Guayusa Rants

<v Speaker 1>M hmmm, welcome to the crime pace. But body doesn't podcast.
<v Speaker 1>That's some that's some smooth ship. That's nice. I like
<v Speaker 1>to I like to listen to be Humphrey every once
<v Speaker 1>in a while. You know, she's an amazing musician on
<v Speaker 1>the blue Note label. Anyway, all right, we can finish
<v Speaker 1>off with that. What's going on? Welcome back? I just uh,
<v Speaker 1>I just got back from I was an ecuador Alan
<v Speaker 1>and Mandy invited me to come down there and be
<v Speaker 1>the plant person on a little uh like mycology tour
<v Speaker 1>they were doing down there, and it ended up being, uh,
<v Speaker 1>it was a fucking wonderful time. It was. I met
<v Speaker 1>a lot of cool people, spent the last two weeks
<v Speaker 1>hanging out with like nerds of the highest order. But great,
<v Speaker 1>I mean great conversations, mentally stimulating conversations. I learned a
<v Speaker 1>ship ton just from being down in that kind of
<v Speaker 1>habitat and observing the plants. Uh, And I said, wow,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the blue the tropical blueberry diversity is really wild,
<v Speaker 1>as well as members of the orders in Gibrelei's the
<v Speaker 1>Ginger order and all the families in there. You know,
<v Speaker 1>morantasy uh, helicony, ac cost they s et cetera Cyclant.
<v Speaker 1>They see the Panama hat family. They look so much
<v Speaker 1>like palms at first glance. Uh, and then you get
<v Speaker 1>up close and realize this is not a palm, and
<v Speaker 1>the inflorescence is wild and they can be the members
<v Speaker 1>of Cyclant, Theacey. We'll get into this later, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>they were like vining epiphytes. There were you know, small
<v Speaker 1>tree like things. The only kind of hint that they're
<v Speaker 1>not palms comes in the leaf shape. They've got this
<v Speaker 1>this it looks like a palm frond that splits into
<v Speaker 1>a v wild shit. That was down there with herpers
<v Speaker 1>I was down there with I mean, just other biologists.
<v Speaker 1>I guess it was technically an eco tour that they
<v Speaker 1>were offering, but almost everybody on this tour, on this
<v Speaker 1>thing was whatever to fuck you call it. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it was you know, it was not it was not
<v Speaker 1>like fluffy and h click baity or any of that.
<v Speaker 1>You know. It was like pretty in depth learning and
<v Speaker 1>extremely educational and just fucking fun. But basically everybody on
<v Speaker 1>it was some sort of you know, had some sort
<v Speaker 1>of biological background or not. Everybody. There were some people
<v Speaker 1>that didn't, but you know, and everybody got afforded the
<v Speaker 1>chance to learn. It wasn't like there was you know,
<v Speaker 1>like it was h like to be to go on it.
<v Speaker 1>You didn't need to be extremely well versed in any
<v Speaker 1>of this stuff already, but you certainly would be by
<v Speaker 1>the time you left. And man, it was just it
<v Speaker 1>was so fucking great. You know, it was a little
<v Speaker 1>more plush than I would have you know, been traveling.
<v Speaker 1>And I mean I normally am like when I go somewhere,
<v Speaker 1>I'm living out of a beat up rental rental car
<v Speaker 1>and just fucking you know, just not for changing my clothes,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm just like, you know, wake up, get caffeinated,
<v Speaker 1>eat some food, pack some food, then got in on
<v Speaker 1>the field for ten hours and just bust ass to
<v Speaker 1>take you know, three thousand photos, make notes, collect some
<v Speaker 1>herbarium specimens. Whatever. This was a little more relaxed, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, they fed us and everything. It was kind
<v Speaker 1>of cool, but yeah, it was. It was an expenses
<v Speaker 1>paid trip to just go down there and basically be
<v Speaker 1>the botany person, be the plant the plant person, which
<v Speaker 1>when I you know, when it comes down to it,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, tropical botany is so new to me. I
<v Speaker 1>learned so much in this trip. But there's there's families
<v Speaker 1>that I had no prior experience with, like cost aacy,
<v Speaker 1>you know, these weird monoca families, myriantasy cyclant the see
<v Speaker 1>another great example, uh erythroxylce the coca family, the cocaine family,
<v Speaker 1>which I guess has four genea. Almost all the species
<v Speaker 1>are in Erythroxylum, which is the erythroxylum whatever. However, I
<v Speaker 1>think Erythroxylum so really the way to pronounce it, it's
<v Speaker 1>a lot easier. But those are that's the like the
<v Speaker 1>largest genus in a family. And there's a couple other ones.
