's basically the fly has to go down
<v Speaker 3>into this chamber that's made by the circle of bracks.
<v Speaker 3>It's a little bit like your It's almost as if
<v Speaker 3>an orchid decided to act like one of your one
<v Speaker 3>of your beloved members of the astor racing. The orchid
<v Speaker 3>fire forms a capitulum, and.
<v Speaker 1>There's tiny flowers. Oh my god, this thing is weird.
<v Speaker 3>Now there is.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't realize it. Oh my god, there's tiny flowers
<v Speaker 1>on the inside of this. What a fucking bizarre organism.
<v Speaker 1>How how old is this? I wanted the evolutionary age
<v Speaker 1>and how did the fuck did this thing evolve under?
<v Speaker 1>What selection pressures? Like, how does that happen?
<v Speaker 3>I will I really don't know, but in this but
<v Speaker 3>but let's let's let's look at it this way. This
<v Speaker 3>is Australia. There has been a great deal of diversity
<v Speaker 3>over time over the the family Orchidoity and.
<v Speaker 1>The subfamily Orchidoity.
<v Speaker 3>The subfamily Orchidolity, And uh, when do you think about it? Uh,
<v Speaker 3>when you were dealing with a with a part of
<v Speaker 3>the world that becomes seasonally dry, perhaps remaining underground in
<v Speaker 3>a relatively moist spot under a bush might be one
<v Speaker 3>of the better ways to handle it. And as far
<v Speaker 3>as exploiting little flies, well that's very, very common in Australia.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, okay, hold on, yeah, what is the host
<v Speaker 1>plant for the fungus? This is a micoheterotrophic plant, so
<v Speaker 1>it's a plant that basically steals from fungus. But I
<v Speaker 1>don't even like anthropomorphizing that because maybe the fungus is
<v Speaker 1>letting it hang on. I don't know, we don't really
<v Speaker 1>understand this relationship. But either way, this thing is not photosynthesizing, right,
<v Speaker 1>this plant is not photosynthetic, so it's taken from the fungus.
<v Speaker 1>What is the host plant that this micorrhizal fungus. It's
<v Speaker 1>a fungus that's symbiotic with most plants anyway, what is
<v Speaker 1>the whole Is it a eucalypt or what?
<v Speaker 3>Uh, You've got the right family. It's mercasey and supposedly
<v Speaker 3>it's one of the common melo lucas, which are they
<v Speaker 3>often referred to as as broom honey myrtles.
<v Speaker 1>So these are really important trees, a lot of these
<v Speaker 1>mertaceous things in Australia, because they are literally the scaffolding
<v Speaker 1>for a highfel network, a highfhel network of cool micor
<v Speaker 1>rhizol fungi. So there's another thing about uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>this is an aspect a lot of people don't realize
<v Speaker 1>is for these roots of plants underground are acting as
<v Speaker 1>a scaffolding for a plethora of different organisms, whether they're
<v Speaker 1>insects or fungi or bacteria whatever.
<v Speaker 3>So and that's what they Wait, wait, wait, we can
<v Speaker 3>take it one step further. This orchid is also produces tiny,
<v Speaker 3>fleshy fruits, so there is a suggestion that these seeds
<v Speaker 3>are are being dispersed by tiny marsupials.
<v Speaker 1>What do the fruits look like.
<v Speaker 3>I've never seen them. The I just they're just they're
<v Speaker 3>just the small fleshy fruits. Remember, fleshy fleshy fruits are
<v Speaker 3>uncommon in the orchids, but they do occur. It's just
<v Speaker 3>that we we usually associate them with the subfamily Banaloidi.
<v Speaker 1>Right, most of the fruits in orchidace are dry capsules.
<v Speaker 1>They're the hissing capsules with tiny seeds. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I remember seeing a vanilla species in the Dominican Republic
<v Speaker 1>that had a really squishy ass red fruit, bright red,
<v Speaker 1>obviously conspicuous for it needs some animal to disperse it.
<v Speaker 1>But there was like a gooey substance. It was really cool. God,
<v Speaker 1>there was a ton of cool vanilla out there. Fuck,
<v Speaker 1>there was one. There was a vanilla that grew on
<v Speaker 1>an arborescent cacti, on tree cacti, and it had like
<v Speaker 1>just it was just brown stems with barely any leaves,
<v Speaker 1>tiny leaves at the nodes. I forget the species almost. God,
<v Speaker 1>that was an incredible I would love to grow that vanilla.
<v Speaker 1>It grew in thorn forest. It was a vanilla that
<v Speaker 1>grew in thorn forest and I didn't, Uh, I don't
<v Speaker 1>think I got the yeah. And I never got any
<v Speaker 1>photos of the flowers.
<v Speaker 3>What a yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Barbolata vanilla barbilatta or venilla barba YadA if you're you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you speak Spanish. But anyway, I was in love
<v Speaker 1>with that plant. Fuck. I should put that in my book.
<v Speaker 1>I still got time. Anyway. I don't have photos of
<v Speaker 1>the flowers though. Okay, So how'd you end up in Australia.
<v Speaker 1>You grew up in Long Island. How'd you go down
<v Speaker 1>to how'd you end up in Australia.
<v Speaker 3>I got down to Australia because I got down to
<v Speaker 3>El Salvador in Central America. Now I'll explain. After I
<v Speaker 3>did my master's degree, there's something I had always wanted
<v Speaker 3>to do with my life. I wanted to be in
<v Speaker 3>the East Corps, and I was. I applied, and they
<v Speaker 3>usually don't give you a choice at the time. They
<v Speaker 3>just say, well, if you want to do certain things,
<v Speaker 3>this is where you're going to go.
<v Speaker 1>Way, Wait, what got you in the Peace Corps? Because
<v Speaker 1>it's like a way to travel without having to worry
<v Speaker 1>about getting shut.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, and it's also a way to to imitate Charles
<v Speaker 3>Darwin and to go to the tropics. So I was
<v Speaker 3>sent to the University of El Salvador to teach and
<v Speaker 3>do research and help maintain the herbarium with a wonderful
<v Speaker 3>woman eighty Montalvo to eighty Montevo right, and we This
<v Speaker 3>included weekly field trips and expeditions. We always found something
<v Speaker 3>new and dur But during that time, part of my
<v Speaker 3>job was to translate certain things for the students. And
<v Speaker 3>I was going through a copy of Science, and the
<v Speaker 3>way I go through journals, I start at the back
<v Speaker 3>and flipped and because I was looking for something, I
<v Speaker 3>wasn't sure of the year, and in the back of Science,
<v Speaker 3>of course that's where all the adverts are. And I
<v Speaker 3>saw an ad for the University of Melbourne that they
<v Speaker 3>were giving out fellowships. And at that point I said, well,
<v Speaker 3>I'm going to finish up here in another year and
<v Speaker 3>a half. I got to think of what's coming next,
<v Speaker 3>and that means graduate school to do a PhD. So
<v Speaker 3>I started a I started a correspondence with doctor Malcolm
<v Speaker 3>Calder of the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne.
<v Speaker 1>Well dead Nowady is still alive.
<v Speaker 3>No, No, Malcolm is Malcolm is living in Victoria in
<v Speaker 3>Yarra Glenn uh uh. He and his son manage a winery,
<v Speaker 3>and I hope to get back there and say up,
<v Speaker 3>well the po the uh the contents. Next year when
<v Speaker 3>the book comes out, you're.
<v Speaker 1>Gonna go down, or you're gonna get You're gonna go down,
<v Speaker 1>or you're gonna get hammered at this winery to celebrate it.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna be looking at You're gonna be looking at
<v Speaker 1>ri How do I get out to see Risent Thella?
<v Speaker 1>Any Australians out there who can get me down to
<v Speaker 1>see Risent Theella? So I don't have to threaten anybody,
<v Speaker 1>can you please? I will I will self immolate on
<v Speaker 1>the steps at the Sydney Opera House if someone doesn't
<v Speaker 1>take my ass out to see Risa.
<v Speaker 3>Well the best I can do for you, because this
<v Speaker 3>is how I had to describe the genus the The
<v Speaker 3>Sydney Botanic Garden has a wet collection of flowers and they.
<v Speaker 1>Had well yeah, boys, okay, go ahead, right.
<v Speaker 3>Well all of the well, but you can also call
<v Speaker 3>it a spirit collection. These are flowers that the well,
<v Speaker 3>no no, no, we don't want to use formaldehyde. That
<v Speaker 3>that that makes the flowers very brittle athough that's the
<v Speaker 3>way it was done in the old day, seventy percent
<v Speaker 3>and all I think is the best. It also leaches
<v Speaker 3>out the colors so you can see the veins inside
<v Speaker 3>various structures, which I think is very important. Well, they
<v Speaker 3>had a horizon fella was the the original genus was
<v Speaker 3>called krypton themis hidden flowers. But they had it in
<v Speaker 3>a bottle and I was able to describe it for
<v Speaker 3>the that section of the book. Very vary. So if
<v Speaker 3>you can't find it in the field, although I'll bet
<v Speaker 3>with all of your listeners in Australia there's probably someone
<v Speaker 3>who can take you to a population. I would suggest
<v Speaker 3>that you go to the collection which is now in
<v Speaker 3>Mount Addam and have a look at it first in
<v Speaker 3>all of its glory, because there's no dirt on it
<v Speaker 3>or anything. And by the way, just shout out to
<v Speaker 3>the Botanic Garden in Mount added You need to see that.
