Trans-Pecos Botany with Dr Mike Powell

<v Speaker 1>Okay, welcome to the crime page, but Bodany doesn't podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I'm here today with the Texas botany legend, doctor Michael Powell,
<v Speaker 1>curator of the Soul Ross or Barium and uh botanist
<v Speaker 1>in Texas. How long have you been doing botany in Texas?
<v Speaker 1>Fifty years, sixty.
<v Speaker 2>Years, sixty some odd years?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so a long time, A long time.
<v Speaker 1>You've seen it, you've seen it all. Just come a
<v Speaker 1>little bit closer to my Okay, so, uh, yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>guess in that time, So you start when did you start? Then?
<v Speaker 1>That would be like early sixties, mid sixties.
<v Speaker 2>In nineteen sixty three, I guess is when I came
<v Speaker 2>to soul Ross. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And how what brought you to West Texas.
<v Speaker 2>Baseball?
<v Speaker 1>Oh? Really? Is that what you is? That what you
<v Speaker 1>came to Suwaros for?
<v Speaker 2>That's right?
<v Speaker 1>Uh? And what made the what made you switch to bodany?
<v Speaker 1>What made you say I'm gonna do this instead? This
<v Speaker 1>is more interesting?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I was a majoring in physical education as an
<v Speaker 2>athlete playing basketball and baseball, and I took a class
<v Speaker 2>and plant tax on me under Barton Warnock. So that
<v Speaker 2>was to me, that was amazing learning about the plants,
<v Speaker 2>and all, and so that changed everything for me. So
<v Speaker 2>I decided to change my major and then get a
<v Speaker 2>master's degree right away, and then luckily I was asked
<v Speaker 2>to go get a pH d after that.
<v Speaker 1>So a single teacher pretty much kind of influenced.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, teacher did. Yeah, he actually influenced several people before me.
<v Speaker 1>That's amazing.
<v Speaker 2>Go into botany.
<v Speaker 1>I wish so many more people were doing that. Switching atics. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'll offence to athletics, but I think one's a lot
<v Speaker 1>more menthally rewarding. One feels a lot more mentally rewarding.
<v Speaker 1>So what was it about? Because Barton Warnock's a well
<v Speaker 1>known name in West Texas, Bondney too, what was it
<v Speaker 1>about him that made you switch?
<v Speaker 2>He was enthusiastic and went in the field all the time.
<v Speaker 2>He took students with him, especially me. I got to
<v Speaker 2>go with him. Marshall Johnston was here at the same
<v Speaker 2>time too, and he's a you know, he was a
<v Speaker 2>co author of the Manual of the Vascular Plants of
<v Speaker 2>Texas and a famous botanists and so anyway, I had
<v Speaker 2>had all of that those people to go to and
<v Speaker 2>cultivate your interests going in the field to me was
<v Speaker 2>amazing and learning species.
<v Speaker 1>Well was it just interacting with the land and.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly. And the topography here was something I never forgot,
<v Speaker 2>the Schwallon desert country. And then I just love to
<v Speaker 2>climb mountains and that sort of thing, and find new plants.
<v Speaker 1>In the endemics too, a ton of endemics out here,
<v Speaker 1>or plants that this is the only place in the
<v Speaker 1>United States that they grow. The rest of the populations
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico and back then too, I would imagine a
<v Speaker 1>lot of these species were not even named yet, right,
<v Speaker 1>This was kind of.
<v Speaker 2>This was the least investigated by home in North America.
<v Speaker 2>And then the Swaman Desert region anyway, and we're in
<v Speaker 2>the northern Schwaman Desert region here. Of course, most of
<v Speaker 2>it is in Mexico. As you know. The diversity was
<v Speaker 2>something else. Geological diversity is what fosters plant diversity. So
<v Speaker 2>this is the most diverse, biologically diverse biome in North America.
<v Speaker 2>It's Schwamann Deesert region.
<v Speaker 1>See the geology. You've got limestone which is prevalent all
<v Speaker 1>throughout Texas, remnants out of western Interior seaway, which is
<v Speaker 1>like early Cretaceous, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's early Cretaceous.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and then you've got much younger volcanics and you
<v Speaker 1>get different casts of plant species on both those. There's
<v Speaker 1>a couple that will grow on both. But then there's
<v Speaker 1>so many limestone endemics too.
<v Speaker 2>The other endemics as well. Of course, through geological evolution,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of other kinds of exposures were formed, Like
<v Speaker 2>the gypsum exposure became a big deal for me. Oh
<v Speaker 2>yeah in the late nineteen sixties, starting about then, and
<v Speaker 2>this is a wonderful gypsum place here into Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, all the way from Albuquerque down into Nuevo Leone.
<v Speaker 1>I mean the gypsummism I didn't really become familiar with
<v Speaker 1>until maybe twenty nineteen.
<v Speaker 2>It goes farther in Mexico than Uev Leone too, and
<v Speaker 2>into San Luis bodesee Zakitacus.
<v Speaker 1>Were you going down to Mexico a lot?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, a lot, yes, mostly in other kinds of pursuits
<v Speaker 2>at the time. Monographing composite genera is what I was doing.
<v Speaker 1>So Asta RASI especially was your specialty. I know you
<v Speaker 1>worked on paridally for a while. What was it about,
<v Speaker 1>And we'll get to that later, But what was it
<v Speaker 1>about Asta Raci that really struck you? Because it's a
<v Speaker 1>family that, as you know, you taught botany, so many
<v Speaker 1>students are just like nah, but when you really learn
<v Speaker 1>about it, it's utterly fascinating.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. It's the largest family of flowering plants, of course.
<v Speaker 2>And that's where I started at UT. My PhD assignment
<v Speaker 2>was a Mexican a monograph of Mexican genus that was
<v Speaker 2>extended into South America. But that's where it got started,
<v Speaker 2>and my major professor had a an NSF grant to
<v Speaker 2>do chromosome numbers and do other kinds of studies and
<v Speaker 2>Asta race It turns out that there were other centers
<v Speaker 2>for Asta racey studies at the same time in California,
<v Speaker 2>at the Smithsonian for example, so they were all doing
<v Speaker 2>chromosome numbers. So anyway, that's what I did in Mexico
<v Speaker 2>was do my tried as collecting field investigations, and at
<v Speaker 2>the same time I was collecting plants for my major professor,
<v Speaker 2>bl Turner.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, I want to talk about him too, because
<v Speaker 1>he's another name. I mean, yeah, all these names, Warnock, Turner, Powell.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, when people think of wests, you know, United
<v Speaker 1>states Chiuhaiwan does her botany, your name comes up like
<v Speaker 1>you're famous, man, you are so, but yeah, deservedly so so.
<v Speaker 1>But let's talk about the chromosome work, because you were
<v Speaker 1>doing botany at a time before the advent the PCR
<v Speaker 1>and and all the molecular work that's being done now,
<v Speaker 1>which must have been hard. I mean, that's I think
<v Speaker 1>back to those times, like no GPS, no molecular work,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, and you guys were still going out there,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, no digital cameras too, like you had. I
<v Speaker 1>remember seeing a picture of Barton Warnock with like an
<v Speaker 1>old school film camera, and I just I can't imagine
<v Speaker 1>what that must have been. Like I'll take twenty photos
<v Speaker 1>of the same plant sometimes before I get one. I like,
<v Speaker 1>so what, I guess I want to talk about all that,
<v Speaker 1>like the going out of the field then and then
<v Speaker 1>also doing chromosome work. I guess I's start with the
<v Speaker 1>chromosome work first. What what's that about and what did
<v Speaker 1>that entail?
<v Speaker 2>Well, it was ah with that asteras or composite chromosome numbers,
<v Speaker 2>because there's so many in the first place. Everybody was
<v Speaker 2>realizing that chromosome numbers were important in composite taxonomy, and
<v Speaker 2>there were few chromosome numbers known at the time, so
<v Speaker 2>there were people that were doing that almost exclusively, a
<v Speaker 2>few people anyway, and so I joined the crowd, was
<v Speaker 2>invited to join some of the crowds I was involved
<v Speaker 2>in at the time in four chromosome number series that
<v Speaker 2>were being developed. You know, people doing series of chromosome
<v Speaker 2>number papers where the papers would include tables of the
<v Speaker 2>chromosome numbers, the number of species and their chromosome numbers,
<v Speaker 2>and then the text would include what was important about
<v Speaker 2>those chromosome numbers and with respect to the taxonomy at
<v Speaker 2>the time.
<v Speaker 1>So this was this was not just plody levels, but
<v Speaker 1>number of chromosomes.
<v Speaker 2>Ye, well there if you do there's here's a thing
<v Speaker 2>about that too. With plants, we can do myotic chromosome observations.
<v Speaker 2>So it's more than chromosome numbers, it's myotic chromosome behavior,
<v Speaker 2>which tells a lot about the relationships of plants and
<v Speaker 2>the the direction of chromosome number change because of myotic
<v Speaker 2>chromosome behavior. Of course, more important, I guess than that
<v Speaker 2>is as ploity levels, you know, whole genome changes and
<v Speaker 2>chromosome numbers.
<v Speaker 1>So how would you how would you figure these out
<v Speaker 1>without molecular analysis? What what would it entail?
<v Speaker 2>What would well look under a microscope? The technique is
<v Speaker 2>fairly simple with composites and other kinds of plants, and
<v Speaker 2>we got into all the other kinds of plants later
<v Speaker 2>on here at so OSS anyway, but what it involves
<v Speaker 2>is picking buds in early stages of myosis and putting
<v Speaker 2>in in vials of fixative that one takes with them
<v Speaker 2>in the field. So if I were going in the
<v Speaker 2>field for a week or two weeks or a month,
<v Speaker 2>I would prepare in advance a number of these chromosome
<v Speaker 2>number of vials with the fixative in them files about
<v Speaker 2>I don't remember how many milliliters of fixative that they had.
<v Speaker 2>And then you would when you encounter these species in
<v Speaker 2>the field and you picked the buds from the plants.
<v Speaker 2>You have to take a number of buds, of course,
<v Speaker 2>because you can't anticipate the correct stage of myosis, so
<v Speaker 2>you want to get them while you're there. And I'd
<v Speaker 2>have to go back several hundred miles or several.
<v Speaker 1>Thousands at different staably.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, indeed, at different stages. Yeah, So anyway, we're
<v Speaker 2>going to get back to the laboratory. Then this is
<v Speaker 2>a compound microscope thing. So it is the technique involves
<v Speaker 2>taking the young buds which are in early stages of myosis,
<v Speaker 2>and you don't know what stage that is until you
<v Speaker 2>make the preparation. And the preparation is on a microscope
<v Speaker 2>slide in a DNA specific stain acetocarmine. It's a carmine
<v Speaker 2>stain to be specific. And so anyway, if there's a
<v Speaker 2>maceration technique with a glass rod and removing all of
<v Speaker 2>the debris and making a what's called a miotic squash,
<v Speaker 2>it's called a miotic squash technique where one flattens these
<v Speaker 2>things so we can, if we have the right stage,
<v Speaker 2>see the chromosomes and a narrow plane of focus, so
<v Speaker 2>we can focus and actually see the chromosomes in a
<v Speaker 2>miotic stage and count the number. It's just that simple.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's incredible. So, how what magnification are youse? A
<v Speaker 1>thousand necks or more than that?
<v Speaker 2>We use oil immersion lin so it's uh and depending
<v Speaker 2>on the ocular in the ocular magnification and the hundred
<v Speaker 2>times magnification of a of an oil immersion LINS, so
<v Speaker 2>it's several thousand, so.
<v Speaker 1>You but it's just wild that you can see the chromosomes, that's.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, in different stages. You see different stages, so you
<v Speaker 2>can follow the behavior of the chromosomes pairing behavior, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>homologous chromosome behavior. You can see the effects of structural
<v Speaker 2>rearrangements like rings of four, like univolence. So all of
<v Speaker 2>that is apparent under a microscope and you're good at it.
<v Speaker 1>And so you'd get the buds before the flowers opened,
<v Speaker 1>because that's yes, in the bud stays, that's when the
<v Speaker 1>plants are undergoing milsis that's correct, and producing half loid sporangia,
<v Speaker 1>So that's.
<v Speaker 2>They're on the way to doing that anyway. And this
<v Speaker 2>is a this is a microspore mother sells microsporocytes. So
<v Speaker 2>it's if you imagine the amount of pollen that is
<v Speaker 2>ultimately produced the myotic cells. Each each microsporocite produces four
<v Speaker 2>ultimately produces four pollen grains through myosis. So there are
<v Speaker 2>a lot of cells to work with in the in
<v Speaker 2>the anthers, young anthers undergoing myosis.
<v Speaker 1>And so you were using what you were using this
<v Speaker 1>for taxonomy presumably, and.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, it's systematic pursuing systematics taxonomy. That's right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and so you said you were working with trite
<v Speaker 1>acts before. I know that. That's it's a native to
<v Speaker 1>lower latitude North America. I mean it's now it's like
<v Speaker 1>a weed all over. It's been very successful, and you
<v Speaker 1>know it is a ruterural plant with human development. It
<v Speaker 1>benefits from from human development. But it's a really I
<v Speaker 1>mean I've seen it where it grows native. I saw
<v Speaker 1>it in the Dominican Republic, like growing on a rock
<v Speaker 1>out crop, behaving like a native plant, like it like
<v Speaker 1>it would. What was it, tritex pro commins you were
<v Speaker 1>working with, or well.
<v Speaker 2>That's one of them. It's it's actually a weedy species
<v Speaker 2>in Mexico, but a lot of.
<v Speaker 3>Them are not weeds.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they have pretty narrow distributions in Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>So this is a big genus.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, it's not a huge genus. About twenty five species,
<v Speaker 2>I think.
<v Speaker 1>So what what was I guess what what did you
<v Speaker 1>find exciting about that genus? Specifically what druids were.
<v Speaker 2>Well, we were able to recognize two subgenera because of
<v Speaker 2>chromosome numbers, for one thing, and then that leads you
<v Speaker 2>to closer examination of morphology, just like modern DNA sequencing
<v Speaker 2>data do today. You can look back and after you
<v Speaker 2>know the living the phylogenetic relationships, and see morphological characters
<v Speaker 2>that one didn't realize the significance of initially.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and so you'd realize these are two different clades
<v Speaker 1>within the same genus.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly.