<v Speaker 1>I guess there's disjunkt Erythroxylum in Africa, which I did
<v Speaker 1>not I did not know, but these are you know,
<v Speaker 1>these are like montane, very wet, very humid. It was
<v Speaker 1>an I opener for me too in the sense that
<v Speaker 1>I picture the Amazon. We were in Upper Amazon, to
<v Speaker 1>be fair, we were like three thousand feet God, that
<v Speaker 1>wonderful South Texas there. It smells like burning plastic can
<v Speaker 1>garbage fire. It is such a fucking dystopia being back here. Man,
<v Speaker 1>it has been unreal. Was It's just like they go
<v Speaker 1>to fucking Walmart to return this speaker, which I should
<v Speaker 1>you know, I would love to patronize an independent business.
<v Speaker 1>But I'm in fucking South Texas, so there's nothing down here.
<v Speaker 1>Walmart is what we got. I have to go there.
<v Speaker 1>I have to fucking it's I'm that's my own hell.
<v Speaker 1>Like this is punishment for some shit I did, probably
<v Speaker 1>a decade ago. I don't know, but I'm being punished.
<v Speaker 1>I feel like I'm being spiritually punned. I had to
<v Speaker 1>go to Walmart. I bring my kid with me. I say,
<v Speaker 1>you're coming with me, you know, for emotional support, getting
<v Speaker 1>so I put her on my shoulders. We go into
<v Speaker 1>fucking Walmart, and I'm dying the minute I walk in.
<v Speaker 1>I can smell the off gassing plastic, the fluorescent lights,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the consumers being farmed. We're all being farmed
<v Speaker 1>here in the United States. It's part of the dystopia.
<v Speaker 1>I hope you're enjoying it. Uh. And in South Texas especially,
<v Speaker 1>it feels like the Matrix. I feel like I'm living
<v Speaker 1>in the matrix, like a nineteen fifty style. It's so
<v Speaker 1>fucking dark, you know what, I should be taking this
<v Speaker 1>up with my shrink, not you. But this is part
<v Speaker 1>of the fun. In the podcast for me is I
<v Speaker 1>get to fucking dump on you. You don't mind, do you?
<v Speaker 1>What are you doing? You know right? You got time?
<v Speaker 1>So I go in there and I had to return
<v Speaker 1>this speaker that I bought for a fucking electric drum
<v Speaker 1>set that I have so I can make some like
<v Speaker 1>a bleke sel beats. I can make some beats for
<v Speaker 1>background music and shit like that. I played drums, been
<v Speaker 1>playing drums like twenty five years, and so I needed
<v Speaker 1>this little speaker so I could hear the thing because
<v Speaker 1>I don't know where I live. I live in a
<v Speaker 1>small house and I'm just I don't have enough room
<v Speaker 1>for an actual drum set. So I got this thing. Whatever,
<v Speaker 1>I'm returning this. I shouldn't have bought the speaker at
<v Speaker 1>Walfart to begin with, because it was I knew it's bad,
<v Speaker 1>all right, It's just like go I have to go
<v Speaker 1>in there for groceries sometimes and uh, just an awful experience.
<v Speaker 1>So I was I but I did, and of course
<v Speaker 1>it was like cheap garbage that you know, came in
<v Speaker 1>a shipping container, was probably made by you know, nine
<v Speaker 1>year olds on the outskirts of Beijing. So I brought
<v Speaker 1>it back to return the thing, and I'm watching these
<v Speaker 1>two dudes like unpack this fucking TV that was like
<v Speaker 1>had to be nine feet long or something, and I
<v Speaker 1>was just like, that's you know, this is this is it.