<v Speaker 3>In New South Wales, you need to see that because
<v Speaker 3>that has one of the greatest collections living collections of
<v Speaker 3>Australian play.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean I'm going back. I need to go
<v Speaker 1>back to Australia at some point and spend like a
<v Speaker 1>month or two there because there's a lot of crime,
<v Speaker 1>pays fans down there, and there's some good people, and
<v Speaker 1>it always feels good. It always feels much better being
<v Speaker 1>there than here. The culture's just not as rotten. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they've got free health care and they've got or affordable
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's just it's just not as much of
<v Speaker 1>a poisonous Uh. It's got its flaws, but it's not
<v Speaker 1>as poisonous. Do you think how much dumber do you
<v Speaker 1>think the American public is going to be after after
<v Speaker 1>the next four years that we're going through right now,
<v Speaker 1>you know, defunding science, defunding, they want to privatize the
<v Speaker 1>post Office? And answer, how much dumber do you think
<v Speaker 1>the general American citizen? And no shame to them, bless
<v Speaker 1>their hearts, how much dumber do you think they're gonna
<v Speaker 1>be after four years of this shit?
<v Speaker 3>I don't think it's even a question of being dumber.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's worse than this, Joey, I think it's
<v Speaker 3>four years. How unprotected we're going.
<v Speaker 1>To be unprotected?
<v Speaker 3>Yes?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and broke more broke.
<v Speaker 3>That's that's what frightens be right now, The indiscriminate firing
<v Speaker 3>of people who have been protecting us. And I don't
<v Speaker 3>know if we should keep talking about this. Who knows
<v Speaker 3>who's listening.
<v Speaker 1>Why what are you worried about?
<v Speaker 3>Well, you never.
<v Speaker 1>I've already run my mouth so much about it already,
<v Speaker 1>I mean anything a lot of Well, you're worried about
<v Speaker 1>the secret police, You're worried about the cheeseburger secret police.
<v Speaker 3>I suppose that's what it's.
<v Speaker 1>Gonna be like here, it's gonna be It's America is
<v Speaker 1>going to put such a distinct flavor on dystopia. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we'll have our own pianom and squares. It'll be Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it'll be amazing in terms of like a science fiction
<v Speaker 1>bleak dystopia. Okay, let's let's go back to talking about flowers. Now,
<v Speaker 1>let's go so you ended up, So you ended up
<v Speaker 1>in Australia, and then when you got there, how do
<v Speaker 1>you I mean, you were already interested in orchids when
<v Speaker 1>you got to Australia, because the Australian orchids, these terrestrial
<v Speaker 1>orchids are especially weird. And that's when you were.
<v Speaker 3>Hoping at what Okay, we we interrupted the narrative. So
<v Speaker 3>I found that I began corresponding with with Malcolm Colder
<v Speaker 3>and then I applied for the fellowship, but I did
<v Speaker 3>not get it because of fellowship over there is really
<v Speaker 3>for people who already have their PhDs. Malcolm wrote me
<v Speaker 3>and said, well, you didn't get the fellowship, but you're
<v Speaker 3>like a scholarship to do a PhD. And I said,
<v Speaker 3>oh yes, poyase because I had spent several months applying
<v Speaker 3>to American graduate schools and I was invited to interview one,
<v Speaker 3>and I suddenly realized what a mean existence graduate students
<v Speaker 3>seemed to seem to have. Melbourne promised me better. They
<v Speaker 3>promised that, first of all, you're not going to have
<v Speaker 3>to take any more of these silly courses. We're going
<v Speaker 3>to get you right into research. You're going to You're
<v Speaker 3>not going to have to be a teaching assistant because
<v Speaker 3>you have a scholarship. We want you working on this
<v Speaker 3>all the time. And after a couple of days, dude
<v Speaker 3>was snowstar. But I was trapped there at the University
<v Speaker 3>of Illinois or body Champagne. I was more than ready
<v Speaker 3>to go to Australia. Uh you were.
<v Speaker 1>You were you were living in Wait? Where were you
<v Speaker 1>you were living in Urbana.
<v Speaker 3>No I went for an interview. Her name was Mary Wilson.
<v Speaker 3>She's gone now. She was she was very important in
<v Speaker 3>the early nineteen eighties for having a new look at
<v Speaker 3>the reproductive ecology of plants. With all respect to her,
<v Speaker 3>but when I realized, you know, the graduate students were
<v Speaker 3>renting an old house. They were living off of cheese
<v Speaker 3>and broccoli soup. I said that in Urbana.
<v Speaker 1>I took Champagne, Illinois. That's rough, that's rough right.
<v Speaker 3>There, which they described as a corn pit, which it
<v Speaker 3>was that you had. You had to for hours to
<v Speaker 3>find any native vegetation.
<v Speaker 1>Definitely doing acid in Champa. There's definitely people doing acid
<v Speaker 1>in Champagne. I would I don't. There's nothing else to do.
<v Speaker 1>You've got to do. You've got to do psychedelic drugs.
<v Speaker 1>It's the only thing there is.
<v Speaker 3>To do there. You gotta do what you gotta do.
<v Speaker 3>So I went to Melbourne and I stayed at a
<v Speaker 3>place called Graduate House, which was just for graduate students.
<v Speaker 3>It still exists in a in some way, shape or form,
<v Speaker 3>and it was great. I had my own room. It
<v Speaker 3>was a non sweet facility I had. They did that.
<v Speaker 3>They had a restaurant. You had breakfast and lunch. It
<v Speaker 3>was it was all part. It was all part of
<v Speaker 3>the bill, and I could and it was about a
<v Speaker 3>two minute walk to the School of Botany. And now
<v Speaker 3>you're talking about let's get back to the orchids. Well,
<v Speaker 3>my research, my PhD study was on the pollination of
<v Speaker 3>ani Ema missiletoes. These are loranzoids very and it was
<v Speaker 3>my it was my first continuous study on bird pollination
<v Speaker 3>because they're they're virtually all pollinated by members of the mellafogty.
<v Speaker 3>Those are the honeyeaters.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, all right, So they got big red flowers.
<v Speaker 3>That's right. They have big red scentless flowers and produce
<v Speaker 3>a lot of nectar. And I worked on the breeding
<v Speaker 3>systems of these, but I went when it was recommended
<v Speaker 3>I do part of my study at cornerk. Now, for
<v Speaker 3>some people, they'll know what I'm going to talk about.
<v Speaker 3>Next to the outside bellbird. In a town called Heelsville,
<v Speaker 3>there is the C. Colin Mackenzie Fauna Park. It's world famous.
<v Speaker 3>This is the first zoo that bread platypus m hmm.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So they're getting bang and they're doing they're doing okay,
<v Speaker 1>So and.
<v Speaker 3>So that's right.
<v Speaker 1>Oh they got they got a nice flora there too.
<v Speaker 3>Apparently, yes they do. And because they had a program
<v Speaker 3>on conservation of the native marsupials. These include small wallabies
<v Speaker 3>as well as koalas, they maintained a a refuge in
<v Speaker 3>the back of the zoo. In fact, it had originally
<v Speaker 3>been a reservation for the remaining Victorian Aborigines. I don't
<v Speaker 3>want to go into the Jesus.
<v Speaker 1>They had were not very nice to the indigenous people.
<v Speaker 3>They were, No, they were not. They still aren't, but
<v Speaker 3>that's another story anyway. Because they had a field station
<v Speaker 3>there of a nice field station run by a creek,
<v Speaker 3>and that's where I studied. To wait, run what a
<v Speaker 3>creep creek? Creek?
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, you said, a creep like a midnight toucher.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, all right, this this, this is a creek uh
<v Speaker 3>in which Platypus lived. As a matter of fact, Melbourne. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>I never had to worry about getting rid of the
<v Speaker 3>garbage because the EMUs came and eat and ate them.
<v Speaker 3>If you ever, if you want to see something amazing,
<v Speaker 3>watch an EMUs swallow a lamb chop bone. Oh boy.
<v Speaker 3>But while I was working on these two species, abe
<v Speaker 3>a pendulum and abie a quandie, which by the way
<v Speaker 3>to hybridize. I was the first one to describe the
<v Speaker 3>hybrid between them. They had an area that they fenced
<v Speaker 3>in to keep the marsupials out. It was a glade area,
<v Speaker 3>and that's where I first found. I first saw in
<v Speaker 3>great number a number of the Australian orchids which were
<v Speaker 3>blooming because there was nothing was grazing on them. And
<v Speaker 3>I became very interested, particularly in members of the genus Philomitra,
<v Speaker 3>the sun orchids.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so let's talk about the plants now, because this
<v Speaker 1>is what I want is really this is the meat,
<v Speaker 1>This is really what I really want to get the
<v Speaker 1>tigue on. So you saw Thelmitra, which doesn't have a
<v Speaker 1>labellum like all the other orchids do. It doesn't have
<v Speaker 1>a show well it's got a lebellum, but it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>have a showy lebellum. It doesn't have a modified labellum.
<v Speaker 3>Ah, But there are two species that do, and their
<v Speaker 3>Alpine they have a they have a scoop shaped labellum,
<v Speaker 3>but they have a they have very reduced sculpturing on
<v Speaker 3>their column hoods Now, let me explain about this. You're right,
<v Speaker 3>most of the theelamitra orchids show typical radial symmetry of
<v Speaker 3>their petals and sepals as you see in both flowers.