<v Speaker 1>There was some divergence event, however, for exactly what was
<v Speaker 1>what was traveling in Mexico like back then? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it was probably a lot safer than now, but also
<v Speaker 1>you know, a lot more rugged too.
<v Speaker 2>Well, it was much safer than it is now. But
<v Speaker 2>after you get farther south in Mexico, we were still
<v Speaker 2>advised not to camp out, so I'm we stayed in
<v Speaker 2>motels all the time. But traveling in Mexico was no
<v Speaker 2>problem at all as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 2>every time you're dealing with the people, it was a
<v Speaker 2>wonderful experience. Yeah, no problems at all. I didn't speak Spanish,
<v Speaker 2>but I just spoke a little bit of Spanish and
<v Speaker 2>I was working on Spanish all the time. Never learned
<v Speaker 2>to speak Spanish, yeah, but I always tried because I
<v Speaker 2>was in Mexico and everybody seemed to appreciate that, and
<v Speaker 2>so they would start speaking English so we could communicate.
<v Speaker 1>So you guys would be just rolling down there with
<v Speaker 1>a crew of what like four or five bodanists and.
<v Speaker 2>Two people men another person. That's the way you always went.
<v Speaker 1>And you went down there with Billy Turner quite a
<v Speaker 1>few times.
<v Speaker 2>Go down first with another person who agreed to go
<v Speaker 2>with me. He was that person I met at Sows.
<v Speaker 2>Actually he was a baseball player and it was from
<v Speaker 2>from the Houston area, but and he went back and
<v Speaker 2>went to school at San Marcos at Southwest Texas State
<v Speaker 2>it was called in Texas State now, But he agreed
<v Speaker 2>to go with me for a month in Mexico when
<v Speaker 2>I was so glad about having a gaudry along.
<v Speaker 1>Did he ever make the switch from baseball to botany.
<v Speaker 2>No, he didn't. He was from Mathis originally, and so
<v Speaker 2>he really got into he was got into natural naturalists
<v Speaker 2>a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>You know, so he's starting with it a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, yeah, a little bit he did.
<v Speaker 1>I'm still just amazed that, I mean, because that's such
<v Speaker 1>a change. I'm sorry to go back to this, but
<v Speaker 1>from baseball to natural sciences, that's got I'd love that
<v Speaker 1>it's bad teacher.
<v Speaker 2>Well, that's that's right. I guess I was always an
<v Speaker 2>outdoorsman when I was a kid, mm hmm, cunning and fishing,
<v Speaker 2>that sort of thing, and so I love the out
<v Speaker 2>of doors anyway. But it's a it's a combination of
<v Speaker 2>the of the topography and all the countryside and plants.
<v Speaker 2>I guess. Plants are marvelous. There's always something interesting about them. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>never run out of interest, at least in this area.
<v Speaker 1>I think for people that aren't into botany, it's still
<v Speaker 1>really hard to not love West Texas. You like to
<v Speaker 1>enjoy spending time on here. I mean there's so much
<v Speaker 1>and especially I mean going to Mexico back then too,
<v Speaker 1>like watching the landscape change from high and dry to
<v Speaker 1>more you know, tropical, you know, dry deciduous forests. Like
<v Speaker 1>when you go further enough south. Yeah, I mean like Quatrisiegasa,
<v Speaker 1>all these, all these when you when you leave south
<v Speaker 1>out of you know, the Big Bend region, I can
<v Speaker 1>only imagine it gets really interesting. You start seeing species
<v Speaker 1>that we don't get up here. Yes, indeed, let's talk
<v Speaker 1>about your work with peridally, because the rock daisies, it's
<v Speaker 1>the you know, most of them. There's a few terrestrial species,
<v Speaker 1>but most of them grow out of vertical cliffs. There's
<v Speaker 1>a lot of microinthemics tool that only grow. You know,
<v Speaker 1>this species of peridally grows in this region, and then
<v Speaker 1>fifty miles away, even thirty miles away, you get a
<v Speaker 1>whole other species of paridally that's you know, completely different.
<v Speaker 1>What how when did you start working on paridally and
<v Speaker 1>what attracted you to it?
<v Speaker 2>Well, when I came here from Austin, I was looking
<v Speaker 2>for another genus to monograph, because that's what that was
<v Speaker 2>the ultimate and systematic botany at the time. And then
<v Speaker 2>of course I started with composits, so I wanted to
<v Speaker 2>continue with the composits. And parially I knew from here,
<v Speaker 2>you know, a couple of species or a few species,
<v Speaker 2>and so I looked into it and it turned out
<v Speaker 2>it's a widespread genus in the southwestern United States and
<v Speaker 2>Mexican go and there were a lot of species, and
<v Speaker 2>so that looked to me like it would gain National
<v Speaker 2>Science Foundation grant support. So I wrote a proposal to
<v Speaker 2>the National Science Foundation and got funded luckily the first year,
<v Speaker 2>just really lucky to do that, because it's hard to
<v Speaker 2>do but had some good people in my background, I think,
<v Speaker 2>to help out, and some product too. You have to produce,
<v Speaker 2>and so I'd already started publishing by then, and so
<v Speaker 2>that's impressive to people at the National Science Foundation. So
<v Speaker 2>I got funded and off I went. So I guess
<v Speaker 2>that lasted for about I think it was nearly ten
<v Speaker 2>years of grant support for monographing Paridley took me all over.
<v Speaker 1>You were going all over West Texas, Mexico.
<v Speaker 3>All over the southwest Arizona, because these are the.
<v Speaker 2>Arizona, Nevada, Utah. They curved for it as far north
<v Speaker 2>as the Salt Lake City.
<v Speaker 1>Lake.
<v Speaker 2>There's a there's a Pirelli Stansbury Eye on the margins
<v Speaker 2>of the Great Salt Lake and then down through California,
<v Speaker 2>Nevada and California, but the Preleys are east of the
<v Speaker 2>of the Sierra Nevadas. But all the way down through
<v Speaker 2>the south part and in the Baja California, and then
<v Speaker 2>in New Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>They specialize in dry areas.
<v Speaker 2>Basically, well not always they're in they're in high mountains too,
<v Speaker 2>you know eight thousand feet approximately that there's a species.
<v Speaker 2>It's only in the annual mountains in the California about
<v Speaker 2>eight a little over eight thousand feet in ensis is there,
<v Speaker 2>so in Mexico and the high mountains too, and other
<v Speaker 2>high mountains and uh in Arizona for example, But that
<v Speaker 2>evidently there they undergo geographic speciation. And so, as you
<v Speaker 2>mentioned while ago, every isolated mountain range, every isolated bluff
<v Speaker 2>rock formation, they're likely to be a different taxon of brittle.
<v Speaker 2>So that was fun investigating all those new habitats in
<v Speaker 2>different areas. It's a lot of work because they're not
<v Speaker 2>on every bluff.
<v Speaker 1>I bet they're like Darwin's finches in that.
<v Speaker 3>Regard, Yeah, sort of like that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, see this, I mean you can't see the specialization
<v Speaker 1>like you could in the beaks of Darwin's finches, but
<v Speaker 1>you know it's the unique species that in the same
<v Speaker 1>genus that are, you know, not so far apart from
<v Speaker 1>each other. I remember seeing pretty vandavenduri, that rare one
<v Speaker 1>in Sonora. We met then tell that day. That was
<v Speaker 1>kind of terrifying, but they were they were nice to us.
<v Speaker 2>But that's after our tales were after me, thank goodness.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, the so what was so Texas is mostly
<v Speaker 1>private land and so how are you getting access to
<v Speaker 1>most of these places. It was probably a lot more
<v Speaker 1>lax back than this is what late sixties, early seventies.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, in that time, ranchers were proud of what they
<v Speaker 2>had on their land, and if there was an unusual
<v Speaker 2>species there, they wanted to know about it, and so
<v Speaker 2>they took care of it and protected it and just
<v Speaker 2>wanted to know what was there so we could gain access.
<v Speaker 2>But frankly, when early on, a lot of my access
<v Speaker 2>was because of Barton wan Hawk, because he knew of
<v Speaker 2>the ranchers and he could help you get access to
<v Speaker 2>various places. But there were places we couldn't get access to,
<v Speaker 2>and that's always been a problem.
<v Speaker 1>Some people just weren't having it.
<v Speaker 2>They just didn't, Yeah, and you couldn't get in contact
<v Speaker 2>with people. Sometimes there was some you know, the landlorders
<v Speaker 2>were the owners were somewhere else, and there were people
<v Speaker 2>that weren't authorized again give permission for access. Yeah, so
<v Speaker 2>eventually that could happen. Eventually you could find some way
<v Speaker 2>a friend knew a friend or something like that.
<v Speaker 1>What is the there's a parially east of El Paso
<v Speaker 1>and Waco tanks? Is that? What is it Prey? What
<v Speaker 1>is it Hawaco?
<v Speaker 3>Inces that's correct.
<v Speaker 1>Have you seen that one that's a super that's.
<v Speaker 2>The one I described?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that is the one you described, well, one of them,
<v Speaker 1>one of them? Yeah, yeah. How many species of plants
<v Speaker 1>have you described?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. There's quite a few, I guess, counting
<v Speaker 2>chips of philes and uh yeah, Mexicum species and several
<v Speaker 2>general I don't I don't keep up with that.
<v Speaker 1>And you wrote the flora of the trans peoples too, yes,
<v Speaker 1>of course, yeah, which is a massive, beautiful tone. So
<v Speaker 1>that parial Waco instance, What was the story with that?
<v Speaker 1>How did you find that? How did did how did
<v Speaker 1>you come across it?
<v Speaker 2>Just going places and looking in different rock formations?
<v Speaker 1>This good feel body, you knew, the habitat you knew, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And it takes a while to get all all these
<v Speaker 2>places and find things. But in several years, you don't
<v Speaker 2>ever see everything any one time you go in the
<v Speaker 2>field because are different climatic conditions at the time, different
<v Speaker 2>flowering times and that sort of thing. So you learn
<v Speaker 2>this through trial and arrow over periods of time.
<v Speaker 1>Regarding the climatic conditions West Texas is, I mean, we're
<v Speaker 1>in a drought right now. It's super dry, and it's
<v Speaker 1>been You know, rains can be hit or miss. The
<v Speaker 1>rainfall pattern here is really bizarre. Spring is generally always
<v Speaker 1>pretty windy and dry, and summer monsoons are what the
<v Speaker 1>region relies on. Hey, how have you seen the landscape
<v Speaker 1>change since you've been here?
<v Speaker 2>It's getting drier And I don't know what else to
<v Speaker 2>say about that. The landscape has changed because plants die.
<v Speaker 2>And this is mostly in recent years in my experience anyway,
<v Speaker 2>there are more juniverse, more invasive plants, more plants dying
<v Speaker 2>in recent years, getting drier all the time. It seems
<v Speaker 2>like it's just it's just an observation, it's not scientific.
<v Speaker 1>Well, you've mentioned, I mean, large oaks dying, even juniper's
<v Speaker 1>dying in some cases. I was talking with Deb yesterday
<v Speaker 1>she had mentioned that, you know, even Koreosot's starting to
<v Speaker 1>die in the park. I know, you know, rainfalls always
<v Speaker 1>hit or miss, but this seems more like a prolonged
<v Speaker 1>like a more prolonged rout. Right.
<v Speaker 2>Of course, dryness has been going on for some time.
<v Speaker 2>The Shewahen Desert has been moving north then expanding in territory.
<v Speaker 2>If we if we wanted to look back fairly scientifically. Luckily,
<v Speaker 2>we have some good, good data going back to since
<v Speaker 2>the last ice Age, at least from packrat middens. And
<v Speaker 2>this was done early on by a person from Kansas,
<v Speaker 2>Philip Wells, and then he published a paper or two
<v Speaker 2>on that, and he moved west a little bit. But
<v Speaker 2>then that was really enhanced by Tom Van Devender you
<v Speaker 2>mentioned a while ago in a specific epithet, who's a
<v Speaker 2>famous botanist in Arizona, and he he did some early
<v Speaker 2>studies and with back right middens in Arizona, Mexico and
<v Speaker 2>here as well. So we have a lot of paleological
<v Speaker 2>information from the middens, so we know what the We
<v Speaker 2>have a good idea of what the conditions were like
<v Speaker 2>eight eight, ten thousand years ago when there were woodlands
<v Speaker 2>all the way south into Big Ben National Park, for example,
<v Speaker 2>and then New Mexico. So we know it's been getting
<v Speaker 2>dryer all the time.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, But in.
<v Speaker 2>We keep weather records like anybody does, I suppose, and
<v Speaker 2>I've been keeping them since since the nineteen I suppose,
<v Speaker 2>and it's and it seems it just seems that things
<v Speaker 2>are getting drier, and it's it's pretty clear for the
<v Speaker 2>last thirty years or more.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and of course, I mean there were megadroughts in
<v Speaker 1>the around twelve hundred, you know, whatever drove the Anisazi
<v Speaker 1>out of their cliff dwellings or as likely to have.
<v Speaker 1>So this is a I mean, this happens, but it's
<v Speaker 1>certainly it doesn't spell. It doesn't. It doesn't look good
<v Speaker 1>when you've got a large human population. Aquifers are dropping.
<v Speaker 1>There's just way more human impact, and all the habitats
<v Speaker 1>carved up to into development or non development or agriculture
<v Speaker 1>whatever the pack rat middens, you know. I mean you
<v Speaker 1>look at places like the Cheeseaus Mountains, which is a
<v Speaker 1>sky island, or the Davis Mountains, another sky island, and
<v Speaker 1>there's plants that grow there that don't obviously occur in
<v Speaker 1>the hotter lowland areas, and then you start thinking, well,
<v Speaker 1>how they get there? I guess it could be birds,
<v Speaker 1>but it's more likely that there was a contiguous population
<v Speaker 1>that occurred much lower down. And then, as you know,
<v Speaker 1>the post place to see drying and warming, this stuff
<v Speaker 1>starts moving up. I think that kind of stuff is
<v Speaker 1>wild to think about, you know that watching a landscape
<v Speaker 1>change over a few thousand years and then seeing these
<v Speaker 1>clues that kind of hint at it. What regarding these skylands,
<v Speaker 1>like the Cheeseos and the Davis, there's an you've obviously
<v Speaker 1>probably done a lot of work in both those places.