<v Speaker 1>It's like the TV is not big enough. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a table. You could flip that on its side and
<v Speaker 1>eat off that thing, you know, with like a fucking
<v Speaker 1>twelve person dinner. And then I just realized, like God, what,
<v Speaker 1>like the fucking who the fuck? What do you need
<v Speaker 1>a TV that But the fuck you're gonna watching a
<v Speaker 1>TV that big? You know what, are you running a
<v Speaker 1>rec center? You got like an orphanage or something. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I could see if you had an orphanage, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you have like movie night, you need a TV that big.
<v Speaker 1>It was just depressing. But it's at this connection from
<v Speaker 1>the real world, right that this part, it's all part
<v Speaker 1>of it. So anyway, get a TV in a South
<v Speaker 1>so's that a sick car? Uh that's just my judgments anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So uh, anyway, what the fuck? So it was it
<v Speaker 1>was an eye opener for me being in the Amazon.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I came back to. I was like trying
<v Speaker 1>to get out, you know, kind of come to terms
<v Speaker 1>with these wonderful life forms I've been seeing, and and
<v Speaker 1>then the human hell, the dystopic scenery of billboards and
<v Speaker 1>car dealerships and just consumer hell and complete alienation and
<v Speaker 1>isolation from the living world and what's real, and that's
<v Speaker 1>what you know, that's what a great many people live
<v Speaker 1>in in the United States and many other places as
<v Speaker 1>well anyway. So, but being in the Amazon was an
<v Speaker 1>eye opener for me because, you know, I picture I
<v Speaker 1>had never been to the tropical rainforest before, and I
<v Speaker 1>pictured hot, humid, miserable, and indeed, it can be that,
<v Speaker 1>but it wasn't at the elevations we were at. We
<v Speaker 1>were about thirty one hundred feet and it wasn't that bad.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't as hot as I pictured it. It was
<v Speaker 1>chilly on some mornings. It's certainly not as hot as
<v Speaker 1>South Texas and June or August, you know, throughout the
<v Speaker 1>whole summer. And the mosquitoes weren't that bad, primarily, I
<v Speaker 1>would assume, because you know, i'd well, first off, mosquitoes
<v Speaker 1>are going to be worse and disturbed areas and in
<v Speaker 1>places that humans have basically cleared, you know, except for
<v Speaker 1>like Alaska. I was talking with Matt about this the
<v Speaker 1>other day, you know, and like remote Alaska, the mosquitoes
<v Speaker 1>are really bad because there's so much you know, so
<v Speaker 1>many large mammals for them to feed off of it,
<v Speaker 1>and it's just hell. But if there's not a large
<v Speaker 1>food source around and there's not a lot of human
<v Speaker 1>clearance because human disturbance, clearing the habitat also kills everything
<v Speaker 1>that eats the mosquitoes, which we don't realize because you know,
<v Speaker 1>we're disconnected and alienated from what's real and we live
<v Speaker 1>in this little hell of our own making. And so
<v Speaker 1>you know, in disturbed areas, it's when you get the mosquitoes,
<v Speaker 1>and it's for species like eighties a jipdi, these invasive
<v Speaker 1>mosquito species that you know, didn't they're not from North America.
<v Speaker 1>They were brought over. And not only that, but they
<v Speaker 1>they're like you know, Norway rats and feral cats, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>They kind of follow humans. They they are organisms that
<v Speaker 1>benefit directly off of human society. You're gonna encounter, you know,
<v Speaker 1>those those show up once the land gets cleared and
<v Speaker 1>the et cetera, and they're you know, they're they've spent
<v Speaker 1>thousands of years co evolving with humans too as their
<v Speaker 1>food source. So well, I shouldn't say co evolving, just
<v Speaker 1>evolving because humans aren't really well. I guess humans are
<v Speaker 1>evolving in response to eighties a gyp D. Right, that's
<v Speaker 1>what sickle cell is. Anyway, the mosquitoes weren't that bad
<v Speaker 1>in the Amazon. There were a few, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's so many frog species and other insects that prey
<v Speaker 1>on them that there's the checks and balances, and it's
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's the same story with ticks, right. The
<v Speaker 1>tics get out of control when you knock out the
<v Speaker 1>editors that keep the deer populations down, or when you
<v Speaker 1>stop burning. And so that's why ticks are so bad.