<v Speaker 3>But what has happened This is something Darwin had a
<v Speaker 3>look at in the nineteenth century thanks to his correspondent
<v Speaker 3>are De Fitzgerald, who produced a fantastic Fitzgerald produced a
<v Speaker 3>fantastic book on the Australian orchids. Is that they the
<v Speaker 3>column the sexual orchid, sorry, the sexual organs in the
<v Speaker 3>orchid that fused together to form a guynosthmium, which you've
<v Speaker 3>a word that you've used on your everybody.
<v Speaker 1>What a ginos themium is.
<v Speaker 3>A ginosmium is where you have fusion between the male
<v Speaker 3>and the female parts of a flower.
<v Speaker 1>Not to be confused with gnostigium, which you get in
<v Speaker 1>milk weeds, right.
<v Speaker 3>Which is slightly different. It depends on who's who's fusing
<v Speaker 3>with what. In orchids, the ginos themium is where the
<v Speaker 3>style of the is, where the style is thick and fleshy,
<v Speaker 3>and the stamen or stamens fuse to it along its
<v Speaker 3>back well. In orchids, as Darwin pointed out, it looks
<v Speaker 3>like in the ancestral orchid way back when we're not
<v Speaker 3>sure there were three fertile stamens ah, But in most orchids,
<v Speaker 3>what has happened is that two of those stamens have
<v Speaker 3>become sterile. They are a wing like. They are referred
<v Speaker 3>to as staminodia. In the sun orchids, what has happened
<v Speaker 3>is that the two stabinold lobes, the two wings, have
<v Speaker 3>had an increased fusion. They fuse to each other and
<v Speaker 3>they form a bonnet over.
<v Speaker 1>They got a bonnet. So okay, so we got there's
<v Speaker 1>three hundred and forty eight species of orchidoidy in Victoria, Australia. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so let's talk about some of these because these what
<v Speaker 1>these are, what these are doing is pretty Do any
<v Speaker 1>of them offer nectar? Do any of them do just
<v Speaker 1>straight up quote regular pollination or are they all duping
<v Speaker 1>insects and deceiving them?
<v Speaker 3>They sure do. There is one genus and this will
<v Speaker 3>take us back to when we first discovered each other. Joey,
<v Speaker 3>it's remember the genus present. I say, that's right, and
<v Speaker 3>you gave a great and it was it was a
<v Speaker 3>great video. When you were in Perth and.
<v Speaker 1>It was on a granite outcropping. It was on a
<v Speaker 1>micro site. Yeah, it was like surrounded by woodland. But
<v Speaker 1>then there's this big granite knob in the middle of
<v Speaker 1>the forest and it was growing in a little crack
<v Speaker 1>in the rock up there with some utricularya and other
<v Speaker 1>interesting stuff.
<v Speaker 3>Right. Well, and you and you made a blooper. You
<v Speaker 3>looked at the flower and you misidentified the parts because
<v Speaker 3>there was one thing you you just didn't know.
<v Speaker 1>It would have to non recipate. It wasn't flipped over
<v Speaker 1>it most orchids are.
<v Speaker 3>In most orchids, the labellum hangs downwards or from the side.
<v Speaker 3>It looks like an apron or lip in pras of film.
<v Speaker 3>The flower does not twist in the bud, so the
<v Speaker 3>labellum stays upright and is like a little plume. That
<v Speaker 3>is where the pollinator lads and it goes downward to
<v Speaker 3>feed on the nectar at the base of the of
<v Speaker 3>the labellum. And in fact, there is another genus which
<v Speaker 3>is in my book which we've just mentioned, the genus
<v Speaker 3>Coruna stylus, which is related to press of film. And
<v Speaker 3>we found that yes, some of the species produce little drops.
<v Speaker 3>We think our nectar at the base of the labellum.
<v Speaker 3>My friend, the photographer Rudy Kueter k u I T
<v Speaker 3>e Are, who does fantastic macro photography of pollinators. He
<v Speaker 3>has a book called Orchid Pollinators of Victoria, which everybody
<v Speaker 3>should own. He has found the droplets at the base.
<v Speaker 3>But the ones that he works in Victoria, the ones
<v Speaker 3>we've studied in New South Wales, that's me, Wren and Wendy,
<v Speaker 3>that we that we've studied in New South Wales do
<v Speaker 3>something very very strange. They produce their nectar drops on
<v Speaker 3>the staminoes of the of the column. That's no one
<v Speaker 3>else has really found that before. And that's what the
<v Speaker 3>chloropids come. The eye flies, the frick flies come down
<v Speaker 3>and drink.
<v Speaker 1>Wait, what is this that produces the nectar and the
<v Speaker 1>staminos karuna styling. I'm looking, I'm looking at or dollinators
<v Speaker 1>of Victoria. God, it's ninety ninety euros. I don't think
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to be purchasing that one. I look for
<v Speaker 1>the PF bdo.
<v Speaker 3>Oh, but I will give I will give you Rudi's
<v Speaker 3>I will give you Rudy's email. There are there, there are,
<v Speaker 3>there are cheaper roots. Weep them.
<v Speaker 1>But it's got a nice it's got a nice image
<v Speaker 1>on the cover. At this this thinid, is that a
<v Speaker 1>thinted wasp trying to hump the labellum, the callous, the
<v Speaker 1>cali studdied lebellum.
<v Speaker 3>That's right.
<v Speaker 1>What's what, geniuses, I don't know what are the orchids
<v Speaker 1>out there, but a lot of the labellum or labella,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the labella, and these orchids have like
<v Speaker 1>these like these dark wordy spots on them, especially like
<v Speaker 1>Caledonian stuff. That's because they're mimicking female wasps.
<v Speaker 3>That's right, and in fact, in a sister genus Kylo Glottis,
<v Speaker 3>also known as the bird orchids, they are producing a
<v Speaker 3>pseudo pheromone that the that gets the males very male, lost,
<v Speaker 3>very very excited. Now Kingsley Dixon, who we both know
<v Speaker 3>and are fond of, has done some further work and
<v Speaker 3>he has found that there are some Caledinius the some
<v Speaker 3>of these spider orchids, and that will also be in
<v Speaker 3>my book, that also secrete nectar, and they secrete nectar
<v Speaker 3>on the labellum, on the on the combs, on the
<v Speaker 3>margins of the labellum. He took me into his the
<v Speaker 3>living collection he had on going back over ten years now.
<v Speaker 3>He took me into the living collection that he was maintaining,
<v Speaker 3>and there they were these little droplets glistening on the
<v Speaker 3>on the labellum, and I tasted them and they're sweet.
<v Speaker 3>So it looks like, oh, let's go into this. What
<v Speaker 3>happens in the pollination of these caledonias and these bird orchids.
<v Speaker 1>Well wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on hold, that's so,
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple that's secreted nectar. But the vast majority
<v Speaker 1>of the members of the orchidoidy subfamily are just deceiving
<v Speaker 1>in Australia, are just deceiving pollinators. It's fake, it's bullshit.
<v Speaker 1>They're just luring them in there and they don't have
<v Speaker 1>to offer anything except produce this modified labellum that looks
<v Speaker 1>kind of weird.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, but we're But what we're finding now is and
<v Speaker 3>this is not my work. This is the work of
<v Speaker 3>people like Peter West and Who's Still Alive? Mind you,
<v Speaker 3>I've gotta be careful about who who's alive and who's
<v Speaker 3>not and Gigsley where they have been finding that within
<v Speaker 3>some of these genera that we everyone thought, We're completely deceiving.
<v Speaker 3>There are a couple of species that are still producing nectar,
<v Speaker 3>such as the genus Diorus, which are are the donkey
<v Speaker 3>or donkey orchids or the twin tails. The yellow ones
<v Speaker 3>tend to be fake and they are pollinated they are
<v Speaker 3>pretending to be pea blossoms, and they tend to be
<v Speaker 3>pollinated by bees that are specialized to forage for pollen
<v Speaker 3>and nectar on bees. But the white ones don't match
<v Speaker 3>much of anything, and they make little bits of what
<v Speaker 3>people call taste or nectar, just enough to bring the
<v Speaker 3>bees to bring other bees in the more generalist foraging
<v Speaker 3>bees to drink.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so what are the main let's talk about just
<v Speaker 1>really que weren't getting a nitty gritty, but what are
<v Speaker 1>the main ways of orchidoid use? Suffer? The main methods
<v Speaker 1>through which a lot of these deceptive pollination strategies work
<v Speaker 1>mimicking female insects. Some of them are thought to mimic
<v Speaker 1>unrelated plants that grow nearby, mimic the flowers of unrelated
<v Speaker 1>plants that grow nearby in order that do offer nectar
<v Speaker 1>in order to get insects in there. What else? What
<v Speaker 1>else are they doing. They we've got some that that
<v Speaker 1>uh not only mimic female wasps, but the the their
<v Speaker 1>thig monastic the labellum moves and slams the coollinator. Why
<v Speaker 1>did that evolve? Like, let's talk about those the hammer orchids.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, okay, let's just clarify things for the listeners. Yes,
<v Speaker 3>there are sex mimics like the Caledonians and the drake
<v Speaker 3>eas and Skyla glottis and well we're just going to
<v Speaker 3>stay in the Australian realms of fla bel. But then
<v Speaker 3>there are the food mimics, which are mimicing other flowers
<v Speaker 3>that are that would normally produce pollen and edible pollen
<v Speaker 3>and nectar, and those are as I said, the diuuris orchids,
<v Speaker 3>and the theelamitras that I was studying, they all seem
<v Speaker 3>to be food mimics. The theelamitras pretend to be the
<v Speaker 3>sort of flowers that are normally buzz pollinated. They I
<v Speaker 3>remember I talked about that inflated bonnet over the guynosthenium. Uh,
<v Speaker 3>that usually comes with little brushes and little papilli. It
<v Speaker 3>looks like an answer releasing its pollen, and that's what
<v Speaker 3>the bees come and shake, but they don't get a
<v Speaker 3>reward at all. They wind up carrying the pollinia off
<v Speaker 3>on their button. Don't seem to know what's what's going on.