<v Speaker 2>I've climbing around there.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, there's I mean you get our Beutis halapenses, which
<v Speaker 1>is the you know, a madrone which you see in
<v Speaker 1>Mexico and cloud forests and pine oak forests, and then
<v Speaker 1>to see it here. I mean if I remember finding
<v Speaker 1>two trees in this wash in a really really dry
<v Speaker 1>area that were just remnants. They were large trees and
<v Speaker 1>no seedlings, and they're hanging in there. Half of them
<v Speaker 1>might be dead, but you see that and you really
<v Speaker 1>start to think, wow, this is you know, what did
<v Speaker 1>this place look like the thousand, two thousand years ago?
<v Speaker 1>It's wild to think about the sky islands act Is refugia.
<v Speaker 1>What are some notable species that that you find really
<v Speaker 1>interesting and that you you know, would encourage people to
<v Speaker 1>focus on in both the Cheeseos and the Davis. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you got archdol stapfelos pungings up there in the Davis Mountains.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't I didn't even know that. I just found
<v Speaker 1>that out our beautis these Oaksquircus rugosa, like really really
<v Speaker 1>cool species that seem way out of place in West Texas.
<v Speaker 2>There are oaks and pines and the Arizona cypress Suda
<v Speaker 2>sugar men cazi, which is Douglas fir. Yeah, that's in
<v Speaker 2>certain places Douglas fur in the Guadaloupes and in the Cheeseos,
<v Speaker 2>but not in the Davis Mountains for some reason. And
<v Speaker 2>these are oliqual populations apparently, is it would seem anyway
<v Speaker 2>from what data are available, so oaks and pines and
<v Speaker 2>maybe some other things that aren't coming to mind.
<v Speaker 1>Now.
<v Speaker 2>I've seen the arch estaphlis. It's in one big population
<v Speaker 2>in the in the eastern Davis Mountains, and then it's
<v Speaker 2>scattered around in another place or two in the Eastern
<v Speaker 2>Davis Mountains, but maybe somewhere else as well. Yeah it
<v Speaker 2>may it may have once been in the Cheesos Mountains,
<v Speaker 2>but evidently it's not there now.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder, you know, with stuff like that, I wonder
<v Speaker 1>how much divergence would be you'd be able to see,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you did like whole genome sequencing comparing
<v Speaker 1>that population with one further south, and you know, saying
<v Speaker 1>the way will lay one. You know, I guess it
<v Speaker 1>would only be what twenty thirty thousand years divergence maybe,
<v Speaker 1>What do you think?
<v Speaker 2>Well, evidently there is some of that going on or
<v Speaker 2>has been going on there. I've noticed and say, in
<v Speaker 2>the recent years, there have been some Ponderosa Pine experts
<v Speaker 2>it has been doing molecular work with bond rosis, and
<v Speaker 2>evidently there are some genetic differences between these populations, and
<v Speaker 2>there's some early genetic evidence that there's more than one
<v Speaker 2>genetic lineage in a Cheeseo's mountains alone. I've seen that
<v Speaker 2>in a fairly recent paper.
<v Speaker 1>That's why.
<v Speaker 2>So I don't know that that's been followed up. And
<v Speaker 2>a lot of the preliminary DNA work has been done
<v Speaker 2>with chloroplasts, and some of that is fairly suspicious because
<v Speaker 2>of the way chloroplasts may be inherited. Yeah, right is Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>in chloroplast capture and through hybridization is also a possibility.
<v Speaker 1>It's a it's a cool thing to think about. It's
<v Speaker 1>fun to think about because obviously the environment is still
<v Speaker 1>selecting in even if it's only twenty thousand years divergence,
<v Speaker 1>Like the environment in one place is selecting slightly differently
<v Speaker 1>and the environment in another place. So I mean still
<v Speaker 1>saying species just different ecotized. But it's really really interesting
<v Speaker 1>stuff to think about. Regarding the Davis Mountains, What interesting
<v Speaker 1>things have you found there or encountered there, because that's
<v Speaker 1>a mysterious that's kind of mysterious area. It's really hard
<v Speaker 1>to get access.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, it is. My first access was through the Davis
<v Speaker 2>Mountain Resort, which is a development on the or sort
<v Speaker 2>of on the southern slopes, and we could gain access
<v Speaker 2>that direction anyway with a little secondary permission or two.
<v Speaker 2>That's for the highest elevations at Mount Livermore anyway. So
<v Speaker 2>there are some say I'm trying to think there's a
<v Speaker 2>there's some rare oaks on the at the near the
<v Speaker 2>top of Mount Livermore if there of course a southwestern
<v Speaker 2>white pines are there. And what is that pseudostrobus uh
<v Speaker 2>that is a pinas strubble offormis yes, yeah, And some
<v Speaker 2>relitual populations of of populous tremuloidies that quaking aspen are there.
<v Speaker 1>That's wild.
<v Speaker 2>Some high elevation salvias are there a viola uh, things
<v Speaker 2>like that.
<v Speaker 1>What are the salvias that are out there?
<v Speaker 2>Salvia Arizonica comes to mind. Wow, a blue flowered salvia.
<v Speaker 1>And I assume there's all collections of this stuff in
<v Speaker 1>the herbarium here.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they have collections of all that.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, do you.
<v Speaker 1>I guess I want to come back to this at
<v Speaker 1>some point because the Sky Island stuff is really fascinating.
<v Speaker 1>But the herbarium, I mean, this is I love this erbarium.
<v Speaker 1>This is one of the best in Texas. The other
<v Speaker 1>one is at Austin, the other large one. I guess
<v Speaker 1>Alpaso has one. But herbaria are almost becoming an endangered
<v Speaker 1>species themselves in some cases. I mean they're being closed
<v Speaker 1>or you know. I know Rio Grand Valley UTRGV had one.
<v Speaker 1>It was in what was essentially a janitorial closet and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the specimens were damaged. And I had
<v Speaker 1>a friend who was working there scanning them. He's like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm just digitizing them and sending him to Austin. We
<v Speaker 1>got a grant to do this. I think the school
<v Speaker 1>may have even maybe the school paid for it, and
<v Speaker 1>I think it might have been a stepping stone for
<v Speaker 1>them to be like, we've digitized it. Let it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>who knows what happens to you whatever.
<v Speaker 2>What?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I guess what are some of the other good
<v Speaker 1>or barrier in Texas? And what do you see? I
<v Speaker 1>guess what's the importance of collecting plants?
<v Speaker 2>Oh? Plants or plant collections are fundamental in botany. Without them,
<v Speaker 2>we were almost lost. We got to have the voucher
<v Speaker 2>specimens for chromosome counts, for example, voucher specimens for DNA work.
<v Speaker 2>They have to have the collections throughout populations to see
<v Speaker 2>variation and populations before species can be understood and described,
<v Speaker 2>or before we can know taxonomy or lineage of plants,
<v Speaker 2>before we can know times of flowering and all kinds
<v Speaker 2>of things that were happening back when they were when
<v Speaker 2>they were first collected. The largest iberium in Texas is
<v Speaker 2>at at brit Botanical Research Institute of Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, I thought it.
<v Speaker 2>Was about over a million four specimens at brit.
<v Speaker 1>Apologies to Brit, I forget to mention you been there before. S.
<v Speaker 2>The second largest siberium is at UT Austin. They're over
<v Speaker 2>a million, well over a million specimens there.
<v Speaker 1>So it's I mean, obviously the importance of of of
<v Speaker 1>herbaria is keeping a record phenological data, noticing phenological changes,
<v Speaker 1>seasonality changes, and also I think with how much development
<v Speaker 1>is going on in some of the higher population density
<v Speaker 1>areas of this state, it's some of these populations might
<v Speaker 1>not be around and even a decade or two they
<v Speaker 1>might be wiped out. And so having a record, I
<v Speaker 1>mean that upo me anti Cyphialitica from South Texas alone,
<v Speaker 1>I've watched that population get destroyed for a solar farm.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, that's a really unique species to be. You know,
<v Speaker 1>that's and especially that it might be two species within
<v Speaker 1>anti Syphilitica. Nathan Taylor was saying it's and he's right.
<v Speaker 1>You look at the flowers on the South Texas population
<v Speaker 1>compared with the West Texas population, they're completely different. Certainly
<v Speaker 1>they probably weren't subspecies status and the rest of that
<v Speaker 1>he mapped it out and was showing that the rest
<v Speaker 1>of that South Texas Anti Syphilitica population is in Mexico
<v Speaker 1>and now it's gone. So you know, they're the two
<v Speaker 1>or barium records one I was able to collect are
<v Speaker 1>the only remnants that show that species was ever there.
<v Speaker 1>So do you do you see your barrier? Do you
<v Speaker 1>see them as slightly threatened in the future.
<v Speaker 2>They're threatened in a few places because of financial problem,
<v Speaker 2>but I think they're mainly threatened by people that take
<v Speaker 2>care of them.
<v Speaker 1>M m.
<v Speaker 2>That's the most important thing.
<v Speaker 1>You need a good curator. I remember when I first
<v Speaker 1>when I first came to this or Bury, it wasn't
<v Speaker 1>been two or three years ago. You were very meticulous
<v Speaker 1>about showing me how to handle them. You were like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna make sure this guy remembers and it was
<v Speaker 1>pretty cool. So now I like, now it's in my
<v Speaker 1>head too. Every time I'm in any herbarium, I'm like, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I make sure you stack it the right way, don't
<v Speaker 1>mix them up, you know, don't sandwich anything that you
<v Speaker 1>know belongs on top or on the bottom, et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>So curators are that way everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, No, it's it's excellent. It's a high You gotta
<v Speaker 1>have high standards with this stuff, man, So you you
<v Speaker 1>really yeah, I mean, you encourage people to collect and press,
<v Speaker 1>and then there's certainly an art to it too, which
<v Speaker 1>is I love. I mean, that's what makes going in there, Buria.
<v Speaker 1>There's nothing worse than seeing a collection that just looks
<v Speaker 1>like a pressed salad, you know, or like a like
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of leaves somebody accidentally sat on, separate them,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and then yeah, Shirley's mounting is excellent as well.
<v Speaker 1>I do want to mention though, I think you know,
<v Speaker 1>for for especially for delineating species, are figuring out what speed.
<v Speaker 1>You know, something's a certain genus, but you don't know
<v Speaker 1>what species it is. That especially is where the herbarium
<v Speaker 1>comes in to help. If you know you're new to
<v Speaker 1>something and you want to get familiar with, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like Onathra a. There's how many species of onathra used
<v Speaker 1>you know some of them used to be? How many
<v Speaker 1>species of Anatha in West Texas And you're you're you're
<v Speaker 1>having trouble looking at the key whatever. Come to the
<v Speaker 1>herbarium and and look at what's what.
<v Speaker 2>So when we're monographing general for example, if we started there,
<v Speaker 2>what we do is we borrow specimens. We may have
<v Speaker 2>all of them, we may be in the field doing
<v Speaker 2>our own collections and that sort of thing, but we
<v Speaker 2>always borrow specimens from other herbaria, and that's how we
<v Speaker 2>get our populational information. You can't collect everything everywhere. There
<v Speaker 2>have been collectors going on since well since we've occupied
<v Speaker 2>North America, and so these are deposited in Herberia somewhere,
<v Speaker 2>and so we know we know from historical records where
<v Speaker 2>a lot of collections might be located in what Herberia.
<v Speaker 2>So we intentionally borrow specimens, say of Paridley or Tridax
<v Speaker 2>or Inauthra, if that's what we're working on, from other Herberia.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's where we get our information to do
<v Speaker 2>the descriptions and keys and other information that's necessary to
<v Speaker 2>publish monographs of genera. So that goes on for all
<v Speaker 2>kinds of taxonomic studies, whether it's a whether it's a
<v Speaker 2>genus monograph or just doing a regional flora. We need
<v Speaker 2>collections to do that work.
<v Speaker 1>Photographs aren't enough.
<v Speaker 2>Do you need a Photographs are never enough because distinctions
<v Speaker 2>of most species are microscopic recognized vcs. After we know
<v Speaker 2>what they are by gestalt, you know, by morphological characters,
<v Speaker 2>by habit, by their appearance. We learned to recognize them,
<v Speaker 2>but we didn't we learned we know that because of
<v Speaker 2>the taxonomy that was involved previously. Yeah, you know, looking
<v Speaker 2>at microscopic characters.
<v Speaker 1>So a compound scope and a good erbarium are absolute
<v Speaker 1>essentials for.
<v Speaker 2>Botany compound microscopes as well as dissecting microscopes. That's what
<v Speaker 2>I use most is a dissecting microscope right there. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so we have several in this herbarium, and we we
<v Speaker 2>have a lot of visitors here and they we have
<v Speaker 2>them available for use for visiting taxonomists or students.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so is everybody listening obviously, you know, collecting making
<v Speaker 1>herbarium special herbarium vouchers very important. It's critical word. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>So you've also done a lot of plant propagation too.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, sewel Ross was really well well known for
<v Speaker 1>greenhouse native plant sales. You guys were selling madrones for
<v Speaker 1>a while. A lot of this stuff has really odd
<v Speaker 1>germination habits, and you know, some people see as really
<v Speaker 1>hard to grow. When did you get into propagating things?
<v Speaker 1>And I mean this is a whole field we could
<v Speaker 1>talk about you, but yeah, when did you start?
<v Speaker 2>I started growing plants when I first came to soul Ross.
<v Speaker 2>We had a greenhouse here, an indoor greenhouse, believe it
<v Speaker 2>or not, in a new building with nothing in it,
<v Speaker 2>And so I really first started growing plants to use
<v Speaker 2>in botany classes. So we would students would have living
<v Speaker 2>plants in their laboratories to me a lot better than
<v Speaker 2>charts and models. Yeah, so we were using living plants
<v Speaker 2>as much as possible, So I'm talking in the vascular
<v Speaker 2>and non vascular plants. We were growing liverworks and mosses
<v Speaker 2>as well as flowering plants. And then one of the
<v Speaker 2>main techniques and biosystematics monographic studies is growing plants the
<v Speaker 2>use in gardens and greenhouses, especially for artificial hybridizations, because
<v Speaker 2>experimental hybridizations are one way that one can determine relationships
<v Speaker 2>the ease of crossing, for one thing, and then if
<v Speaker 2>one does produce F one hybrids, then the fertility of
<v Speaker 2>F one hybrids is a measure of relationship potentially anyway
<v Speaker 2>between two between species. So attempted to make crosses between
<v Speaker 2>the fifty some odd species of per Italy that I
<v Speaker 2>was studying during those years, and then later on with
<v Speaker 2>another genus, Flavaria. And then during that time, of course,
<v Speaker 2>I was doing gypsum studies too, and trying to grow
<v Speaker 2>gypsum plants and trying to find out what was going
<v Speaker 2>on with that and other native plants because they're nice
<v Speaker 2>in landscaping. And then about that time the landscaping booms
<v Speaker 2>started happening in Texas and so in the you know,
<v Speaker 2>in the the Austin area and Dallas Fort Worth area.