<v Speaker 1>Part of the reason why ticks are so bad in
<v Speaker 1>Northeast fire suppression, you know, removal of predators and complete
<v Speaker 1>imbalance of the deer populations. Anyway, I didn't know what
<v Speaker 1>to expect when I got down there, and it was
<v Speaker 1>it was really pleasant. It's just humid and it rains
<v Speaker 1>a lot. You've got you know, the intertropical convergent zone,
<v Speaker 1>and so that's you've got these warm air masses you know,
<v Speaker 1>rising and uh of course creating low pressure systems low
<v Speaker 1>pressures of course associated with rainfall, and so you know,
<v Speaker 1>basically the other end of that Hadley Stell, you've got
<v Speaker 1>the high pressure zones, that high pressure cold they were
<v Speaker 1>descending at thirty degrees latitude north and south, creating deserts
<v Speaker 1>in certain areas. And that was air that originally rose
<v Speaker 1>at the tropics. We're part of that air originally rose
<v Speaker 1>at the tropics and then got pushed to thirty degrees.
<v Speaker 1>So because of that rising air, it just rains all
<v Speaker 1>the fucking time. It was like, I think the rainfall
<v Speaker 1>for where we were was between fifteen and twenty five
<v Speaker 1>feet of annual rainfall a year. And you know, many
<v Speaker 1>of the places where we were, it's wild. It's like
<v Speaker 1>you'll be walking and then there's just this little two
<v Speaker 1>foot crevasse that opens up two foot wide by like
<v Speaker 1>three feet deep, and then there's just water running through
<v Speaker 1>it and it's just a drainage and it's clear water.
<v Speaker 1>It's not like nasty brown water. It's clear water. It's
<v Speaker 1>got a little fish in it, and then that's just
<v Speaker 1>part of the drainage. I mean, the ground is just
<v Speaker 1>always wet. There's lots of leaf litter the forests. There
<v Speaker 1>were just fucking incredible. I kept thinking the whole time
<v Speaker 1>I'm there, I'm like, what is it like? What is
<v Speaker 1>it like to do psychedelics in this kind of habitat?
<v Speaker 1>It's got to be incredible because everything around you is alive,
<v Speaker 1>you know, versus like where I live now, everything around
<v Speaker 1>me is dead, you know, including like the people on
<v Speaker 1>the inside. Right, It's just like it's like the modern
<v Speaker 1>American that's where we're all headed. Like I think, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just we're all gonna be walking dead, just farmed this
<v Speaker 1>consumers dead on the inside, alienated from what's real. So uh,
<v Speaker 1>but just to be surrounded by like this, all this
<v Speaker 1>living green, living green fabric everywhere has got to be intoxicating.
<v Speaker 1>And then the fucking frogs at night, the frog diversity
<v Speaker 1>there's insane. Saw a lot of cool herbs who saw
<v Speaker 1>coral sneak. We saw what was it Boutria kophis, some
<v Speaker 1>pit viper species that the Alex, one of the herpetologists,
<v Speaker 1>was with. They milked the venom out of it. So
<v Speaker 1>we got the milk the venom out of it. That
<v Speaker 1>was cool at least see how it's done. Uh. And
<v Speaker 1>then they of course use that to create anti vent
<v Speaker 1>and it was. It was a really great experience, but
<v Speaker 1>the plant life was just fucking nuts. We went up
<v Speaker 1>to the Paramo one day, which is you know, Paramo
<v Speaker 1>habit that for anybody who doesn't know, is high elevation,
<v Speaker 1>low latitudes, basically what twelve one hundred feet looks like
<v Speaker 1>on the equator, and it was just fucking nuts. I've
<v Speaker 1>been wanting to go there for a while. But you
<v Speaker 1>get all these temperate lineages, lineages from you know, points
<v Speaker 1>further north or south, latitudes further north or south, but
<v Speaker 1>they're at the equator, and basically at the equator it's
<v Speaker 1>far too warm for them and just too different of
<v Speaker 1>a climate and habitat type at lower elevations. The only
<v Speaker 1>place they can really get on is at higher elevations.