<v Speaker 1>Is there a genus nearby that these thelamitra? Is there
<v Speaker 1>a sympatric genus at these the unrelated sympatric genius at the.
<v Speaker 3>Are lots of them? Well, Danella is one.
<v Speaker 1>Which is a sparagacy or a sparagaie.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, a lot of them are what we would call
<v Speaker 3>pedaloid monocots. And what they all have in common is
<v Speaker 3>that their bus buzz polony. There's also in the in
<v Speaker 3>the udaetots there is Tetrathica. And then also there was
<v Speaker 3>one of my favorite genera which I have studied. That's
<v Speaker 3>that's the Bertia, the guinea flowers. Those are the ones
<v Speaker 3>that produced little fascicles of stamens with little toys that
<v Speaker 3>the tip and the bees come and shake them.
<v Speaker 1>Coming throughout Australasia, really arborescent one in New Caledonia, yes.
<v Speaker 3>Well, arborescent ones throughout Southeast Asia. And the genus Dialinia
<v Speaker 3>and the uh and and it's an odd thing about
<v Speaker 3>Australia itself. There are probably more different species of buzz
<v Speaker 3>pollinated flowers there than anywhere else in the world. I
<v Speaker 3>think I know why everyone says, oh, I see they're
<v Speaker 3>buzz pollinated. They make no nectar and the bee has
<v Speaker 3>to shake it out. That's because Australia is such a
<v Speaker 3>dry country and the flowers are conserving their water. No,
<v Speaker 3>I don't think that's the reason at all. I think
<v Speaker 3>unlike other parts of the world with temperate subtropical climates
<v Speaker 3>like here in the Northern Hemisphere, most of our woody plants,
<v Speaker 3>most of our trees are wind pollinated. Not in Australia.
<v Speaker 3>Most of the forest is made by nectar producing members
<v Speaker 3>of the Vertesi and the proteac as you well know.
<v Speaker 3>So in fact, the production of nectar by trees in
<v Speaker 3>Australia lays the groundwork for buzz pollinated things. The bees
<v Speaker 3>are going to the nectar producing trees for carbohydrate and
<v Speaker 3>secondarily for pollen. But when they need lots of pollen,
<v Speaker 3>they're going down closer to the ground and they're shaking
<v Speaker 3>the tetrathecos and the danellas and the hyberthia.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, well, well, hold, but buzz pollination, which you know. Again,
<v Speaker 1>is just the vibration of wings. And there's a species
<v Speaker 1>of Crnodendron in Chile that's buzz pollinated by hummingbirds. Like
<v Speaker 1>the vibrations of the hummingbird wings shake the anthers of
<v Speaker 1>this crnodendron, which are poricidal, they've got a hole in them.
<v Speaker 1>First off, you've got to tell everybody whenever you see
<v Speaker 1>a hole at the end of an anther as opposed
<v Speaker 1>to a longitudinal slit, that means it's probably buzz pollinated,
<v Speaker 1>like tomato flowers, Like potato flowers, anything in the genus
<v Speaker 1>so Lainum, you'll see it. You'll see a little hole.
<v Speaker 1>You see. There's a members of eric Ac the blueberry
<v Speaker 1>family that do that that are buzz pollinated. And this
<v Speaker 1>is a way, I think to conserve pollen, so it
<v Speaker 1>can't just all be given away at once by bees
<v Speaker 1>that come in and they would just take everything. It's
<v Speaker 1>a way to it's like a ceial dispenser. Again, I
<v Speaker 1>tell people it's like the cereal dispenser at the motel,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or you can. You got to pull it
<v Speaker 1>each time to let you know, so eventually you're not
<v Speaker 1>gonna get some you know, some fatty who's gonna go
<v Speaker 1>in there and take like, you know, half a gallon
<v Speaker 1>of honey a cheerios because he's he'll be there too long,
<v Speaker 1>so because he can only get it out in little
<v Speaker 1>whatever that you know is dispense when you pull that
<v Speaker 1>lever on the and the dispenser thing, it's kind of
<v Speaker 1>like that. So but why would more nectar production what
<v Speaker 1>does that have to do with I'm not I'm not
<v Speaker 1>seeing the selective force in the environment that's selecting for
<v Speaker 1>buzz pollination.
<v Speaker 3>I suggest it has something to do with with plants
<v Speaker 3>sharing a limited resource, and that limited resource is bees.
<v Speaker 3>By my crude calculations, I suspense that at least ten
<v Speaker 3>percent or more of the flowers in Australia, ten percent
<v Speaker 3>of the flowering species in Australia make no flower nectar
<v Speaker 3>at all. So what do you have. You have a
<v Speaker 3>canopy that is made primarily of trees that are making nectar.
<v Speaker 3>You have a shrub layer and a herbaceous layer in
<v Speaker 3>which they in which probably about ten percent of the
<v Speaker 3>species are making lots of pollen for buzz pollination, but
<v Speaker 3>they don't make any nectar at all. It means that
<v Speaker 3>that trees and herbs and trees and shrubs can share
<v Speaker 3>the same pollinator, because I have been doing this for years.
<v Speaker 3>You catch a bee on a buzz pollinated flour, what
<v Speaker 3>do you find on the bee? On its hind legs?
<v Speaker 3>You find the pollen of You find the pollen of
<v Speaker 3>the buzz pollinated flower. But you also find the pollen
<v Speaker 3>of a nectar pollinated flower.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so, so bees they're eating nectar and pond. You
<v Speaker 1>said the nectar is like the gas, and pollen is more.
<v Speaker 1>What are they doing with the pond? Feeding it to
<v Speaker 1>their young or what they need both those.
<v Speaker 3>Are They are either feeding it to their young or
<v Speaker 3>if they're use social, they're feeding it to their sisters.
<v Speaker 3>And then they're.
<v Speaker 1>The pollen is protein and the nectar is sugar.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, well, that's that's very simplistic nectar, as we now
<v Speaker 3>understand thanks to the late Herbert and Irene Baker of Berkeley, California,
<v Speaker 3>who first started looking at this. Yeah, it's sugar. Nectar
<v Speaker 3>is sugar and water. But it also contains a certain
<v Speaker 3>amount of the vitamins and some amino acids that helps
<v Speaker 3>keep that helps nourish the adult and keeps it alive
<v Speaker 3>maybe for a little bit longer. Pollen, on the other hand,
<v Speaker 3>is depending on the grain, can be anywhere be the
<v Speaker 3>cytoplasm can be anywhere between ten to maybe twenty percent
<v Speaker 3>amino acids and lipids. And as I used to tell
<v Speaker 3>the Australian students, if there's one thing you can't do,
<v Speaker 3>you can't make a baby bee out of sugar and water.
<v Speaker 1>It needs the pollen. Yes, So that's why there's so
<v Speaker 1>that basically gets so since bees are collecting both, you've
<v Speaker 1>got to offer. You can't just offer nectar. You've got
<v Speaker 1>to be producing. So I assume these buzz pollinated flowers
<v Speaker 1>are producing. They're producing more pollen than like a nectar
<v Speaker 1>pollinated flour would be because some of that ponen is
<v Speaker 1>gonna get eaten.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, more pollen and probably more nutritious pollen. Remember the
<v Speaker 3>levels of lipids, levels of fats and proteins in pollen
<v Speaker 3>is going to vary according to plant species.
<v Speaker 1>So some of these plants, I mean not the anthropomorphise here,
<v Speaker 1>but I'm gonna do it anyway. Some of these plants
<v Speaker 1>know that their pollen they've evolved with with you know,
<v Speaker 1>the with it being true that some of that pollen,
<v Speaker 1>well a good half of that pond is probably not
<v Speaker 1>going to serve the intended purpose of pollen, which is
<v Speaker 1>to serve as the male gametophyte of the of the
<v Speaker 1>plant and end up pollinating another, you know, for reproduction
<v Speaker 1>like they've they've evolved with allowing for or I guess
<v Speaker 1>the pollenais are selected for it. Flowers that produce more
<v Speaker 1>pollen than you know, a more abundance of pollen that
<v Speaker 1>is needed.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly, and uh, think about it, this is going to
<v Speaker 3>creep out the audience. Think about it this way. Bees
<v Speaker 3>are sperm eaters, you know it?
<v Speaker 1>I said, wow, do you Well, no, I guess they are,
<v Speaker 1>but not really, because pollen is not analogous to sperm.