<v Speaker 2>So we accelerated that here at so OSS and I'm
<v Speaker 2>no horticultures, so I just do this by trialing error,
<v Speaker 2>or did it by trialing era. And then we started
<v Speaker 2>started growing all of the trying to grow all of
<v Speaker 2>the woody plants in the trans Vegas just because to
<v Speaker 2>learn how to grow them, for one thing. And then
<v Speaker 2>we we luckily got new greenhouses. President built greenhouses for
<v Speaker 2>us and for this kind of work and for the
<v Speaker 2>taxonomic work we were doing here is the eighties. That
<v Speaker 2>was actually in nineteen eighty that's correct, President Bob Richardson.
<v Speaker 2>He built two state of the art greenhouses for us here.
<v Speaker 2>And I also asked for a native plant demonstration garden.
<v Speaker 2>And it's a small little garden out in front of
<v Speaker 2>the greenhouses now and it just has a regular gorden
<v Speaker 2>soil in it. And because plants in nature look different
<v Speaker 2>or may look different than plants and cultivation, and so
<v Speaker 2>we needed some way to demonstrate to the public that
<v Speaker 2>was just becoming aware of the value of low maintenance plants.
<v Speaker 2>And those with low water requirements in landscaping, and so
<v Speaker 2>I wanted a place where the public could see what
<v Speaker 2>the plants look like in cultivation. And of course they're
<v Speaker 2>quite attractive, our native species, A lot of them do
<v Speaker 2>have large flowers. They're very attractive and grow well under
<v Speaker 2>most any kinds of conditions.
<v Speaker 1>Incredible, Yeah, some incredible stuff, are it?
<v Speaker 2>So we did. We actually grew trees and all kinds,
<v Speaker 2>and I had to remove some trees from a native
<v Speaker 2>plant demonstration garden because they were crowding out everything. I
<v Speaker 2>put them in the wrong place. We had about one
<v Speaker 2>hundred species in there at one time, including some smaller
<v Speaker 2>plants to somemall smaller perennials, and a few annuals that
<v Speaker 2>we could put along a sidewalk because it was sort
<v Speaker 2>of a decoration for their attractive flowers.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's a great context for place too. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm always promoting native plants in whatever region someone's in,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's South Florida or New England, or California or Arizona.
<v Speaker 1>But few places really show the practicality of native plants,
<v Speaker 1>like desert regions, especially West Texas, like I still see
<v Speaker 1>crape myrtles, they're all dead, but crape myrtles being planted,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, and I'm just like, why We've got
<v Speaker 1>such treasures out here. Why are you planting this big
<v Speaker 1>box store garbage. And it's also not going to survive
<v Speaker 1>to it from a completely different climate. The winds here
<v Speaker 1>are insanity. Sometimes the drought here is insanity. You can
<v Speaker 1>feel it on your fingertips and your skin. It's it's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>But these plants are built for them. Some of the
<v Speaker 1>what are some of the structural adaptations you find in
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the plants that are native here to
<v Speaker 1>deal with the climate.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, oh, I'd have to go through a number of things. Well,
<v Speaker 2>narrowing of leaves. Narrow leaves, pubescence, density of pubescence is
<v Speaker 2>one thing.
<v Speaker 1>Reducing leaf area or service.
<v Speaker 2>Reducing of leaf area, yeah, or hairs, evaporation and fewer stata,
<v Speaker 2>positioning of stormata, wax coatings on leaves. Yeah, and on candaliah.
<v Speaker 2>You mentioned candalia a while back, Yeah, the candiliah wax plant.
<v Speaker 1>Photosynthetic stems, I see that a lot.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, photosthetic stems exactly, root systems, the kinds of root systems,
<v Speaker 2>the depth of root systems and spreading root systems as
<v Speaker 2>in most cacta those kinds of things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, because most cacti have roots. I mean some may
<v Speaker 1>form a taproot, but then they'll form roots that really
<v Speaker 1>go out, go laterally to collect rain that may not
<v Speaker 1>always pinet.
<v Speaker 2>Usually shallow roots and spreading fibrous roots. That's correct.
<v Speaker 1>Did you see I mean back then was there? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>have you seen more of an interest than native plants?
<v Speaker 1>Have you seen it growing out here?
<v Speaker 2>It's growing. Yes. The first entries came with people that
<v Speaker 2>moved to the suburbs and maybe in one of the
<v Speaker 2>first developed areas from a ranch west of Alpine. Those
<v Speaker 2>people were interested in native plants and they came in
<v Speaker 2>shopped for them from us. And then the the population
<v Speaker 2>was because this is what people are familiar with. That's
<v Speaker 2>why they grow plants they're familiar with and that they
<v Speaker 2>knew from wherever they came from, and the ones that
<v Speaker 2>are sold in stores and really available. But that's grown
<v Speaker 2>tremendously in this area. There's a Native Flant chapter here
<v Speaker 2>and that sort of thing, and we did it's also
<v Speaker 2>establish a native flant propagation program, an official native flant
<v Speaker 2>propagation program and association with biology. And that's been going
<v Speaker 2>on since the late nineteen seventies here and it's still
<v Speaker 2>going on at this school.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I will, you know, I'll be walking downtown in
<v Speaker 1>downtown Alpine and I'll see there's a couple of spots
<v Speaker 1>where there's madrones in people's yards, you know, and like
<v Speaker 1>the right microclimate that especially, I mean, people love that
<v Speaker 1>that tree. It's got beautiful bark, it's related to blueberries.
<v Speaker 1>It can be really hard to grow. It needs special
<v Speaker 1>Michael Rise, it needs to have it at some point
<v Speaker 1>then it's life encounter. But you really nailed down how
<v Speaker 1>to do that, how to grow these from seed from
<v Speaker 1>the little berries. There's two beautiful trees and the native
<v Speaker 1>plant area behind the school and all the ones in
<v Speaker 1>town I presume came from seol Ross. How did you
<v Speaker 1>figure out how to get those things going? And what's
<v Speaker 1>the method?
<v Speaker 2>Trial and error? Again? Well, I did a lot of
<v Speaker 2>things in connection with madrones. For one thing, I collected
<v Speaker 2>fruits from all kinds of places, from the Guadaloupe Mountains
<v Speaker 2>through the Davis Mountains and the Cheezos Mountains and wherever
<v Speaker 2>I could find them. Because of different ecotypes that we
<v Speaker 2>know about different adaptations to drier conditions. Did the same
<v Speaker 2>thing with pines and other kinds of plants, but with
<v Speaker 2>the my drones we're talking about now, I also started
<v Speaker 2>growing them different ways, collecting the seeds or obtaining the
<v Speaker 2>seeds from the fruits, from planting seeds, and different kinds
<v Speaker 2>of media, different kinds of conditions, just to see what
<v Speaker 2>worked the best. And I too thought they needed some
<v Speaker 2>kind of special soil conditions at the time that my seed.
<v Speaker 2>Of course the microflora in the soil, and they obviously do,
<v Speaker 2>but they don't need that they get started. But I
<v Speaker 2>grew them in mulch that I collected from underneath madrones,
<v Speaker 2>and soil collected from underneath madrones, and that sort of thing,
<v Speaker 2>and ultimately I found out it makes no difference at
<v Speaker 2>least in our greenhouses. In my experience. The key thing
<v Speaker 2>is to there are several key things and growing madrones.
<v Speaker 2>One of them is to make sure that you have
<v Speaker 2>viable seeds in the first place, because certain conditions and
<v Speaker 2>you may think that the berries that are produced have
<v Speaker 2>viable seeds because they're berries, but not always. That led
<v Speaker 2>to myth that still persists today that madrones produce low
<v Speaker 2>viable seeds, you know, low viability, and my experience, if
<v Speaker 2>they are pollinated correctly and the conditions are correct, they
<v Speaker 2>are almost one hundred percent viable all the seeds. So
<v Speaker 2>I've done that over and over again, you know, planning
<v Speaker 2>a certain number of seeds to see how many germinate,
<v Speaker 2>and one hundred percent. It happens many, many times. So
<v Speaker 2>I separate the seeds by using my wife and her blender.
<v Speaker 2>For large numbers of seeds. Anyway, so we put a
<v Speaker 2>pretty good batch of fruits and blend them and break
<v Speaker 2>up the fruits and then put them in a paper
<v Speaker 2>bag and let them dry out and crack them up
<v Speaker 2>and shuffle them up, and the seeds go to the
<v Speaker 2>bottom of the sack. And so that's if you have
<v Speaker 2>a large number of seeds and you can get the
<v Speaker 2>seeds from there.
<v Speaker 1>You'll take the berries and put them in a blender
<v Speaker 1>and then just but not for very long, no seconds.
<v Speaker 2>Not at very high speed, but not with the idea
<v Speaker 2>of grinding them as fine as possible, but breaking openness
<v Speaker 2>the fruits. Otherwise, one can remove the seeds one at
<v Speaker 2>a time, I suppose, and that's very laborious process.
<v Speaker 1>And the seeds look like kind of like orange slices.
<v Speaker 2>Tiny little orange slices exactly. Rugos are wrinkled orange slices.
<v Speaker 2>Under exacting microscope, one can easily discern viable seeds or
<v Speaker 2>filled seeds anyway, those that have into sperm. So I
<v Speaker 2>always also do that now. I mean, if I'm growing
<v Speaker 2>them today, I take the time to look under a
<v Speaker 2>microscope and separate seeds. It's still a time consuming process,
<v Speaker 2>but it's you can plant the number of seeds you
<v Speaker 2>want in the container that you choose to plant them in.
<v Speaker 2>And then today we've evolved with containers for growing the seeds.
<v Speaker 2>There were some containers that evidently were invented in the
<v Speaker 2>Northwest for growing pines for reforestation, the long tubes, and
<v Speaker 2>those are the tubes, right, they call containers. They were
<v Speaker 2>called that anyway, and I guess they sell our call containers.
<v Speaker 2>So we started ordering those and there I planted them
<v Speaker 2>in seven inch containers and then discovered that that wasn't
<v Speaker 2>a good size for them, because I'd like to move
<v Speaker 2>them up to one gallon plots after they get established
<v Speaker 2>and after they first developed, and in seven inch containers
<v Speaker 2>the roots are too long and you can j root
<v Speaker 2>plants easily in a gallon plot. That means curving the
<v Speaker 2>roots at the bottom of the pot. Yeah, messes up
<v Speaker 2>there oxens in the direction of growing roots. So anyway,
<v Speaker 2>we use a short containers these days we call stubbies.
<v Speaker 2>There are about five or six inches I forget the
<v Speaker 2>exact length of them. Stubby, the stubby containers the yellow
<v Speaker 2>in color, and we can put them in racks anyway,
<v Speaker 2>growing them in those Why just use ordinary potting medium
<v Speaker 2>that has fertilizer in it. And if there's no fertilizer,
<v Speaker 2>I add Osmo coat after that came along. It's the
<v Speaker 2>time release fertilizer. Watering plants and pots ultimately ultimately leeches fertilizers,
<v Speaker 2>so they need to be fertilized, and the more you
<v Speaker 2>water them, the more they need to be fertilized. But
<v Speaker 2>you can overfertilize plants, and we don't do that with madrones,
<v Speaker 2>and time release fertilizers like Osma coat prevents a lot
<v Speaker 2>of leeching. You know, you don't have to water, you
<v Speaker 2>don't have fertilized you don't have to use a liquid
<v Speaker 2>fertilizer very often. Anyway, the key to growing madrones is
<v Speaker 2>controlling the water in the plotting medium. And that's what
<v Speaker 2>I've found. They tend to get fungal infections since they
<v Speaker 2>have no root hairs. The water has to be just
<v Speaker 2>right for these madrone seedlings to develop all the time.
<v Speaker 1>So there's a narrow window.
<v Speaker 2>You're working with, narrow window. And I use potting medium
<v Speaker 2>without any kinds of heavy material in its. You know,
<v Speaker 2>this is a well draining potting medium. And one can
<v Speaker 2>tell how much water is in a container by lifting
<v Speaker 2>the container. And that's just what I do. Anyway, you
<v Speaker 2>can feel it. So I water when they're dry, not
<v Speaker 2>too dry, I mean they don't let them sip dry.
<v Speaker 2>But as soon as they dry out, I water them
<v Speaker 2>thoroughly or water runs out the bottom, and don't water
<v Speaker 2>them again until they dry out again.
<v Speaker 1>So just basically just see a water when they're.
<v Speaker 3>Dry, exactly.
<v Speaker 2>And it's the way it was to take care of
<v Speaker 2>plants anyway.
<v Speaker 1>But some people like to grow a bunch of stuff
<v Speaker 1>in the same pod, germinate the seeds in the same
<v Speaker 1>pot and separate them later. You can't do that with
<v Speaker 1>madrones obviously.
<v Speaker 2>Right well you can, yes, one can, but better be
<v Speaker 2>careful because their roots go to the bottom. Yeah, if
<v Speaker 2>it's a shallow container, and then the roots go along
<v Speaker 2>the bottom and you can't get the whole root system.
<v Speaker 1>When you're disturbing roots though, if their roots are all intertwined,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, how do you avoid that?
<v Speaker 2>Well, it's hard, you can. You can't avoid it if
<v Speaker 2>you're growing them together. And what the result is you
<v Speaker 2>lose a lot of the plants that you transplant from
<v Speaker 2>that situation. I've never liked growing plants together in flats
<v Speaker 2>of any kind because of that. I started out doing
<v Speaker 2>that frankly. I grew Arizona cypress that way. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 2>then I would weightily got farewell established and separate.
<v Speaker 1>Them and then just keep them in shade for two
<v Speaker 1>or three weeks till their roots can grow.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Well, they don't have to be in shade. They
<v Speaker 2>have to have light, yeah, not to bright light, and
<v Speaker 2>not light, not west light, not south or west light,
<v Speaker 2>east east. I found that east light is a bit
<v Speaker 2>in the greenhouse. I put the racks of the drones
<v Speaker 2>in east windows.