<v Speaker 1>But they're also kind of on these islands in the sky,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the andes, and so they they speciate you
<v Speaker 1>just but it's just nuts, man, and there's so much
<v Speaker 1>hummer pollination. Serato stemma elatam was a really wild looking
<v Speaker 1>member of Eric Casey, the blueberry family that was there.
<v Speaker 1>It was like this scandent vining epiphyte as well, and
<v Speaker 1>it was just fucking you know, these bright red flowers,
<v Speaker 1>very neck, the rich, the petals recurved back. It looks
<v Speaker 1>like a little bell with these recurved petals. And then
<v Speaker 1>these exerted stamens poking out, and some of these things
<v Speaker 1>would form like these woody tubers. They were epiphytes, but
<v Speaker 1>they would form woody tubers on their branches, which was
<v Speaker 1>nuts to me. It was like they were forming storage
<v Speaker 1>mechanisms for those you know, short periods that they may
<v Speaker 1>dry out. I mean, I don't know what the habitats
<v Speaker 1>like that. We were there in the paramo and it
<v Speaker 1>was it was very wet and cool, you know, chillier
<v Speaker 1>than sand. It was like, it's such a weird habitat.
<v Speaker 1>It was like climate not even climate of San Francisco,
<v Speaker 1>like climate of like coastal Humboldt County, like coastal like
<v Speaker 1>up in the Redwood Belt, like Chili almost and very foggy.
<v Speaker 1>Everything's wet, and we're walking through this short canopy for us,
<v Speaker 1>maybe twenty feet tall. The dominant tree was Escalonia myrtaloides,
<v Speaker 1>one of the escalonias, you know, which is in the
<v Speaker 1>order escaloni alies. That doesn't tell you that much, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you look on the angiosperm phylogeny poster,
<v Speaker 1>it's somewhat close to the order astles, the sunflower order,
<v Speaker 1>and the Lobelia order and the trigger plant order. So
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, Escalonia is really diverse in South America. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there's a ton in Chile. There's a couple members of
<v Speaker 1>the family. I'm pretty sure in Australia and New Zealand,
<v Speaker 1>and a lot of things we saw had disjuncts, had
<v Speaker 1>other members of the genus or the family in New
<v Speaker 1>Zealand or in Tasmania. It's that gondwan in connection. There
<v Speaker 1>was like when I when I was in Chile, we
<v Speaker 1>saw Rakua Rakawa. How are you fucking pronounced that? Ra
<v Speaker 1>a u k a u a lead of virans, which
<v Speaker 1>is in arali a c the Ginseng order, order Apa
<v Speaker 1>les a carrot order. Uh not Ginseng order, Jinseng family.