<v Speaker 1>Pollend's analogous to like a nut, a scrotal sack of
<v Speaker 1>rinse Well, Rin's previous, Just kidding, Rich's previous has nothing
<v Speaker 1>to do with it. I just wanted to mention because
<v Speaker 1>it's a disgusting.
<v Speaker 3>You want to if you want to get a little
<v Speaker 3>crude or that.
<v Speaker 1>It's a disgusting thought thinking of Rhine's previous as scrown. Anyway, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but you.
<v Speaker 3>Know allimation biologist, I love disgusting.
<v Speaker 1>But hold on, wait, so so bees are eating plant scrotums.
<v Speaker 1>That's a good way you could say that. Well, all right,
<v Speaker 1>is that true? That's correct?
<v Speaker 3>Right? Well, no, in my case, I think of the answer.
<v Speaker 3>It is closer to a scrotum, and I would think
<v Speaker 3>the pollen. I remember, I.
<v Speaker 1>Just wanted to get that on tape. That's all. We're done.
<v Speaker 1>The podcast is over. Let's go. I just I just
<v Speaker 1>that was the whole point of it. Now go on.
<v Speaker 3>Sorry, okay, Well think of what think of of a
<v Speaker 3>pollen grain. What it is? Yes, it's a particle. It is,
<v Speaker 3>it's it has a double wall. The outside is a
<v Speaker 3>natural plastic. It's it's spore a pollen, and it's it's
<v Speaker 3>polymerized vitamin A in the jestible.
<v Speaker 1>But the pollen produces sperm, though the pollen itself is
<v Speaker 1>not analogous to sperm. There's actually plant.
<v Speaker 3>The pollen contains. The pollen grain contains sperm either one
<v Speaker 3>or two. Uh, pollen either one or two sperm cells.
<v Speaker 3>What's inside of a pollen grain is going to be
<v Speaker 3>a number of things. Uh, there's there's cytoplasm. There are
<v Speaker 3>going to be starch bodies which will be converted to
<v Speaker 3>help make the pollen tube later on. And then there's
<v Speaker 3>what we now call the male germline unit, which is
<v Speaker 3>the vegetative cell, which is acting like a little donkey
<v Speaker 3>and and and and is attached to the sperm cell.
<v Speaker 3>So that is what is pushing down the tube and
<v Speaker 3>getting down into the ovary and into the ovule itself.
<v Speaker 1>Right, But the pollen grain is like the nut st
<v Speaker 1>it's not the sperm cell.
<v Speaker 3>Well, you're right, right, it's not the sperm cell. But
<v Speaker 3>when bees or their larva eat a pollen grain, they
<v Speaker 3>are not eating the shell of the nut. They can't
<v Speaker 3>digest that. They're only eating the contents inside, and that
<v Speaker 3>includes the sperm.
<v Speaker 1>But they eat the whole thing though, because they don't
<v Speaker 1>digest the whole thing. You see where I'm going with this.
<v Speaker 1>This is an enlightening conversation, by the way to it.
<v Speaker 1>Hope somebody is listening to this on the speaker at work. Well,
<v Speaker 1>the pollen is like the scrotle sec and the sperm
<v Speaker 1>cell is in there, and we're not even talking about
<v Speaker 1>how uh you know, the the endosperm is triploid. We're
<v Speaker 1>not even talking about that. That's something I just wanted
<v Speaker 1>to put that out there so people know, okay, but
<v Speaker 1>the pollen grains haploid, the sperm cells haploid and h
<v Speaker 1>But this is where it gets confusing though. So a
<v Speaker 1>pollen grain is this little thing is covered with the colpy,
<v Speaker 1>right or it's broken up.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, now we're now talking about we're we're getting very
<v Speaker 3>uh we are, We're going up there, we're going out where,
<v Speaker 3>we are getting micro we're getting microscopic. Now, the pollen
<v Speaker 3>grain has an outer wall and an inner wall. And
<v Speaker 3>but then you have to say, well, how does the
<v Speaker 3>sperm get out? And the answer is the grade has
<v Speaker 3>apertures that they will have anywhere from one to several exits.
<v Speaker 3>These apertures are going to be important. Remember, the pollen
<v Speaker 3>grain is released in a highly high hydrated form, and
<v Speaker 3>if it's lucky enough to add to land on a stigma,
<v Speaker 3>it must rehydrate and that needs fluids have to enter
<v Speaker 3>through the aperture. So in some pollen grains they enter
<v Speaker 3>through slits, whereas in others they enter through plores. Now
<v Speaker 3>you mentioned slits. The slits are referred to as colpy,
<v Speaker 3>and some pollen grades have both pores, and that pores
<v Speaker 3>and colpy at the same.
<v Speaker 1>Copy are like where the seams come together kind of exactly,
<v Speaker 1>and the pores are the actual dots like if you
<v Speaker 1>look up a Google image Church. Okay, So a pollen
<v Speaker 1>grain lands on a stigma and then it germinates, right,
<v Speaker 1>it actually Germany. What happens when it germinates?
<v Speaker 3>Okay, let's go back a notch. It lands on the
<v Speaker 3>stigma in a in a dehydrated state. The first thing
<v Speaker 3>it has to do is take on fluid.
<v Speaker 1>Because pollen is dry. That's why you can freeze pollen.
<v Speaker 3>Right, and it has to take on fluids offered by
<v Speaker 3>the stigma. Okay, it hydrates.
<v Speaker 1>That's why the stigma of plants, like if you look
<v Speaker 1>at Hibiscus thigma, great example, because they're really juicy. That's
<v Speaker 1>why this stigma it looks juicy. It looks in a
<v Speaker 1>lot of cases depending on what species you're looking at.
<v Speaker 1>You look at a stigma of a flower, it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of wet and like you know, got a certain texture
<v Speaker 1>to it in many cases.
<v Speaker 3>Right, So it's taken on fluids, it's taken on water,
<v Speaker 3>it's taken on a certain amount of sugar, it's probably
<v Speaker 3>taken on certain enzymes, and its next response is to
<v Speaker 3>produce a pollen tube, which usually means breaking down the
<v Speaker 3>starch granules inside the grain and that they are converted
<v Speaker 3>into a structure into a tube that is made out
<v Speaker 3>of sporal pollen. That's the that is that is the
<v Speaker 3>primary component of of a pollen tube. Ah, now we've
<v Speaker 3>got a tube. Now we have a way for the
<v Speaker 3>male germline unit, the vegetative cell, and the one or
<v Speaker 3>two sperm cells to escape. Some pollen grains only start
<v Speaker 3>with one sperm cell, but by the time they get
<v Speaker 3>into the tube, the sperm cell divides into two. The
<v Speaker 3>pollen tube pushes its way into the stigma, into the style,
<v Speaker 3>and makes its way down into the ovary, but it
<v Speaker 3>doesn't usually grow as a continuous unit. It starts and stops.
<v Speaker 3>It starts and stops.
<v Speaker 1>But it's only one cell. The pollen tube is still
<v Speaker 1>only one cell.
<v Speaker 3>Right, The pollen tube is technically not a cell at all.
<v Speaker 3>It has the cells of a male germaline unit inside.
<v Speaker 3>The pollen tube is simply just the tube mate out
<v Speaker 3>of spoora pollenin that was made by the interior of
<v Speaker 3>the pollen grain.
<v Speaker 1>But the important part is it's sending down two sperms
<v Speaker 1>for double fertilization. One that pollinates the avule, fertilize the ovule,
<v Speaker 1>and the other what is the other one?
<v Speaker 3>No, no, no, no, joey, joey. One pollinates the egg cell.
<v Speaker 1>The egg cell, the other that's what I made, the
<v Speaker 1>egg cell in the ovule. I'm sorry, you're right, right,
<v Speaker 1>And the other does what what's the other one doing?
<v Speaker 1>This is what I mentioned before. What's the other one doing?
<v Speaker 3>Its two polar cells that have fused together. It unites
<v Speaker 3>with them. You get a triploid cell and this begins
<v Speaker 3>to in most cases, not orchids. Doesn't happen in orchids. Uh.
<v Speaker 3>These cells go through fast biosis and this because sorry,
<v Speaker 3>not myosis. They go on, they go through fast mitosis.
<v Speaker 3>And this is this is what induces the food story.
<v Speaker 1>Endosperm endo little lunch box that goes with the seed,
<v Speaker 1>like in a bean you have, right.
<v Speaker 3>Well, no, actually, here's something. Do you realize beans do
<v Speaker 3>not have an endosperm. Do you know what happens? The
<v Speaker 3>endom is absorbed by the two condoleans.
<v Speaker 1>Right, that masses. So when you're eating a bean, you're
<v Speaker 1>eating the catilets.
<v Speaker 3>Right exactly. Uh, it's just it's just different. In different seeds.
<v Speaker 3>In some the the the In some the cadilebans are
<v Speaker 3>thin and wing like, and they're just there for photosynthesis.
<v Speaker 3>Shortly thereafter. In the case of peas and beans, though,
<v Speaker 3>they absorb the nutrients that are produced by the endosperm,
<v Speaker 3>and that is why they are so fleshy and why
<v Speaker 3>they're so good for us.
<v Speaker 1>Wait wait, wait said it again? What is so? What's
<v Speaker 1>why is it?
<v Speaker 3>Why?
<v Speaker 1>Why is it fleshing good for Because you're eating the cattleedens.