<v Speaker 1>Morning sun, morning sun, getting bright light when it's not
<v Speaker 1>very when it isn't heated up yet.
<v Speaker 2>And they get light all day long, but it's they
<v Speaker 2>don't get too hot.
<v Speaker 1>I think, yeah, So I think with this species especially,
<v Speaker 1>it makes sense to just try to sell them individually
<v Speaker 1>in individual pots in those tubes, and then just water
<v Speaker 1>them whenever they try out.
<v Speaker 2>Right, I use four or five or six seeds for kubby,
<v Speaker 2>I mean stubby myself, because I frankly like the multi
<v Speaker 2>stem madrones.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and they can grow like that, they can.
<v Speaker 2>Grow like that. They'll be fine, They'll be fine. And
<v Speaker 2>all seedlings don't survive anyway, It's just a thing about
<v Speaker 2>growing plants. Everything doesn't always survive, but.
<v Speaker 1>This species certainly is. I mean, madrones certainly are more
<v Speaker 1>prone to fungal infection when they're young they are most
<v Speaker 1>other plants. And it's you think that's mostly just because
<v Speaker 1>of the lack of root hairs.
<v Speaker 2>Or well, it's from the development. One must use sterile
<v Speaker 2>potting medium. These fungi are developing potting medium from and
<v Speaker 2>spores that come in are spores that are already there.
<v Speaker 2>And so we start with sterol potting medium. It's supposed
<v Speaker 2>to be stero and it's in a sack, but it
<v Speaker 2>may not be. And of course one can heat it
<v Speaker 2>if one wants to make sure they're sterilized. But I
<v Speaker 2>don't do that. I think sterol potting medium and grow
<v Speaker 2>them that way. I have used liquid fungicide before. I
<v Speaker 2>don't like to do that. And the last madrones I grew,
<v Speaker 2>I didn't use any fungicide. It's just stero potting medium.
<v Speaker 1>The soil is just I mean, it's just like a
<v Speaker 1>peat based.
<v Speaker 2>It's peat based, but it has other ingredients in it.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's a commercial mix. I just buy commercial mixed
<v Speaker 2>potting medium as long as it's well draining.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I've never been I've never sterilized any soil.
<v Speaker 2>I don't really have to do that now.
<v Speaker 1>I do wonder about though, what I did. What I
<v Speaker 1>have done is some of those I mean, I'm skeptical
<v Speaker 1>of some of those Michael rhizol mixes. You can purchase
<v Speaker 1>all thing. Some might be snake oil, who knows what
<v Speaker 1>they're what their process is forgetting it. But some the
<v Speaker 1>ones that are more reputable, I might get and take,
<v Speaker 1>you know, mix it up and then take like a
<v Speaker 1>And I've done this with pines too, even though it's
<v Speaker 1>probably not necessary. Maybe it's a placebo for me, who knows,
<v Speaker 1>But I'll take a meat uh injector you know, you
<v Speaker 1>can get on Amazon for like injecting meat. It was
<v Speaker 1>like a giant syringe and up. But the it's got
<v Speaker 1>a large gauge tube's needle and then I'll just fill
<v Speaker 1>it with Michael rhiselin and inject the soil. You know,
<v Speaker 1>and who knows. I haven't done any tests obviously, that.
<v Speaker 2>Sounds like a yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I mean the spores are good, yeah, because you know.
<v Speaker 1>I also I remember I was in the Davis Mountains
<v Speaker 1>with Adam Black a few months ago and I was
<v Speaker 1>doing the same thing you would talk about, trying to
<v Speaker 1>collect the duff that you could see my celium on already.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it was just the saprotrophic fungi
<v Speaker 1>or my or Micae rhizol or what, but I was like,
<v Speaker 1>what the hell it went? You know, why not? But
<v Speaker 1>I was so desperate. But the deer. I had one
<v Speaker 1>that I got from Sewel Raw and I was I
<v Speaker 1>put it in the ground. It got to two and
<v Speaker 1>a half feet tall. The minute I took the fence off,
<v Speaker 1>the deer came nibbled it down. And then Dan Hostage
<v Speaker 1>was telling me they don't come back after that. If
<v Speaker 1>they're that young and they get they lose all their leaves.
<v Speaker 1>They try to re sprout, and then the new leaves
<v Speaker 1>just rot, which was really Again, I don't know why.
<v Speaker 1>It's some discrepancy between the roots and the shoots. I
<v Speaker 1>guess I don't know, but I was angry. Angry.
<v Speaker 2>I have found that half in this area. One must
<v Speaker 2>protect madrones from herbivores until they get above the brows line.
<v Speaker 2>That is, if if herbivores can get to madrone, that's
<v Speaker 2>ain't number one good?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, So I have them drone at home.
<v Speaker 2>I've grown several on my property, and I have them
<v Speaker 2>in wire cages until they get to above the.
<v Speaker 1>What do what? The deer will avoid things like salvia
<v Speaker 1>and obviously anything that's very pungent. Probably a lot of
<v Speaker 1>composites they'll avoid too.
<v Speaker 2>If it's they're avoid certain kinds of plants, but not
<v Speaker 2>very many. They try them out. If they don't mind
<v Speaker 2>having stems broken off your salvis, they don't mind breaking
<v Speaker 2>stems off my salvia or mary regulars, regulars at home
<v Speaker 2>try them out and spit them out.
<v Speaker 1>Have they always been like this in town where there's
<v Speaker 1>just these massive deer herds?
<v Speaker 2>Oh, since I've been in Alpine and they've they come
<v Speaker 2>and go from Hankock Hill.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it depends how what the rain is like.
<v Speaker 2>It depends on where they have something to eat. It's
<v Speaker 2>like deer jumping on the highway rights of way and
<v Speaker 2>there's more water running off the highway and so they
<v Speaker 2>jump in to get some food there when it's when
<v Speaker 2>it's sparse in the pastures. So they've been coming into town.
<v Speaker 2>When I lived in town, I had three madrone trees
<v Speaker 2>and my yard and some pines and some oaks, and
<v Speaker 2>even if giants of quaria. As a matter of fact,
<v Speaker 2>Oh really, two of them growing in my yard.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah did they last?
<v Speaker 2>Somebody cut them down after I moved. Yeah, they were
<v Speaker 2>there for years. They were tall.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy. Yeah, I forgot that.
<v Speaker 2>Somebody brought me some seeds from California, so I had
<v Speaker 2>to grow them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that would do well out here. Those things move
<v Speaker 1>fast when they get there. Oh yeah, they've got water.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of plants grow faster than people think when
<v Speaker 2>they get water. That's this desert plant. Desert plants love water.
<v Speaker 2>They grow better when they get.
<v Speaker 1>And they always look so much better and native like
<v Speaker 1>in a garden. That's the thing with native that's why
<v Speaker 1>native plant currents are so important because you can create
<v Speaker 1>such a great seed bank of things that you know
<v Speaker 1>might not be doing well due to drought in the
<v Speaker 1>region or you know whatever human impacts. But anyway, well,
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk about gypsu fhiles too, because I
<v Speaker 1>think that phenomenon is really interesting, especially to people who
<v Speaker 1>may not know what that is. So gypsum is a
<v Speaker 1>sedimentary marine rock. It's much more water soluble than limestone,
<v Speaker 1>and it's you know, a remnant of you know, shallow
<v Speaker 1>water estuaries, briny area, saltwater lagoons, whatever that were existing
<v Speaker 1>you know, a long time ago, sixties seventy million years,
<v Speaker 1>and it's throughout the Chyuai Want desert. You often get
<v Speaker 1>gypsum with limestone. There's a lot of gypsum in West Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and it's like serpentine in that it's a geologic substrate
<v Speaker 1>that kind of induces speciation, like it selects for plants,
<v Speaker 1>and so you get new plant species evolving that are
<v Speaker 1>restricted to gypsum. When did you start getting into that
<v Speaker 1>and what have you documented?
<v Speaker 2>Well, that goes back to until in the late nineteen sixties.
<v Speaker 2>Actually I knew about gypsum plants before that, but point
<v Speaker 2>we had we had a thriving Department of Biology and
<v Speaker 2>lots of graduate students, and finding thesis studies for graduate students,
<v Speaker 2>you know, projects, is an ongoing thing. And so at
<v Speaker 2>one point I asked my professor Turner if he had
<v Speaker 2>any good suggestions about possible thesis topics for graduate students.
<v Speaker 2>And so he gave several suggestions about kinds of plants
<v Speaker 2>and then mentioned gypsum plants. I said, well, I'll look
<v Speaker 2>into that further. And I already knew about some early
<v Speaker 2>studies by Ivan M. Johnston in Mexico. He was a
<v Speaker 2>borad expert and he was doing some some of his
<v Speaker 2>work and in the Boltsontimpai and from Drongo into uh
<v Speaker 2>Suawan Koela in that area, and so he collected some
<v Speaker 2>gypsum plants and wrote a paper about it. And then
<v Speaker 2>another researcher that was in nineteen forty one, by the way,
<v Speaker 2>and about nineteen fifty one another person sort of took
<v Speaker 2>up what Ivan M. Johnson started in Oklahoma and south
<v Speaker 2>southeastern New Mexico and in a little bit in Transpacos, Texas.
<v Speaker 2>That's a ut waterfall. He was at University of Oklahoma
<v Speaker 2>and Oklahoma stayed at different times, so he published a
<v Speaker 2>paper in nineteen fifty one, so I had that to
<v Speaker 2>go by, But and I knew where a lot of
<v Speaker 2>the gypsum deposits were, but not all of them. So anyway,
<v Speaker 2>we started looking around for them here and then we
<v Speaker 2>started visiting the one at the Castian gypsum deposit Permia's
<v Speaker 2>permian Age south of the Guadaloupe Mountains in Culberson County,
<v Speaker 2>southeastern New Mexico. And then we started finding other gypsum
<v Speaker 2>deposits in other areas in Culberson County and Husabeth County
<v Speaker 2>and then ultimately farther south in the Transpacos and then
<v Speaker 2>Mexico all the way to San Luis, pot to see,
<v Speaker 2>and there are great gypsum deposits there. As you mentioned,
<v Speaker 2>Quatro Cienegus is a famous place and with white gypsum
<v Speaker 2>dunes like those in the southern New Mexico, and there
<v Speaker 2>are white gypsum dunes in the Transpacus as well west
<v Speaker 2>of the Guadalupe Mountains and where there are gypsum endemics
<v Speaker 2>by the way, So anyway, I started visiting these areas
<v Speaker 2>and encouraging students to go with me. We even developed
<v Speaker 2>a class called field taxonomy and field botany here, and
<v Speaker 2>so I took students to these areas and we did
<v Speaker 2>sort of class studies of using the situation the endemism
<v Speaker 2>and gypsum habitats. One can go from say the Castian
<v Speaker 2>deposits twenty thirty miles away over the Delaware Mountains and
<v Speaker 2>north of Van Horn and find different species that have
<v Speaker 2>been selected for on that gypsum deposit I go to
<v Speaker 2>another place, say in Mexico, twenty miles away, fifty miles away,
<v Speaker 2>one hundred miles away, at different gypsum deposits and on
<v Speaker 2>different different gypsum floras. So we started collecting the plants
<v Speaker 2>on these different gypsum habitats and doing papers about that.
<v Speaker 2>And then I started collaborating with Billy Turner again about that,
<v Speaker 2>and he started doing a lot of gypsum studies in
<v Speaker 2>Mexico as well.
<v Speaker 1>So you guys were probably finding a ton of new species.
<v Speaker 1>I mean this all over the place, high levels of
<v Speaker 1>diversity and endemism. And what's a relatively small geographic area
<v Speaker 1>a few hundred miles right, What were some of the
<v Speaker 1>most exciting ones you found that were just, you know,
<v Speaker 1>really fascinating.
<v Speaker 2>Oh well, there are a number of them. What's coming
<v Speaker 2>to mind right now is something that came to mind
<v Speaker 2>fairly recently when I was doing another project. I remember
<v Speaker 2>four species from one Jurassic gypsum deposit between Ohinaga and
<v Speaker 2>Shuaha City. Yeah, in in Chihuahua, about halfway there, close
<v Speaker 2>to the to a lake there, Lake Lee Lewis leon
<v Speaker 2>Forresa Granero, the dam. Uh. There was a Galordia species there.
<v Speaker 2>There was a prickly poppy, our jeminy species there. There
<v Speaker 2>was a dermatic phillim species there. Sephora used to be Sephorah,
<v Speaker 2>a mountain laurel species. Uh, sort Wellia composite species in
<v Speaker 2>a small area there. All endemics, all endemics there and
<v Speaker 2>the only place they occur on Earth today as far
<v Speaker 2>as we know. Uh, the Dermatophillum gypsophalom occurs there. We
<v Speaker 2>named we named all of them.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 2>The Gaylordia were named it Turneri and it actually the
<v Speaker 2>our gemeny is named our Geminy Turnery after Billy's wife
<v Speaker 2>sort Willia.
<v Speaker 1>Is Is there any protection for that area so far
<v Speaker 1>as you know?
<v Speaker 2>No, No, it's not, as far as I know. Gypsum
<v Speaker 2>is mind as you know, for plaster and plasterboard, it's
<v Speaker 2>a commercial product. In cement, it's a commercial product. And
<v Speaker 2>so where we found the the what became it was
<v Speaker 2>for at the time, the demount of film was in
<v Speaker 2>an area that was being mined at the time. I
<v Speaker 2>have no idea if it's still there. Maybe it is
<v Speaker 2>and maybe it isn't. But the Mexican botanists are getting
<v Speaker 2>better and better all the time, and they're really concerned
<v Speaker 2>with conservation, like like we are here great botanist in Mexico,
<v Speaker 2>and and they're doing conservation work all the time, doing
<v Speaker 2>good DNA studies and that, and so they're quite aware
<v Speaker 2>of all these things. Quadras hasn't been very well protected,
<v Speaker 2>but it's that's because there's water there and that's the
<v Speaker 2>problem there, I think. But they're all aware of that
<v Speaker 2>and trying to protect all of those things.
<v Speaker 1>Now there's a what is that weird lofa for that's
<v Speaker 1>freaky I for ci that's around that area, isn't it.