<v Speaker 1>Excuse me. Arali acy, which is a rarely ac is
<v Speaker 1>like the sister family to the carrot family. Ginseng family
<v Speaker 1>is sister family to the Carat family. So h but
<v Speaker 1>order Apa Le's we saw Rakawa lad of virans and
<v Speaker 1>then I looked up and uh, you know the ce
<v Speaker 1>my my I naturalist profile where else I've seen that
<v Speaker 1>fucking genus before, and I had seen it in New Zealand,
<v Speaker 1>so I you know, that happened a lot. And there
<v Speaker 1>was another a couple other genera two that I looked
<v Speaker 1>at and realized, oh, I've seen this or a related
<v Speaker 1>genus in New Zealand. So you know, these plant lineages
<v Speaker 1>in South America, especially in Chile, you know, go back
<v Speaker 1>a very long time, you know, to when the continents
<v Speaker 1>were a little bit close together, fifty sixty million years
<v Speaker 1>in some cases, the same with Gunnera. Some of those
<v Speaker 1>might be long distance dispersal, but I'm sure a good
<v Speaker 1>many of them are the result of Gondwana and affiliations. Anyway. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the Paramo was just just filled with wild shit Pinguicula calyptrata,
<v Speaker 1>a carnivorous plant. I think the thing for me that
<v Speaker 1>was that was wild to see was the habitat up
<v Speaker 1>there is. You know, a lot of stuff was fuzzy,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of stuff was covered in hairs. But it's
<v Speaker 1>not a dry habitat. I normally associate plants with hairs
<v Speaker 1>with with you know, dry or seasonally dry habitats. I
<v Speaker 1>don't think it's ever really dry for long periods in
<v Speaker 1>the Paramo. Certainly nothing compared to deserts or tropical dry
<v Speaker 1>forest or tropical thorn forest, et cetera. These hairs were
<v Speaker 1>mostly there as a result of adaptation to ultraviolet light
<v Speaker 1>and to frosts, because you're so high up that it
<v Speaker 1>can get very cold, especially at night. So just just
<v Speaker 1>the too a totally novel habitat for me and filled
<v Speaker 1>with diversity. There's a supposedly there's a disjunct Epiletia stand
<v Speaker 1>or Espilletia stand or Espalicia if you want to pronounce
<v Speaker 1>like that E S P E L E. T I A,
<v Speaker 1>which is a huge genus that's almost I think it's
<v Speaker 1>all endemic to the Paramo, but they're mostly in Colombia.
<v Speaker 1>It's astracy, so it's the sunflower family. But they can
<v Speaker 1>form these uh sometimes two or three meter tall colescent
<v Speaker 1>wooly just really bizarre look in doctor use plants. And
<v Speaker 1>there's a disjunk stand of Espialetia I forget what species.
<v Speaker 1>I think it begins with an L in Yanga nat
<v Speaker 1>National Park in this you know, like in which is
<v Speaker 1>like mid Ecuador. Most of the Espalicias are in the
<v Speaker 1>Espilletias are in the north, but there's this one disjunk
<v Speaker 1>population down down where we were. But it's it's like
<v Speaker 1>a two day hike in over some rough drink cat
<v Speaker 1>that would be fucking amazing to do. Yeah, the diversity
<v Speaker 1>in the Parmo was just fucking it was so cool.
<v Speaker 1>It was so cool. We didn't get enough time, but
<v Speaker 1>I could have spent I could have spent the you know,
<v Speaker 1>a few days. There. Two gunnera species, those weird ass
<v Speaker 1>you know, elephant ear looking plants. If you're not familiar
<v Speaker 1>with them, they're just they look like, you know, there,
<v Speaker 1>we saw Gunnera tinctoria in Chile, but up here it
<v Speaker 1>was Gunnera mage I guess it was gunna A magellanica.
<v Speaker 1>It didn't look anything like the gunner of Magellanica I
<v Speaker 1>saw in southern Gile. It's probably a different species. I
<v Speaker 1>don't think that's the DNA has been sequenced. Probably, uh,
<v Speaker 1>they just you know, just based on morphology alone, it's
<v Speaker 1>been lumped in with Magellanica. At least that's what I assume,
<v Speaker 1>because it's it's certainly a different ecotype. It's it's phenotypically different.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure it would be genetically different. If you look
<v Speaker 1>at it, it's probably a different species or should be
<v Speaker 1>should be split up. And then I think there was
<v Speaker 1>gunner a mannicotta down there as well, anyway, unrelated. It's
<v Speaker 1>nuts to see. I mean, it's such it's such a
<v Speaker 1>it's such a shit storm here back in the US,
<v Speaker 1>and I knew it was gonna be. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>try not to. I'm just trying to close my eyes
<v Speaker 1>and take more of a Carlin esque approach to the
<v Speaker 1>fucking dystopic idiocracy nightmare that is the United States. It's
<v Speaker 1>just it's this. It just feels bad. It feels bad
<v Speaker 1>to see, to be here, It feels bad to think
<v Speaker 1>about this place. It feels bad to hear. It feels
<v Speaker 1>bad to read the comments, just of shit that's going
<v Speaker 1>on here, just reading about what's going on, Like the
<v Speaker 1>people are still in such denial, you know, the I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I knew this was going to be Reagan two point zero.