<v Speaker 3>You're eating the nutrients made by the endosperm that were
<v Speaker 3>transferred to the contileedans. You have nice fat contileedans full
<v Speaker 3>of amino acids and carbohydrates. And that's what we're eating.
<v Speaker 3>When you eat a bean, when you have chile con carni,
<v Speaker 3>the beans are, in fact, the cottonleedens are packed with
<v Speaker 3>all of the nutrients that were made originally by the endosperm.
<v Speaker 3>It's different when we get canola oil, on the other hand,
<v Speaker 3>that is made of the oils that have been rendered
<v Speaker 3>from the endosperm inside the seed.
<v Speaker 1>So okay, so, But the point is is that pollen
<v Speaker 1>grain still leads to germinate when it gets una statement
<v Speaker 1>heeds to German and that that pollen tube comes out
<v Speaker 1>where where it comes out of.
<v Speaker 3>The poor or it comes out of one of the apictures.
<v Speaker 3>It will either come out of a poor or it'll
<v Speaker 3>come out of a slit that we call.
<v Speaker 1>A copus APUs copy.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, and the plural is copy.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how we get I don't know how
<v Speaker 1>we got it where we talked we oh, we forgot
<v Speaker 1>to mention though too. The Australian Acacia trees, for example,
<v Speaker 1>don't produce any nectar.
<v Speaker 3>Well, their flowers do not produce any nectar.
<v Speaker 1>Right, But they've they've got there's a lot of extra
<v Speaker 1>floral nectaries. The flowers don't produce nectar, right.
<v Speaker 3>The Australian acasias are extremely interesting, and I've watched this
<v Speaker 3>over a period of years. We've dissected the flowers of
<v Speaker 3>hundreds of species. There is no nectar gland, which is
<v Speaker 3>unlike the African accasions, which certainly do make nectar. The
<v Speaker 3>floorrets of a of an Australian occasion therefore make no nectar,
<v Speaker 3>but the plant itself does make nectar. They have extra
<v Speaker 3>floral glands, either on their leaves or on their photosynthetic
<v Speaker 3>branches you can known as pyloads, and this is what
<v Speaker 3>attracts parasitic wasps and ants which do protect the plants
<v Speaker 3>while they are in bloom or setting fruit from from
<v Speaker 3>a chewing and sucking pests. I saw this years ago
<v Speaker 3>in the Grampians. It was like something out of a
<v Speaker 3>out of a movie. I was working on the pollination
<v Speaker 3>of Acacia retinidies the wilda and one day I was
<v Speaker 3>watching what was going on on the filloads itself and
<v Speaker 3>there was a skipjack ant. Now we know about a
<v Speaker 3>certain Australian ants. They're highly predatory. They will have the workers,
<v Speaker 3>will have stingers. And it had found chewing away on
<v Speaker 3>a filload was a little green inch worm, a little geometron,
<v Speaker 3>and I watched that ant grab the caterpillar with its
<v Speaker 3>pincers and then the ant sort of stood up on
<v Speaker 3>its hind legs, took the stigure on its ad and
<v Speaker 3>it rammed the body of the caterpillar, which went limp,
<v Speaker 3>and it just picked it up and walked away with it.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder if it ate it or just dumped it
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 3>Uh No, I'm sure it probably took it back to
<v Speaker 3>the nest and they ate it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but the extra floral nectaries, I mean you can
<v Speaker 1>see these on a lot of these, I mean on
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the legooms like Caama Crysla produces extra
<v Speaker 1>floral nectaries, which is a native North American genus, But
<v Speaker 1>you could see them. It looks like a little oval,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it stands out if you look closely at it.
<v Speaker 1>But I didn't. I've seen it in a I forget
<v Speaker 1>what species of acacia it was. I think it was
<v Speaker 1>in Tasmania somewhere, but I saw it on uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>this is like a ruterol plant, Like what are the
<v Speaker 1>pioneer species of acacias? The ones that just grow on
<v Speaker 1>the roadside, And I remember seeing it. It wasn't on
<v Speaker 1>the the philos though, it was on the just like
<v Speaker 1>right on the stem.
<v Speaker 3>Right. There are some that have typical leg you b
<v Speaker 3>b tennate leaves and you will find the gland on
<v Speaker 3>the on the pedosal towards uh, towards its base.
<v Speaker 1>But the flowers, I mean, the flowers are just producing pollen.
<v Speaker 1>So they're just producing extra amounts of pollen for pen
<v Speaker 1>collecting bees. There's no nectar in the flowers.
<v Speaker 3>Bees also surface flies and certain flower beetles.
<v Speaker 1>Oh you know what, we forgot to mention what we're
<v Speaker 1>talking about. Orchids too. Is another method they use to
<v Speaker 1>do pollonaires is mimicking the prey of predatory things like
<v Speaker 1>hoverflies or wasps. Like the epipactus. It does that. I
<v Speaker 1>know that's not Australian, but still it's another method.
<v Speaker 3>Well, that's a very very interesting species complex. My co
<v Speaker 3>worker in China, Zumzingren, has worked on this. Almost Daphni
<v Speaker 3>in Israel, who is still with us, did some of
<v Speaker 3>the initial work on this. And yes, the labellum looks
<v Speaker 3>like a little produces little bumps. That the that the
<v Speaker 3>pollinators normally wasps mistake for aphians or in fact, no
<v Speaker 3>it's not wasps. The major pollinators are surfed flies. People
<v Speaker 3>don't realize about surfed flies. They're so interesting because the
<v Speaker 3>adults eat pollen and nectar.
<v Speaker 1>Wait, Peter, I don't think most people. I don't think
<v Speaker 1>most people realize there's more than one kind of fly,
<v Speaker 1>especially that in this cunt. I mean, we're such a it,
<v Speaker 1>we're such a you know, paucity of science education in
<v Speaker 1>this country. But but what are surfed flies? Tell people?
<v Speaker 1>What they are? Surf a A S Y R P
<v Speaker 1>H I D A E. Hoverflies. And then this is
<v Speaker 1>why I would get into entomology. That is why I
<v Speaker 1>got the entomology book, because it's got everything by so
<v Speaker 1>surfeit is a family. I want to know all the
<v Speaker 1>different families of flies, not just the ship flies.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, surfoed flies are often brightly colored. They off people
<v Speaker 3>mistake them for bees because they have a maybe have
<v Speaker 3>abandoned abdomen. But surfoed flies have predatory maggots. They eat
<v Speaker 3>other insects, and their favorite food is aphids and mealy
<v Speaker 3>bugs because they feel let's be honest, those insect those
<v Speaker 3>aphids and melli bugs don't get around very much. They
<v Speaker 3>can't run away. There.
<v Speaker 1>I want to mention this too, because this is what
<v Speaker 1>this is another thing that pisses me off. When people
<v Speaker 1>just have a hatred of plants and want to clear
<v Speaker 1>everything and put up lawn is you've got. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>here's a family of flies that literally eats the negative
<v Speaker 1>insects that most people, you know, the pest insects that
<v Speaker 1>really pet you know, really harm a lot of crop
<v Speaker 1>plants or horticulture, but whatever, and most people don't even
<v Speaker 1>know these things exist. And don't you know so when
<v Speaker 1>they take a fucking insect fogger to their yard. I
<v Speaker 1>can't believe you can even still buy those things that
<v Speaker 1>like home despot and insect foger. You just wipe out everything.
<v Speaker 1>These are some of the things you want around that
<v Speaker 1>you're wiping out when you anyway, keep sorry, go on.
<v Speaker 1>I just people don't even know what's out there. That's
<v Speaker 1>what drives me nuts, man.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, go ahead, Well let's get back to epipak. This
<v Speaker 3>also known as the helberine orchids. And yes, some of
<v Speaker 3>not all. Some epipactus orchids just make nectar and they
<v Speaker 3>have a normal lobellum and they don't have these little
<v Speaker 3>dark bumps on them. Others have make nectar and they
<v Speaker 3>they have these dark bumps. So they get the pregnant
<v Speaker 3>surfing flies that come in mistake drink some nectar. But
<v Speaker 3>then they mistake the bumps for the uh for the aphens,
<v Speaker 3>and they will lay their eggs on them. The maggots
<v Speaker 3>hatch out and since there isn't any prey food, they
<v Speaker 3>starved to them. But in China, because Reren has worked
<v Speaker 3>on this, there's an intermediate to this, the orchid once
<v Speaker 3>again makes bumps, It makes nectar, but it is also
<v Speaker 3>infested by aphids. Yes, aphids will suck anything after all,
<v Speaker 3>Maybe I shouldn't have put it that way, but anyway,
<v Speaker 3>what happens is the fly comes, drinks nectar, lays its
<v Speaker 3>eggs on it. But when the maggot hatches out, it
<v Speaker 3>doesn't starve to death. It simply eats the aphids that
<v Speaker 3>are on the orchid.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, but what happens if the pollinator doesn't show up,
<v Speaker 1>then the aphids just murked the organ flower.
<v Speaker 3>Too bad for that for that year.
<v Speaker 1>So this, this orchid really needs the flowers or the
<v Speaker 1>pollinators around, not just to pollinate it, but also to
<v Speaker 1>prevent the aphids that it attracts from eating the whole flower.
<v Speaker 3>Right at least that seems to be the story at
<v Speaker 3>this at this level, and more research has to be done. Now,
<v Speaker 3>let's look at another case of what the orchid is providing.