<v Speaker 1>But that's not a gypsum endemic.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if that I know of anyway. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I wasn't much in the Kectie at the time. But
<v Speaker 2>I should have been, but I wasn't. Yeah, you certainly
<v Speaker 2>got yeah, because there's so many different kinds of here.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. But going back to the gypsum endemics, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>from what I know, there's a gypsum endemic a gave
<v Speaker 1>down in Wahaka. There's I mean this, yeah, this is
<v Speaker 1>these exposures go far north to south, from Albuquerque all
<v Speaker 1>the way down to well Haka. The some of the
<v Speaker 1>traits I've noticed, especially in the more arid areas. That's
<v Speaker 1>the other thing is, Yeah, gypsum is normally it's almost
<v Speaker 1>always in arid regions where because otherwise it would just
<v Speaker 1>be washed away. But the traits that you find in
<v Speaker 1>a lot of these they're almost white. They're like a
<v Speaker 1>much more pubescent dwarfed a little bit. I imagine it's
<v Speaker 1>probably pretty stressful growing on some of these deposits, not
<v Speaker 1>a lot of nutrients. What do you think it is
<v Speaker 1>that makes growing on gypsum so stressful and causes these
<v Speaker 1>new species to evolve that require new adaptations.
<v Speaker 2>Well that there are gypsum deposits all over the world,
<v Speaker 2>as you know, and there are a lot of them
<v Speaker 2>in this area that have been exposed by erosion, and
<v Speaker 2>I guess they're still eroding a little bit. But there
<v Speaker 2>have been quite a few studies since my time anyway,
<v Speaker 2>of people looking into those questions you ask, and I
<v Speaker 2>don't think they're completely answered yet. In my experience, plants
<v Speaker 2>grow there because of the structure, and they're selected not
<v Speaker 2>because of the calcium sulfate that's in gypsum, but because
<v Speaker 2>of the structure of the gypsum habitats. That seems to
<v Speaker 2>be a restricting factor. There could be minerals as well,
<v Speaker 2>different kinds of mineral situations. That's a very good question
<v Speaker 2>why they're restricted there. So they're exposed at different times,
<v Speaker 2>and theoretically caedes are dispersed by some mechanism for related species,
<v Speaker 2>so they've managed to get to another exposed gypsum habitat
<v Speaker 2>where they can grow and other pants are selected against.
<v Speaker 2>And there are plants that grow strictly on gypsum, those
<v Speaker 2>that grow on gypsum and elsewhere. They're called gypsum vags.
<v Speaker 2>Now we call them facultative gypsyphiles in my time. And
<v Speaker 2>then there are those that never grow on gypsum. And
<v Speaker 2>as you've pointed out, the distinction between a gypsum deposit
<v Speaker 2>sometimes is like drawing a line on the floor. It's
<v Speaker 2>very stark, very stark, and so a gypsyphile will be
<v Speaker 2>on one side of the line and non gyps of
<v Speaker 2>else would be on the other side line. I've seen
<v Speaker 2>that often in Culbersom County, for example, where that permium
<v Speaker 2>gypsum is located. The kalia hispoedisima grows on gypsum and
<v Speaker 2>nowhere else in.
<v Speaker 1>My experience, Nama Carnosa too.
<v Speaker 2>Nowma Carnosa exactly. It's another good one there.
<v Speaker 1>And some of these some of these deposits just look nuts.
<v Speaker 1>I mean they look like just bright white. You could
<v Speaker 1>see them from a satellite. Uh, you know, the texture
<v Speaker 1>of concrete, like poorly mixed concrete when it's dry, like
<v Speaker 1>very rough. It's a really interesting phenomenon. I think things
<v Speaker 1>like that, especially when you point that out. The people
<v Speaker 1>who may not be interested in the in bodany initially,
<v Speaker 1>they see that and they're some of them find it
<v Speaker 1>so confounding and cool and fascinating that they you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's that you could see their eyes light up a
<v Speaker 1>little bit. They're like this there. Really, I had no
<v Speaker 1>idea that this kind of phenomenon occurred.
<v Speaker 2>They were gyps gyps and sites were neglected by botanists
<v Speaker 2>in the past, probably because they look like they're practically
<v Speaker 2>devoid of vegetation for most of the year. When it rains,
<v Speaker 2>they light up like most areas do, and then if
<v Speaker 2>a botanist happened by, they were collected, probably, but they
<v Speaker 2>were generally very undercollected. That's why we found lots of
<v Speaker 2>undescribed species there.
<v Speaker 1>I think what you said, most of the annual callists
<v Speaker 1>are gypsophiles, right, that's correct. There's maybe what a few
<v Speaker 1>that grow off of it, but most you find.
<v Speaker 2>Are in deluted gypsum, and there are some that grow
<v Speaker 2>in a kind of a clay e gypsum that actually
<v Speaker 2>we sort of realized was a true gypsophile kind of habitat.
<v Speaker 2>In this area there are gypsies clays and the southern
<v Speaker 2>Big Bend area of Cretaceous age where there were selenite
<v Speaker 2>crystals are quite obvious there, and there are gypsophiles in
<v Speaker 2>the clay, and some of those are any the calls species.
<v Speaker 1>Like like Agua Fria. Would that be a good That's a.
<v Speaker 2>Good example where those gypsies clay occur.
<v Speaker 1>There's a slea down there too.
<v Speaker 2>There's a Stanleia there and they they're sort of a
<v Speaker 2>marginal gypsyphile. Stanley Is it's known for absorbing selenium and
<v Speaker 2>is known as an uranium indicator.
<v Speaker 3>In Utah.
<v Speaker 2>There's such a thing as geological prospecting, and I got
<v Speaker 2>into some of that too because it sort of interests me.
<v Speaker 2>There are certain plants that are indicators of minerals, you
<v Speaker 2>know that that miners are interested in, like gold and
<v Speaker 2>silver and cinnabar and all kinds of other things.
<v Speaker 1>That's wild nickel, Yeah, yeah, nickel, all kinds of things. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>The that area agm Havardia. Is that a gypsyphile, that
<v Speaker 1>little cushion there.
<v Speaker 2>It's a it's a questionable gypsyphile, but it occurs in gypsum,
<v Speaker 2>but it occurs in the high a diluted gypsum gypsum
<v Speaker 2>habitats as well, but it is restricted by something and
<v Speaker 2>that area, as is the carrier recipes.
<v Speaker 1>Right. God, it's such a that is such a unique
<v Speaker 1>area from Botany too.
<v Speaker 2>It's so it is, and we revisit that all the time.
<v Speaker 2>One of our gypsyphiles was discovered there. It was a gypsyphile.
<v Speaker 2>You know this one too, the pseudo Clappya Watsonia. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it was described from a Husbeth County in a ging
<v Speaker 2>gypsyis class and as far as we knew, it was
<v Speaker 2>restricted there until it was found at that Alla Fria
<v Speaker 2>site and one little place there.
<v Speaker 1>It's just that's how big. It's a small population.
<v Speaker 2>It's a very small population there. But we found it
<v Speaker 2>again recently Kelsey Wogan and I did in big the
<v Speaker 2>National Park. So it's it's a as a further reach
<v Speaker 2>than we knew.
<v Speaker 1>Well that there's another you guys found on the population
<v Speaker 1>that one was there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well not just recently the last. Every time we
<v Speaker 2>go somewhere we find something new potentially or find something
<v Speaker 2>interesting anyway.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that that spot, the one I'm thinking of, is
<v Speaker 1>really really cool. There's really cool bad land formations, petrified
<v Speaker 1>wood everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>And it needs to be revisited time and time again.
<v Speaker 2>We also found a actually and it's fairly invasive grass species.
<v Speaker 2>It wasn't known for the Transpacus uh in that that
<v Speaker 2>habitat is that one of the drainages. It's a let
<v Speaker 2>me think of the name, it's Andropogona. It'll come to
<v Speaker 2>him in a minute.
<v Speaker 1>Was it from where? What's the origin? Africa?
<v Speaker 2>Well, it's a I'm not sure if its origin, probably,
<v Speaker 2>but it's all over Texas and South Texas. But it's
<v Speaker 2>most it's most closely known distribution prior to this was
<v Speaker 2>in Valverde County. It's not a very large range extension,
<v Speaker 2>but it is with all we knew all the grasses
<v Speaker 2>in the trans Vegas. But it's a large grass too.
<v Speaker 1>It's not a large range extension.
<v Speaker 2>Now what it could be, Well, I doubt if it's
<v Speaker 2>going to occur anywhere else. It must be restricted to
<v Speaker 2>those gypsum sites.
<v Speaker 1>It's the other plan I want to ask you about
<v Speaker 1>to Castilla Stewarty, which used to be what was that
<v Speaker 1>Hollacantha start that's a.
<v Speaker 2>Really Olacantha stewarty it used to be and now it's castilla.
<v Speaker 1>That's a unique one. Is that Would you say that's rare?
<v Speaker 2>I would say it's rare, yes, But it's widespread in
<v Speaker 2>this area. At least it occurs in Shafter and uh,
<v Speaker 2>it occurs at all Freea where you were talking about,
<v Speaker 2>occurs in big Ben National Park, and it probably occurs
<v Speaker 2>at Black Gap. I don't know why I wouldn't, but
<v Speaker 2>I'm not sure it's been found.
<v Speaker 1>There is that a limestone endemic or no?
<v Speaker 2>Well it no, it occurs in mixed deets as well.
<v Speaker 2>The Courson Volcanic Habitat and Big b A National Park.
<v Speaker 1>Those plants that are limestone endemics, like Concilius koposa or
<v Speaker 1>I mean a kind of cactus Warzantalonius has generally thought
<v Speaker 1>as that too. What do you think it is about
<v Speaker 1>limestone that makes those plants restricted to just the chemical differences,
<v Speaker 1>the pH levels I mean, obviously very different from volcanic
<v Speaker 1>But that's a really interesting phenomenon.
<v Speaker 3>It's all.
<v Speaker 2>That's an interesting question about all edaphic endemics. I don't
<v Speaker 2>think we know from Serpentine on through the things that
<v Speaker 2>you've mentioned. Evaculate in a marathon basin and a few
<v Speaker 2>other places.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, that's another cool west Why they're there.
<v Speaker 2>There should be nothing in that Devonian silicious material that
<v Speaker 2>can be absorbed by plants. Maybe there is something, but
<v Speaker 2>it's probably structure. Again, I'm just guessing. Of course, there
<v Speaker 2>are several species of cacti that are in there and
<v Speaker 2>nowhere else.
<v Speaker 1>Let's talk about that and novaculate because that's a those
<v Speaker 1>those exposures are only found in a few areas in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas, I guess. I mean they occur in other
<v Speaker 1>regions too, but in West Texas it's not somewhat limited.
<v Speaker 1>And that's another case of adaphic nimism. How many species
<v Speaker 1>you get that are a daphak endemics you can think
<v Speaker 1>of all.
<v Speaker 2>In evaculate, Yeah, I think about six or seven cactus species.
<v Speaker 2>There's a Peronicia carryoflesi Pera, Nikia Wilkinsonia, I think, And
<v Speaker 2>there are probably others that are not coming to mind
<v Speaker 2>right now, or we may not even know about because
<v Speaker 2>we really haven't botanized and evaculated as thoroughly as it
<v Speaker 2>could be.
<v Speaker 1>It kind of serious. The vidya is that it vitii
<v Speaker 1>and uh Escobaria minima.
<v Speaker 2>Escobaria now Pelisiphora minima unfortunately. Yeah, that and Hesteri. You
<v Speaker 2>mentioned that or did you? No?
<v Speaker 1>I didn't, I didn't.
<v Speaker 2>Hester I supposedly was an endemic there, but now we
<v Speaker 2>found it on another place on the on volcanic soil too,
<v Speaker 2>just over the hills.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I think I've seen it. I've seen that that
<v Speaker 1>spot is that off Longfellow.
<v Speaker 2>Maybe, Well, no, it comes over the hill on ignoist
<v Speaker 2>material south of Alpine, about ten or twelve miles curs
<v Speaker 2>on my property there as a matter of fact.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, there's a yeah, there's there's It seems like
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot to be discovered out here. It just
<v Speaker 1>requires access to the land. That's great, making friends with
<v Speaker 1>the landowner or ownership changes, and maybe someone's you know,
<v Speaker 1>more amenable to letting botanis on to look at things.
<v Speaker 1>Do you what do you think there's I noticed that
<v Speaker 1>there was from what I hear, there was a certain
<v Speaker 1>decade at which fear of letting people on your land
<v Speaker 1>became more prominent. Was that after Endangered Species Act? Or
<v Speaker 1>when did the flavor kind of change?
<v Speaker 2>And my experience it was after the Endangered Species Act?
<v Speaker 2>And and of course the venters I think had some
<v Speaker 2>reservations about having rare things discovered because they might be
<v Speaker 2>controlled by the federal government. That's the sort of the
<v Speaker 2>word I get.
<v Speaker 1>Anyway, But that's not a reality.
<v Speaker 2>At least endangered species don't jump fences, and so the
<v Speaker 2>rules are different, the federal and the state rules.
<v Speaker 1>The dangered plant species versus.
<v Speaker 2>And animals are different from plants, and so there is
<v Speaker 2>no problem in dangered species, but there's just the same
<v Speaker 2>I think there's a fear of that.
<v Speaker 1>The fear remains that, yeah, a lot more guarded. So
<v Speaker 1>you saw people becoming a lot more guarded about access
<v Speaker 1>after that, whereas before because a lot of these private
<v Speaker 1>parcels are huge and people may not even live on
<v Speaker 1>them or anywhere near them, and so you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>prior to that, I could them being like, sure, go out,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just after establishing a certain sense of trust.
<v Speaker 1>But then I guess what was in dangered species like
<v Speaker 1>early seventies Nixon.
<v Speaker 2>I think nineteen seventy three if I remember correctly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, now, but you've probably seen it's probably been a
<v Speaker 1>lot harder to gain access to some of these places.
<v Speaker 2>Now, Yeah, early on too, I started trying to locate
<v Speaker 2>all of those supposedly rare species in the Transpacus. After
<v Speaker 2>I became provincial enough to have to concentrate on this area.
<v Speaker 2>Didn't have the money to go all over from grant support.
<v Speaker 2>So one of the things I like to do is
<v Speaker 2>try to find out the distributions of all and the
<v Speaker 2>localities of all of the supposedly rare or nearly rare species.