<v Speaker 3>Certain orchids are not making are are They're not sex mimics,
<v Speaker 3>they're not food mimics. They are not making any reward.
<v Speaker 3>They are not making any edible reward. This takes us
<v Speaker 3>to the Helbert orchids in the genus coriubus. Once again,
<v Speaker 3>we've done a little work on this. We've looked at
<v Speaker 3>the Chinese species, and we've looked at and Rudy has
<v Speaker 3>looked at the Australian species. Rudy thinks that the that
<v Speaker 3>the helmet orcans are making subjector of their of their labellum.
<v Speaker 3>Their primary pollinators are fungus mats. These orchids bloom at
<v Speaker 3>a time of year in uh usually late winter in Australia,
<v Speaker 3>in which fungal hiphie are very active and growing in
<v Speaker 3>the in the to try this layer. In Australia, on
<v Speaker 3>the other hand, sorry not not notssarily. In China, on
<v Speaker 3>the other hand, we have a couple of coribus which
<v Speaker 3>do not make nectar, but they are still being visited
<v Speaker 3>by male and female fungus mats. We originally thought, as
<v Speaker 3>everyone did, that the coribus, since they look a little
<v Speaker 3>bit like a mushroom, they were mimicking mushrooms and producing
<v Speaker 3>odors like mushrooms. Turns out the odor is not a
<v Speaker 3>mushroom mimic. Our friend Robert Raguso in Cornell who is
<v Speaker 3>still with us, do we know rob has studied mushroom
<v Speaker 3>mimicry in South America with another group of orchids, and
<v Speaker 3>he makes a point, you have to have certain types
<v Speaker 3>of compounds made by the orchid that are also made
<v Speaker 3>by the mushroom, the mushrooms around it. Uh. The conabus
<v Speaker 3>in China don't seem to do this. What we seem
<v Speaker 3>to have then is a temporary shack, a little motel
<v Speaker 3>room for the for the fungusnts to stay in.
<v Speaker 1>So temporarily traps.
<v Speaker 3>No, there's no trap. It's it's just a little shelter.
<v Speaker 3>The the fungusnts go in and stay there for a
<v Speaker 3>while for for whatever reason that they don't lay eggs
<v Speaker 3>in it. They don't mainten it. Uh, it's a bed,
<v Speaker 3>but there's no breakfast. And eventually they emerge. Of course
<v Speaker 3>when they exit they hit the orchids. Guy nos themium
<v Speaker 3>and the Polindia drops on their back. That will be
<v Speaker 3>in the book Caribus.
<v Speaker 1>I remember, Yeah, I've seen those in uh were this
<v Speaker 1>all is a New Zealand tesman. What is the there's
<v Speaker 1>another there's a what is the what is the genus
<v Speaker 1>of It's a little orchid and it looks it smells
<v Speaker 1>like hell. It's in South Africa. I have to pull
<v Speaker 1>up the name, but it's it's a little it's it's
<v Speaker 1>stinks like hell, and it's pollinated by flies.
<v Speaker 3>But could it be what could it be one of
<v Speaker 3>the theesus they have, They have so many different colors
<v Speaker 3>and shapes and and and no.
<v Speaker 1>It was uh no, I got home. Let me pull
<v Speaker 1>up the name. God, it was hilarious. This is gonna.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna definitely be putting us in a book just
<v Speaker 1>because it's it was. I mean, the thing has a
<v Speaker 1>it smells like a bathroom. It's yes, setrium pumilum, and
<v Speaker 1>it's the flower looks like a little mouth too. It's hilarious.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know about one that sounds like that. Sounds
<v Speaker 3>like something that Steve Johnson must have studied.
<v Speaker 1>The columnist man.
<v Speaker 3>He works on the orchards of South Africa and he's
<v Speaker 3>still with us.
<v Speaker 1>So a lot a lot of these fly pollinated flowers too,
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk about have this kind of modeling.
<v Speaker 1>It's a convergent trait that a lot of fly pollinated
<v Speaker 1>flowers converge on whether it's you know, members of the
<v Speaker 1>sleepy ad you know in South Africa, like the hoodias
<v Speaker 1>or or Stapelias and then aristolochia. You know, does a
<v Speaker 1>lot of the aristolochia flowers have this speckling, this like
<v Speaker 1>purple speckling and modeling, which I assume how is that
<v Speaker 1>a visual attracted the flies? It just looks like rotting
<v Speaker 1>fruit or rotting meat. I mean it's it's implying rot
<v Speaker 1>the mahogany color and then the speckling.
<v Speaker 3>You've answered your own question. They it will look like
<v Speaker 3>what the flies either tend to feed on or lay
<v Speaker 3>their eggs. And of course the one everybody knows is
<v Speaker 3>the starfish flour, the stapelia. A lot of people have it.
<v Speaker 3>It smells awful like rotting flesh, and yet it's it's
<v Speaker 3>a dozen of our own milk weeds. And it goes
<v Speaker 3>further than that. This is something the bakers have to
<v Speaker 3>have a look at. The The nectar that the Staphelia
<v Speaker 3>is produced is extremely rich in amino acids as a
<v Speaker 3>piece of a fresh dung wood. So in this case
<v Speaker 3>it's giving the fly, the obopositing fly, some of the
<v Speaker 3>nutrients that would normally get from freshly dropped done mm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of the amorpho fellas do that as well.
<v Speaker 1>I mean they smell terrible. Some of the aeroids, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the ammorphal feci.
<v Speaker 3>I don't think that. I don't think the abor for
<v Speaker 3>Pholus produces vector.
<v Speaker 1>But I have doesn't. It just smells like absolute health.
<v Speaker 1>It smells like a dead possum and it's.
<v Speaker 3>Got But it gets a lot of tourists to the
<v Speaker 3>Missouri Botanical Garden when it flowers.
<v Speaker 1>Well, titanum does. But even there's little ones you could
<v Speaker 1>just grow in the landscape, you know, like that will.
<v Speaker 1>What about Arisima? What's what's hitting the arissima?
<v Speaker 3>Oh? Yeah, where we're talking about lords and the ladies.
<v Speaker 3>I used that I tried to grow. I kept them
<v Speaker 3>for a couple of seasons. The beautiful Japanese rice cake
<v Speaker 3>flower that's arthmuscchi anam. I don't really know very much.
<v Speaker 3>There is a botanist in Japan who get soup. People
<v Speaker 3>need to look up his papers. He is a pistol.
<v Speaker 3>He has been producing a lot of fine work lately,
<v Speaker 3>and he tends to specialize in the little fly and
<v Speaker 3>that pollinated species, aroids and orchids and other things that
<v Speaker 3>are part of the shady woodland flora of Japan.
<v Speaker 1>Arisima triphylum also known as Jack in a pulpit in
<v Speaker 1>the Midwest. I mean, this is a this is you know,
<v Speaker 1>this is like in the forest preserves in Chicago where
<v Speaker 1>they haven't been ruined by buckthorn is pollinated primarily by
<v Speaker 1>fungus gnats, which makes sense. I mean, it's got that,
<v Speaker 1>it's certainly got the coloration for it, but that's definitely
<v Speaker 1>a trademark. You know, it's one of the things. You
<v Speaker 1>can look at a flower that's got that speckled modeling
<v Speaker 1>on it, and you know it's some kind of diptery,
<v Speaker 1>it's some kind of fly that's hitten.
<v Speaker 3>As I understand, it is the only known plant on
<v Speaker 3>the planet that kills its pollinators and it works like
<v Speaker 3>Jack and the pulpit. So it's got a much nicer
<v Speaker 3>name compared to what it does. As I understand that
<v Speaker 3>it's dioecious. There are males and females, so it'll in
<v Speaker 3>in the What happens here is that the fungus, the
<v Speaker 3>fungus mats go to a male one, uh and they
<v Speaker 3>are released the following day carrying the pollen. But when
<v Speaker 3>they get to a female one, they enter and are
<v Speaker 3>never allowed to leave.
<v Speaker 1>So okay, So there. I don't how are they never
<v Speaker 1>allowed to leave? How does this tra how does it
<v Speaker 1>trap them in there?
<v Speaker 3>It has something to do with the architecture of the
<v Speaker 3>space and spadix. They are trapped inside once they go
<v Speaker 3>in there. Now, once again, I'm not familiar with the paper.
<v Speaker 3>Once again, you need to go to an arithmus specialist.
<v Speaker 3>I know Susan Redder at the University of Missouri and
<v Speaker 3>Saint Louis was interested in this at one point, and
<v Speaker 3>of course Shugets who has found this in some of
<v Speaker 3>the arismas in Japan.
<v Speaker 1>That's okay, So why would it Why would it kill
<v Speaker 1>It can't be a constant thing. It can't. It's not
<v Speaker 1>like it always kills him.
<v Speaker 3>It's probably joey in this case because the fungus that
<v Speaker 3>is carrying the pollen of the male plant, it is
<v Speaker 3>not selective for the female to allow its female plant
<v Speaker 3>to allow it to leave. It's gotta stay there, bag around,
<v Speaker 3>try to escape and hit the stake of it.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. So Arasima Arisima trophylum is dioecious. The plants are
<v Speaker 1>their male or female, whereas in a lot of orchids
<v Speaker 1>they'll be proto protogenists. They're like their bisexual inflorescent device,
<v Speaker 1>but the female flowers go off first and then the Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so okay, well shit, I didn't. That puts a whole
<v Speaker 1>new spin on this. So this.