<v Speaker 2>So it was fun looking in the field for those,
<v Speaker 2>but you still couldn't go everywhere. I could do a
<v Speaker 2>lot of work in BigMan National Park because you could
<v Speaker 2>get permits there from the government, and in state parks
<v Speaker 2>we could go there.
<v Speaker 1>What are what were what are some species that would
<v Speaker 1>be good, you know, to put on a bucket list
<v Speaker 1>if anyone's ever able to get access that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you would be curious about, like I wonder if that
<v Speaker 1>population is still extent, or if it's how it's doing whatever.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I said, if you knew where they were, that's
<v Speaker 2>one of the main problems. So I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>to say to answer that.
<v Speaker 1>So a lot of these the distribution is just not
<v Speaker 1>fully Yeah, the.
<v Speaker 2>Distribution isn't known and just as just as taxonomy isn't
<v Speaker 2>well known in some areas, because we know that distributions
<v Speaker 2>of some species are very restricted. M like the one
<v Speaker 2>that was recently discovered, right, yeah, well we'll get tourculate
<v Speaker 2>by radiator.
<v Speaker 1>But it sounds like there's big there's big blank parcels
<v Speaker 1>on the map for some some of these distributions. There
<v Speaker 1>very well could be range expansions.
<v Speaker 2>That's definitely true.
<v Speaker 1>Other unknown populations, that's just there's no access, there's no
<v Speaker 1>way of knowing they're there, and.
<v Speaker 2>We've we've documented that in some cases by but access
<v Speaker 2>we didn't have before. For example, a few ranches. There
<v Speaker 2>is a ranching in the Big Band area south of here,
<v Speaker 2>south of Alpine, where there is there is some access
<v Speaker 2>now from the from the ranching conglomerate, and we've been
<v Speaker 2>able to do some botanizing there fairly recently.
<v Speaker 1>There was another species of composite discovered a few years ago,
<v Speaker 1>a population uh down there right, what was that was it?
<v Speaker 2>It was actually no from Mexico before that. It's a
<v Speaker 2>Mexican species on the Kueva Nueva Leoned Khela border in
<v Speaker 2>that area. Highly restricted species, and it was collected in
<v Speaker 2>nineteen twenty nine by a ranch foreman on that ranch
<v Speaker 2>who collected plants. We have thousands of his collections in
<v Speaker 2>this heerberium. It was a ranch foreman and twenty eight
<v Speaker 2>in the twenties and early thirties collected fossils and all that.
<v Speaker 2>He was interested in plants, so he made two plant
<v Speaker 2>collections of this platy limit Palmerum. They're in this herberium,
<v Speaker 2>but we didn't know what they were never heard of
<v Speaker 2>plaidy Limo Palmer myself. So when Billy Turner was working
<v Speaker 2>in the Herberium he came to those, he didn't know
<v Speaker 2>what it was either, so he took them to Austin,
<v Speaker 2>where they have a wide collection of Latin American plants,
<v Speaker 2>especially Mexican species, and he found out what it was.
<v Speaker 2>And of course then we knew where it exists here,
<v Speaker 2>but we didn't have access, so we all looked for
<v Speaker 2>it along the road for a number of years. This
<v Speaker 2>is one of the stories I could.
<v Speaker 3>Tell, never found it.
<v Speaker 2>Every time I went south, we Shirley and I we
<v Speaker 2>would jump out and I would walk a distance here
<v Speaker 2>there I hadn't walked before looking walk on the road side,
<v Speaker 2>walking the roadside because exactly that's where we do a
<v Speaker 2>lot of botanizing, because the same plans that occur across
<v Speaker 2>the fencer on the road side usually so so that's
<v Speaker 2>where we do a lot of botanizing. And the water
<v Speaker 2>is better there anyway, because it runs all the pavement.
<v Speaker 2>So I would look there forever and ever never found it.
<v Speaker 2>So one day, this is part of the story. The
<v Speaker 2>Range Animal Science Department had access to this this this
<v Speaker 2>ranch doing some range vegetation and a range range work
<v Speaker 2>there and other kinds of experimentals things they were doing.
<v Speaker 2>And a graduates didn't walked in here, and what happened
<v Speaker 2>to know who he was because we'd met before and
<v Speaker 2>he was interested in plants and he was doing a
<v Speaker 2>transact for this person that was doing range research there.
<v Speaker 2>So in a little paper towel, wet papertail, he had
<v Speaker 2>this plant and he opened it up and I've recognized
<v Speaker 2>it immediately, his platy limba palm rod.
<v Speaker 1>I've been the one. It was the one you've been
<v Speaker 1>looking for exactly eighty years.
<v Speaker 2>God, it was unknown eighty years. So that's an interesting
<v Speaker 2>little story. So then he started looking around and we
<v Speaker 2>were luckily invited to join him on this ranch, and
<v Speaker 2>we looked on throughout a lot of the area anyway,
<v Speaker 2>and found that it's quite abundant there, but it's highly
<v Speaker 2>restricted to one soil type on that ranch. So it's
<v Speaker 2>another edaphic endemic. What is it to limestone, Well, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's not it's not rocky, but it's a it's a
<v Speaker 2>elementary deposit of a certain kind. And I don't know
<v Speaker 2>that much about soils. It has a name you know,
<v Speaker 2>the soil scientists have a name for it, and that's
<v Speaker 2>I think it's posted on I'm just on a poster
<v Speaker 2>oute in the hall. There was Chris Jackson who made
<v Speaker 2>you rediscovered that a graduate student here.
<v Speaker 1>At so was he a botanist or just arranged signce
<v Speaker 1>he was.
<v Speaker 2>Doing a range science experiment. They wound up doing his
<v Speaker 2>thesis concerning that platy Limo Palmer, though his chromosome number
<v Speaker 2>was unknown and the whole kinds of thing. Actually, we
<v Speaker 2>knew the chromosome number before we've re located it here
<v Speaker 2>because new Mexico botanist Rich Spelenberg came across it in
<v Speaker 2>Mexico and collected buds in Mexico and brought them to me,
<v Speaker 2>left him on the table right there on the table
<v Speaker 2>because he had to go back to Los Crusis. So
<v Speaker 2>I got a count from his buds, and so we
<v Speaker 2>already knew the chromosome number from Mexico. But it's the
<v Speaker 2>same thing here.
<v Speaker 1>Did they do you guys publish a paper on this?
<v Speaker 2>Well it's published, yeah, yeah, and a new new.
<v Speaker 1>Populations that are rediscovered yep.
<v Speaker 2>That's Paturner published that, and because he knew what it
<v Speaker 2>was in the year two thousand and then the chromosome
<v Speaker 2>number is published in a different paper.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>And then and so information about that. Chris Jackson, as
<v Speaker 2>far as I know, hasn't published his thesis.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, that's wild though, eighty eight years lost.
<v Speaker 2>It's there are many things yet to be found.
<v Speaker 1>Did you guys try growing that one from seed?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? It grows from seed. It actually has a very
<v Speaker 2>long route and it goes very deep in alluvial soil.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so that's that might be one. It's restricted to that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Very soon after that, I found it roadside too.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I trying to find there. I found Paganam Mexicanum nearby.
<v Speaker 2>Paganam Mexican Kingdom locale. It's across the fence from there, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>but it's farther up the road. Well, it's right there too,
<v Speaker 2>and I'll give you further directions where you can find
<v Speaker 2>a couple of plants.
<v Speaker 1>It's further Mexican.
<v Speaker 2>Well, it's the better population that we found ultimately at
<v Speaker 2>roadside was further north from the Paganum locality. But we
<v Speaker 2>also finally located it thanks to Kelsey's good eyes. Close
<v Speaker 2>to that Piganem Mexicanum locality right adjacent to it. In fact, Wow,
<v Speaker 2>I'll give you some directions.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, yeah, I'll be kidding.
<v Speaker 2>But it's the rain first. Yeah, hopefully it didn't even
<v Speaker 2>show up last year.
<v Speaker 1>It's been Is this the worst? Is this the driest
<v Speaker 1>year you've seen since you've been there? One of them?
<v Speaker 1>Or what?
<v Speaker 2>Everyone seems drier than the other. But right now I
<v Speaker 2>would say, yes, you know there are there are desert
<v Speaker 2>plants that are dying all over.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, So I think it's fitting for the end
<v Speaker 1>of the conversation here to talk about this new composite
<v Speaker 1>species that was discovered last year. I mean it's only
<v Speaker 1>been known to science for a year oviculate by radiata,
<v Speaker 1>which you actually have already grown from seed. You successfully
<v Speaker 1>grew it. I think that's interesting too. What do you yeah,
<v Speaker 1>what would I mean, You've been here for so long
<v Speaker 1>you to still think that there's new species out there
<v Speaker 1>to be described, especially in a national park which you
<v Speaker 1>would assume has already been thoroughly surveyed. What did you
<v Speaker 1>think of that?
<v Speaker 3>Well?
<v Speaker 2>I thought it was remarkable, predicted, predictable that there would
<v Speaker 2>be new things discovered. I even told her that that
<v Speaker 2>manly when we were dealing with the white flowered kind
<v Speaker 2>of serious a while before. But yeah, that's that's a
<v Speaker 2>remarkable find and a remarkable discovery.
<v Speaker 1>And it's it's so unique too. I mean, it's it's uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, sunflower family ast racy. It's only got anybody listening.
<v Speaker 1>It's got these Really it's a really wooly plant, as
<v Speaker 1>you would expect from a limestone desert area, and it's
<v Speaker 1>got only two to three ray floor its per head,
<v Speaker 1>so like these, and they look like these long what
<v Speaker 1>someone who doesn't know about the sunflower family intricacies might
<v Speaker 1>think is just a pedal, but two or three of
<v Speaker 1>these long, candy cane striped rays that are almost twice
<v Speaker 1>as long as the flower head coming out of these heads.
<v Speaker 1>It's really weird. It's a really bizarre plant.
<v Speaker 2>And not only is it restricted and distribution, and it's
<v Speaker 2>remarkable for that reason, but as you just said, it's
<v Speaker 2>a remarkable discovery for the whole family pastor racey because
<v Speaker 2>of its position.
<v Speaker 1>And came up close to silostrophy.
<v Speaker 2>Closest to p ssilostrophy, that's correct, but not really close
<v Speaker 2>to silostrophy, and so within that subtribe of composity. It's
<v Speaker 2>an unusual discovery, and of course there's remarkable morphology as well.
<v Speaker 1>Is are there any guesses or has anybody talked about
<v Speaker 1>how how long ago it might may have diverged from ssilostrophy.
<v Speaker 2>I think we've all guessed about that, I think, and
<v Speaker 2>of course Isaac lictor Mark has a good idea from
<v Speaker 2>the DNA sequencing data that it's primitive, but how long
<v Speaker 2>it's always hard to tell. I think we need to
<v Speaker 2>be sure about other distributions or distributional rangees, because it's
<v Speaker 2>it's so inconspicuous that and it's a it's a winter
<v Speaker 2>blooming femeral, a very delicate annual apparently judging from its
<v Speaker 2>root system, we have real short, slender, little root that
<v Speaker 2>moodanists are not out at that time of year, looking
<v Speaker 2>around very much and little. As you mentioned already, it's
<v Speaker 2>very small and wooly, covered with hair, whitish and resemble
<v Speaker 2>seedlings of many other wooly plants, plants that have a
<v Speaker 2>lot of pubescentce wooly pubescence in the Shuahuan dead northern
<v Speaker 2>Chiwuahuan does it region.
<v Speaker 1>It's weird that a blooms in winter and this is
<v Speaker 1>not normally a winter rainfall area.
<v Speaker 2>It's not, but even though it rains a little bit
<v Speaker 2>or snows are used to at least in the fall
<v Speaker 2>late fall and in the winter as well. Sometimes pretty
<v Speaker 2>good snowfalls in February in the rain in February. But
<v Speaker 2>we have other winter blooming species here as far as
<v Speaker 2>I can remember, all of them are perennial, but they
<v Speaker 2>bloom in the winter, and we're poorly known too until recently.
<v Speaker 2>There's a cactus variety that occurs in blooms in February
<v Speaker 2>as well. What is which one is that ancestral cactus
<v Speaker 2>sclero cactus depending on your terminology me to rerevia Mattis
<v Speaker 2>variety pallida, which we described.
<v Speaker 1>Here, and it's got white flowers or as.
<v Speaker 2>White flowers, and it's a limestone endemic apparently, but it
<v Speaker 2>occurs in minute to vaculate as well.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, how rare.
<v Speaker 2>It's widespread, and it's difficult to say how rare it
<v Speaker 2>is because of that, but it's one rarely encounters it
<v Speaker 2>in limestone. It seems to be quite rare, s put
<v Speaker 2>it that way.
<v Speaker 1>So it's got a broad distribution, but it's just sporadic
<v Speaker 1>or what sporadic and the white flower do you think
<v Speaker 1>that's a Is that some sort of special specialization towards
<v Speaker 1>moths or is it?
<v Speaker 2>That's always a good question. It's it's some and a
<v Speaker 2>genetic accident. Of course it was selected for and why
<v Speaker 2>It's always hard to determine, but that that makes sense
<v Speaker 2>to me, both of those things.
<v Speaker 1>Is it a night bloomer do you know?
<v Speaker 2>No, it's not a night bloomer as far as I know,
<v Speaker 2>And we have grown it too from seed and I've
<v Speaker 2>I've looked at it and watched it. But cratypuscular activity.
<v Speaker 2>It could be it could be involved with moss. I
<v Speaker 2>don't know. But it's relatives are yellow flowered mm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>I've always wondered about that. Why certain flowers or certain
<v Speaker 1>plants will have the majority of their population, you know,
<v Speaker 1>a color, and then there's this, you know, phenotype that
<v Speaker 1>pops up that's white. It's like, what it's what selects
<v Speaker 1>for that? I mean, I could just think of moths,
<v Speaker 1>but maybe there's other things selecting for it too, who knows?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, or maybe there is no. It could still be
<v Speaker 2>an accident and it could be persisting for no selective reason.
<v Speaker 2>So it's it's always difficult to say that that we can.
<v Speaker 2>We know a lot of instances where certain things seem
<v Speaker 2>to be true. But there are a lot of white
<v Speaker 2>flowered individuals and populations of all kinds. I was looking
<v Speaker 2>into that recently in connection with some other things that
<v Speaker 2>we were doing, including a white flowered strawberry patalia. One
<v Speaker 2>white flowered strawberry patalia when thousands, tens of thousands of
<v Speaker 2>individuals are always deep magenta in color, and so there's
<v Speaker 2>all those betaline pigments are present or else they it's
<v Speaker 2>a it's a it's an accident, it's a I hate
<v Speaker 2>to call it a mutation, but it's a phenotype thing there.
<v Speaker 2>And it has more than one pigment in there too,
<v Speaker 2>probably so it.
<v Speaker 1>May hop up, but it doesn't become dominant in the
<v Speaker 1>population lesson I select for it. So I do want
<v Speaker 1>to get back to a vicula. But before I forget,
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk a little bit, just a little
<v Speaker 1>bit on moth pollination, because there's a lot of moth
<v Speaker 1>pollination in the Chihuahua desert, which I think is fascinating.
<v Speaker 1>Salvia white housey eye. Have you noticed I've seen that
<v Speaker 1>getting pollinated by sphinx moths.
<v Speaker 2>Oh really, I have not seen that.
<v Speaker 1>Manda villa. What is that out here? No, macrosciphon mana macrocyphone.
<v Speaker 1>There's a ton.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's several of them actually, all.
<v Speaker 1>The onantheras, all the nicktags. It's a really have there
<v Speaker 1>been many people studying that.
<v Speaker 2>Siphon and gloss. There are people who study that and
<v Speaker 2>I don't know enough about.
<v Speaker 1>It too, but I mean people coming through sewel Ross
<v Speaker 1>who studied it or hads.
<v Speaker 2>No, not in not far as I know, not specifically that,
<v Speaker 2>but people who do come here and visit here and
<v Speaker 2>visit the herbarium study those kinds of things.
<v Speaker 1>There's a menadora including.
<v Speaker 2>The caterpillars, you know the product of these moths.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the menadora. There's a moth pollinated menadora. That's laundrifa
<v Speaker 1>flora acua xanthees. Uh what amsonia?
<v Speaker 2>Right?
<v Speaker 1>So much good stuff? Okay, anyway, okay, so let's get
<v Speaker 1>back to Well, that's like a whole podcast on its
<v Speaker 1>on its own. Yeah, it seems insane to touch on
<v Speaker 1>it for but I just wanted to put it out
<v Speaker 1>there to get in people's brains so this so viculous.
<v Speaker 1>So you grew this too. The seeds are tiny on
<v Speaker 1>this new species, but really really small. Correct need a
<v Speaker 1>dissecting sculpt to look at them. What what did you know?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I'm amazed that you were able to not surprised,
<v Speaker 1>but amazed you were able to grow this. What was
<v Speaker 1>your method? What do you what? Do they seem to need?
<v Speaker 2>Just the usual method for me is fotting medium, try
<v Speaker 2>several seeds. Of course, what I did first was to
<v Speaker 2>get filled the kenes or sipsila, that's the fruits of
<v Speaker 2>a composite, and the seed is a single seeded fruit
<v Speaker 2>on the inside of the kene, so we can call
<v Speaker 2>them seeds just for and if they're filled, then you
<v Speaker 2>can assume that they're fertile and should germinate. But they
<v Speaker 2>may not be fertile just because they're filled, so they
<v Speaker 2>have to test that. And these winter annuals logically could
<v Speaker 2>require a cold season to overcome dormancy, and for that
<v Speaker 2>we do coal stratification and I use just refrigerator temperatures
<v Speaker 2>to substitute for formal coal stratification, lack in a potting
<v Speaker 2>medium and under chill temperatures. So that seems to work
<v Speaker 2>for a lot of navy plants. So I did the
<v Speaker 2>usual thing there, there's nothing extra. But I did plant
<v Speaker 2>several seeds in several pots before any of them germinated,
<v Speaker 2>and all the time they were in the refrigerator. So
<v Speaker 2>the coal stratification or the refrigerator temperatures after about three
<v Speaker 2>months seemed to be more effective. It could just be
<v Speaker 2>an artifact of time. I have no idea, really, But
<v Speaker 2>then I got a pot to germinate with about seven seeds.
<v Speaker 2>I put about maybe ten, I don't remember, and some
<v Speaker 2>of them damped off right away. It's as though the
<v Speaker 2>little tiny radicals couldn't penetrate the substrate.
<v Speaker 3>That's the way it looked.
<v Speaker 2>And of course I'm growing these at home in a
<v Speaker 2>window sill where I could look at them as often
<v Speaker 2>as necessary, and at ease facing window exactly southeast. Well
<v Speaker 2>not even a greenow. They just loved that early morning sun.
<v Speaker 2>Almost everything does. So anyway, four of them finally survived,
<v Speaker 2>four of the little seedlings, and one grew faster than
<v Speaker 2>the others, and others three and then the one quickly overcame.
<v Speaker 2>We'll say two of them established very nicely and pretty
<v Speaker 2>good sized plants. And the third and fourth were lagging behind,
<v Speaker 2>but probably crowded out and shaded too much by the
<v Speaker 2>larger plants. But I had four plants originally, and that's it.
<v Speaker 1>And so when you were cold stratifying these was it
<v Speaker 1>Were they in soil or just just bare seeds.
<v Speaker 2>In a in paper And actually it's quite envelope envelopes.
<v Speaker 2>We used to put seeds always in paper, but in
<v Speaker 2>a refrigerator. I put them in a plastic bag as
<v Speaker 2>if lock and I don't zip it shut in case
<v Speaker 2>if it don't want water to accumulate. But it protects
<v Speaker 2>them a little bit in the paper from the cold
<v Speaker 2>temperatures and keeps them a tiny bit moist or moist.
<v Speaker 1>It's alister. You want them to be a slightly moist,
<v Speaker 1>not wet, but moist, and that helps with the cold.
<v Speaker 2>If I were doing real colt ratification with wallets, let's
<v Speaker 2>say native wallets, I would put them in the maybe
<v Speaker 2>a tray and potting medium, moisten the potting medium, and
<v Speaker 2>put them in a refrigerator and they would if you
<v Speaker 2>didn't get the mouth, they'd probably germinate for very long. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>under those conditions. The moisture, so just.
<v Speaker 1>Three months in a paper envelope in the fridge, and
<v Speaker 1>that seemed to work well.
<v Speaker 2>That worked for these and it could be that they
<v Speaker 2>would have maybe those particular ones would have germinated. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>this is not scientific, you know, we would do trial
<v Speaker 2>and error and both kinds of things. But that's that's
<v Speaker 2>just a standard thing that I do, is called stratification,
<v Speaker 2>so that I call it anyway in the refrigerator because
<v Speaker 2>it's required for so many of our natives. Anyway, up
<v Speaker 2>they came, and I do have a few more seeds,
<v Speaker 2>so I'll try try it again.
<v Speaker 1>And then you could probably get seeds off the one,
<v Speaker 1>this one that you've got growing now too.
<v Speaker 2>Well, if you have two plants. But also found out
<v Speaker 2>by growing them that they're self incompatible. And we didn't
<v Speaker 2>know any of the biology about Ovicula by radiator because
<v Speaker 2>it was, as you noted, it was discovered in March
<v Speaker 2>March second by this remarkable pork volunteer, and and so
<v Speaker 2>there was no in it. Right away. It got very
<v Speaker 2>hot and dry in its habitat, and it started messing
<v Speaker 2>right away, and before long it was gone, and there
<v Speaker 2>was just nothing left of it except the wooly little
<v Speaker 2>balls that were present there, and so we know, but
<v Speaker 2>nothing biological about it, you know, it's it's life history.
<v Speaker 3>How did we know that much?
<v Speaker 1>How do you think? Because that pod that I saw,
<v Speaker 1>there's what four individuals in there? How'd you figure out
<v Speaker 1>it was self incompatible?
<v Speaker 2>There was only two plants in flower at the time,
<v Speaker 2>and something has to pollinate them, or something has to
<v Speaker 2>pollinate them, you know, like an insect of some kind.
<v Speaker 2>But there are no insects as far as I know
<v Speaker 2>in my window cell. And what I did was take
<v Speaker 2>the older plants, the older heads of the plants that
<v Speaker 2>had been there long enough to develop the fruits, and
<v Speaker 2>look in the heads. There are seven of them, I think,
<v Speaker 2>and not a single seed developed. At the same time,
<v Speaker 2>I also crossed some of the two plants that were
<v Speaker 2>in flower and mark them with reds, which is a
<v Speaker 2>habit I used to do to mark things. That's one
<v Speaker 2>good way to mark them, tie a thread around the
<v Speaker 2>head or around the peduncle of the head, so way
<v Speaker 2>I did with prittlies and other composites. But these were
<v Speaker 2>too small to do that, so it was not an
<v Speaker 2>absolutely correct kind of thing. And then later, as a
<v Speaker 2>matter of fact, just less than a week ago, I
<v Speaker 2>picked those heads, and I haven't examined them yet, so
<v Speaker 2>we can find out if they can be artificially crossed
<v Speaker 2>that way.
<v Speaker 1>What were you using to artificially cross them?
<v Speaker 2>I rubbed the heads together. Okay, there are all kinds
<v Speaker 2>of ways to do it, the brush or any kind
<v Speaker 2>of thing to get pollen from one to the other
<v Speaker 2>and put them on the stigmas of developing disc flowers.
<v Speaker 2>So anything that works for that.
<v Speaker 1>Are the marginal floorrets, because the marginal floorts are just pistilate, right.
<v Speaker 2>The marginal floorits are pistolate, two or three of them,
<v Speaker 2>and they two are fertile. They're pistelate and fertile. And
<v Speaker 2>I could determine that from the original material that we
<v Speaker 2>had to describe write a description for the species.
<v Speaker 1>And the disc floor its are hermaphroditic but fertile. Correct.
<v Speaker 1>And so these seeds, I mean that one growing now
<v Speaker 1>might be the only one in existence at this very
<v Speaker 1>dry time of year.
<v Speaker 2>So far as we know, the only they're the only
<v Speaker 2>plants living today, that's correct.
<v Speaker 1>That's not in seed form, right, The rest are just.
<v Speaker 2>Not in seed form, that's correct.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder how long the seeds if some of these
<v Speaker 1>can live.
<v Speaker 2>It's a good, good question we need we'd like to
<v Speaker 2>find that out, of course, and we can do it
<v Speaker 2>experimentally given a little time. But logically, you know, just
<v Speaker 2>from other kinds of composites, these seed coats are very thin,
<v Speaker 2>so I expect fability is not very long, maybe a
<v Speaker 2>year or two or three or four.
<v Speaker 1>Because I normally think it doesert plants having very long
<v Speaker 1>lived seeds.
<v Speaker 2>But they do, and especially if they have fairly thick
<v Speaker 2>seed coverings. There's more than just being you know, there
<v Speaker 2>are different kinds of dormancy, of course, and one of
<v Speaker 2>the most effective in these desert climates is mechanical dormancy
<v Speaker 2>through thick sea sick seed coats. All of our legumes
<v Speaker 2>have fairly thick seed coats, right to me. Overcome that
<v Speaker 2>easily by filing or snipping the seed coats drems. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>rub them on a brick.
<v Speaker 1>I just did that with theirmount of Phylum I collected
<v Speaker 1>near Fort Davis. And yeah, the population out here even
<v Speaker 1>looks like a different ecotype. It's a much hairer than
<v Speaker 1>you'd find.
<v Speaker 2>This is Mountain Laurel, cold hardy compared to Central Xas.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Texas they are all the ones I scarfight came up,
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, I want.
<v Speaker 2>To how did you do it?
<v Speaker 1>Just a dre Oh yeah, yeah, held it in like
<v Speaker 1>a plumber's wrench, and then you could use advice too,
<v Speaker 1>and then.
<v Speaker 2>Just went in there and smart that is. I use
<v Speaker 2>a three corner file, just.
<v Speaker 1>A dremal, just to the point that you can see
<v Speaker 1>the endosperm.
<v Speaker 2>And commercially, people that do that use an acid, sulfuric acid,
<v Speaker 2>and yeah, it's the seed coats that way, but it's
<v Speaker 2>kind of a nasty way to do it to me.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, that's a that thermount of phylum that you
<v Speaker 1>found on gyps And just going back to that, is
<v Speaker 1>that same species or is it a different one that's
<v Speaker 1>in the Guadeloupees.
<v Speaker 2>It's a different subspecies, different or as we describe them, varieties.
<v Speaker 1>But they look notably, they're quite.
<v Speaker 2>Similar in appearance, but they are different enough to be
<v Speaker 2>at least and of course they're geographically isolated, and so
<v Speaker 2>they're different enough for us to call them varieties.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder how that species would do in cultivation, because
<v Speaker 1>it seems like it would probably be a great horticultural
<v Speaker 1>specimen from their plant.
<v Speaker 2>I think it would be yes, I don't have any
<v Speaker 2>viable seeds of either one of them. Now we do
<v Speaker 2>have the.
<v Speaker 3>Specialist or her burial.
<v Speaker 1>You've got to go out there and get get some
<v Speaker 1>seeds either one of those populations.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I can tell you exactly where it is in
<v Speaker 2>Mexico and.
<v Speaker 1>How far over the border from, oh, you know, thirty minutes.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's I can look on the label. I
<v Speaker 2>think it's a certain number of miles from the railroad
<v Speaker 2>tracks across the highway.
<v Speaker 1>M hmm, yeah, I've seen that special.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so it's then you can't miss it because it's
<v Speaker 2>right by the road.
<v Speaker 1>And it probably looks unique too.
<v Speaker 2>Just oh yeah really, and they are big shrubs.
<v Speaker 1>Any plant person would probably stop and be like, let's chat.
<v Speaker 1>So well, I could talk to you for another three
<v Speaker 1>hours here, but I won't do that to you. So
<v Speaker 1>I really appreciate you being willing to come on to
<v Speaker 1>this podcast. Is there anything you'd like to say before
<v Speaker 1>we dip out here or any inspiring words to young
<v Speaker 1>people who are getting excited on Texas.
<v Speaker 2>By plants are great. It's always something something exciting going
<v Speaker 2>on with plants.
<v Speaker 1>Try to grow them, collect their Buryingboucher's.
<v Speaker 2>Feel work, growing plants, all of those things. There are
<v Speaker 2>many things that aren't known yet
<v Speaker 1>As we've seen species being discovered, and yeah, well all right, well,
<v Speaker 1>doctor Powell, thank you so much, and everybody else they
<v Speaker 1>have agrest today