<v Speaker 3>It's relatively new. And yes it is a fly trap,
<v Speaker 3>but nothing is eaten. It's uh, it's simply a case.
<v Speaker 3>Then you've got the the the fly is carrying the
<v Speaker 3>pollen that the plant needs. It is not selective for
<v Speaker 3>the for the inflorescence to allow it to escape.
<v Speaker 1>Because if they I mean, why wouldn't it just temporarily
<v Speaker 1>trap them like the mail plants.
<v Speaker 3>Do uh, to ensure deposition of pollen on the stigma.
<v Speaker 3>Remember it's at random. The fungus that isn't looking for
<v Speaker 3>a stigma. It's just an obstacle in its way. It's
<v Speaker 3>trying to get out.
<v Speaker 1>You know this, this trapping your pollinators thing is what
<v Speaker 1>families do this. We got the orchid ac does it?
<v Speaker 1>The air roids do it? Air ac? I guess the
<v Speaker 1>milk weeds technically trapped they can trap, uh. You know
<v Speaker 1>pollinators like stigmatic Sarahpgia does two, Aristolochias do aristokiac reflec
<v Speaker 1>does two? Doesn't it?
<v Speaker 3>Yep?
<v Speaker 1>And uh, some gasnriads as well.
<v Speaker 3>And something people should know about the the milk weeds,
<v Speaker 3>the asclepias that they like, they name that a lot
<v Speaker 3>number of the name they're they're they're pollinators. It's not deliberate.
<v Speaker 3>But when Retha and I worked on asclepias needy eye
<v Speaker 3>that needs milk.
<v Speaker 1>Weed, Yeah, the rare one, right, super rare.
<v Speaker 3>We found that at least ten percent of the honeybees,
<v Speaker 3>which are not anywhere from ten to twenty percent of
<v Speaker 3>the honey bees which are not the date of pollen
<v Speaker 3>of course, would lose a leg when they were trapped
<v Speaker 3>temporarily and trying to yank out the the pollen area.
<v Speaker 1>Right, it looks like that sexy leg lamp that the
<v Speaker 1>dad brought home for the living room in a Christmas story.
<v Speaker 1>You'll see like a little wasp blast wasp pre stuck
<v Speaker 1>in It's pretty funny.
<v Speaker 3>I love that movie.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but like the wasp still makes it up, or
<v Speaker 1>that the bee still makes it up, but then the
<v Speaker 1>leg is stuck in there. But that's not how it's
<v Speaker 1>that's not intended, that's not intentional.
<v Speaker 3>It's not intentional, but that's what happens. I presume when
<v Speaker 3>when remember honey bees did not evolve with milk weeds.
<v Speaker 3>Milk weeds are North American, honey bees are are Eurasian.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, serves them right coming over here. And I'm
<v Speaker 1>just okay, I man. I when I was in Ecuador,
<v Speaker 1>God damn, there were so many gazneriads. I did a
<v Speaker 1>podcast with John Clark, who studies them fun guys too,
<v Speaker 1>really really funny human being. But uh yeah, I didn't.
<v Speaker 1>I had no context yet. I wish man, that's a
<v Speaker 1>weird family. They're everywhere too, super abundant in the trans
<v Speaker 1>I understand.
<v Speaker 3>There there is a tree Gasnaria. I don't remember the
<v Speaker 3>name of the genus. It was named after a Greek queen.
<v Speaker 3>Now I'd have to look it up in one of
<v Speaker 3>my books. It's I know it's in my I've forgotten that.
<v Speaker 3>That was in Gods and Goddesses in the Garden.
<v Speaker 1>How many have you? How many books you got? Four?
<v Speaker 1>Three not including the one you just wrote.
<v Speaker 3>Well single author books, it's four and of course the
<v Speaker 3>fifth one is out next year. But also remember I
<v Speaker 3>did the biology of missiletoes with Falcon Colder. That was
<v Speaker 3>back in the eighties. And of course Reathan I and
<v Speaker 3>twenty something other authors. We did, and it's still available
<v Speaker 3>from University of Chicka Iago Press. That's Darwin's Orchids.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, wait, hold on the hold on, because my attention
<v Speaker 1>span will limit. How many is that total? Four?
<v Speaker 3>Uh? If it's four in which I'm a single author
<v Speaker 3>and it's meant to be popular, bot me.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 3>But the more technical books which I co edited and
<v Speaker 3>co wrote. There was the Biology of Missiletoes with Malcolm
<v Speaker 3>Calder and with Retha edens Meyer. Uh we did as
<v Speaker 3>co editors and co authors. That's Darwin's Orchids Then and Now,
<v Speaker 3>and that's from University of Chicago Press.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Well, what are the two pop science books that
<v Speaker 1>readers couldn't could enjoyed? It could find the Wiley Violence
<v Speaker 1>Underground Orchids. And what's the other one?
<v Speaker 3>Well? There? Uh?
<v Speaker 1>Kiss is that it?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah? The roses kiss is basically my fake and my
<v Speaker 3>a basic introduction to pollination biology. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>Here, the triegisniad species is Strepto Streptocarpus sexorum. And there's
<v Speaker 1>another one called Colliria.
<v Speaker 3>There's another one. Yeah, yeah, but really, the differences in
<v Speaker 3>sizes of the plants in the gasniods is really extraordinary.
<v Speaker 3>You've got those little micro uh, you've got those those
<v Speaker 3>little micro gasniods in which the the the flower is
<v Speaker 3>in fact, when it does blue is bigger than the
<v Speaker 3>entire plant. And then of course you got the the
<v Speaker 3>tree gasniods. It's it's it's really amazing.
<v Speaker 1>Then they're all fucking Herey, there's a lot of epiphytes
<v Speaker 1>abundant in the tropics, order Lamey a leaves, so they
<v Speaker 1>got zygomorphic, bilaterally symmetrical, just the fancy way to say
<v Speaker 1>biletter symmetrical flowers. Like a lot of like I think
<v Speaker 1>like eighty or ninety percent of the members of of
<v Speaker 1>Lamey Ailey's the orders.
<v Speaker 3>I remember, Yeah, I remember them from my Peace Corps
<v Speaker 3>days at El Salvador. You found them. You found little
<v Speaker 3>members of the genus Achimenes. Beautiful where you had a
<v Speaker 3>natural seep going through some of the old lava boulders,
<v Speaker 3>they would colonize that and you would they would make like,
<v Speaker 3>oh these these they would grow in these little patterns
<v Speaker 3>along the cracks and the seep.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I saw a bunch in Dominican Republic. I've seen
<v Speaker 1>a few in uh southern Mexico in the wetter areas,
<v Speaker 1>and then yet a ton of Ecuador. Of a god,
<v Speaker 1>they're so weirdt lots of them are the one A
<v Speaker 1>lot of ones I was seeing in Ecuador. Califfloris too,
<v Speaker 1>so they just flower right out of the stem. I'm
<v Speaker 1>still processing, Equador, I need ive, got videos to edit.
<v Speaker 1>I'm trying to get this other book done. Well, I
<v Speaker 1>think we I think we did it. That was good.
<v Speaker 1>It's like two and two and a half hours, so
<v Speaker 1>good Lord, Well, thank you well. I was ranting for
<v Speaker 1>a while. I guess you and I are like an
<v Speaker 1>hour and a half. But thanks for be willing to talk.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to call you up and have you on
<v Speaker 1>here again, and I've been wanting to do it for
<v Speaker 1>like a year. I just the timing isn't pretty, but.
<v Speaker 3>I'm still I'm still hoping you'll get through Saint Louis
<v Speaker 3>again on either April or May, because I would really
<v Speaker 3>really like you. But since you're so passionate about geology,
<v Speaker 3>I would love to get you to the Shaw Nature Reserve,
<v Speaker 3>which is owned by the Missouri Botantical Garden. I want
<v Speaker 3>to introduce you to be what what must be one
<v Speaker 3>of the biggest limestone glades in all of the all
<v Speaker 3>of the Midwest, and you can see the flora growing on.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, I'm gonna make it out there at some point.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 1>There were there were some mobile people at this conference
<v Speaker 1>I was speaking at last weekend and they were mentioning Shah.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, I'll make it out there at some point.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, and I'll be I'll be stopping by to
<v Speaker 1>see you as well. Anyway, So yeah, I think I
<v Speaker 1>might have a bury Specimens to drop off their two again,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but anyway, Pete, thanks a lot. Thanks,
<v Speaker 1>I really appreciate this as always, my dear friend. And yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'm stoked to look at your books. So what's the
<v Speaker 1>name of your book? The new one coming out again?
<v Speaker 3>Once again the it doesn't have a set name, It
<v Speaker 3>only has a working title. The working title was are
<v Speaker 3>still is Unloved Pollinators and their Flowers with a subtitle
<v Speaker 3>more than the Birds and the Bees. But I think
<v Speaker 3>my editor wants to make a change, and I'm he
<v Speaker 3>knows the Australian audience better than I do, and I'm
<v Speaker 3>not going to argue.
<v Speaker 1>So study study Unloved Pollinators or I'll club you with
<v Speaker 1>something heavy and rusty. Okay, all right man, Well, thanks
<v Speaker 1>a lot, and everybody else have a grocery to go
<v Speaker 1>for examply