<v Speaker 1>I knew it was going to be defunding everything. I
<v Speaker 1>knew the country is gonna get dumber. I know people
<v Speaker 1>are going to be even more farmed than they are now.
<v Speaker 1>I know the middle class is going to continue to eroad,
<v Speaker 1>But it's just such a dystopias. Seeing the support still
<v Speaker 1>among I mean, it's whatever. It shouldn't surprise me. People
<v Speaker 1>are fucking morons, people are retards. At least we could
<v Speaker 1>say retard again, you know, without being lectured by some fucking,
<v Speaker 1>you know, elitist nerd. That's the that's like the high point, right,
<v Speaker 1>the one like the whole the whole country is going
<v Speaker 1>to ship. But at least you could say read again.
<v Speaker 1>She would never say to someone who's actually mentally disabled.
<v Speaker 1>But but it's this is the poisonous concoction. That's the
<v Speaker 1>result of the last fucking i don't know, ten years.
<v Speaker 1>I mean social media too, the effects this all has.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, having numerous friends that have lost their jobs,
<v Speaker 1>the defunding of science, like it's just gonna get worse.
<v Speaker 1>This is what the right has been wanting to do
<v Speaker 1>for forty five fifty years now. Reagan started it, and
<v Speaker 1>this is finishing it off. It's just it's fucking unbelievable. Man.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's so dystopic. It's such a death cult.
<v Speaker 1>It's talking about being alienated and estrange from the living world.
<v Speaker 1>And I think just the stupidity too, like the just
<v Speaker 1>realizing there's not a lot going on upstairs. It's just
<v Speaker 1>like these lowest common denig dominator, bottom of the brain
<v Speaker 1>stem primate instincts to like acquire money and hoard and
<v Speaker 1>anything that stands in a way of that. But uh, gutting, education, gutting.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I've got so many friends that that have
<v Speaker 1>federal jobs. They're scientists, They've got federal jobs, uh to
<v Speaker 1>you know, for surveying, for collecting data, for monitoring important shit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for keeping the living skin of the earth alive,
<v Speaker 1>for keeping this living machine functioning. And he's fucking retards
<v Speaker 1>on the right. These people that just are so disconnected
<v Speaker 1>from anything real. They live in this make believe land
<v Speaker 1>of of that humans have just created of of a
<v Speaker 1>of the economy and the fucking investment portfolios and the
<v Speaker 1>shareholders and whatever the fuck that diseased, boring ass world
<v Speaker 1>is focused on, but disconnected from anything alive and real,
<v Speaker 1>and the decisions that they're making is just god man,
<v Speaker 1>it's just what the what a fucking the properate existence
<v Speaker 1>they must lead. But yeah, a lot of people have
<v Speaker 1>just lost their jobs who are more than qualified. Because
<v Speaker 1>we're cottag or cottag we gotta cot. We gotta buy cots.
<v Speaker 1>And what are you gonna do with that money? You're
<v Speaker 1>gonna You're gonna you're gonna get basically award contracts to
<v Speaker 1>your friends, your crow. I mean, the oligarchy is just
<v Speaker 1>gonna be fully cemented in now. I you know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't want to talk about because I know this is
<v Speaker 1>this should be an escape, right, a little bit of
<v Speaker 1>an escape, but it's, uh, the dystopia is just it's
<v Speaker 1>so ripe now. So I think the answer is just
<v Speaker 1>more of this, just the you know, complete irreverence for
<v Speaker 1>that world and complete reverence and respect for the living
<v Speaker 1>world in front of you. By studying something, by learning
<v Speaker 1>about something, by obsessing and fixating on something, it's a
<v Speaker 1>way of respecting it and also spreading it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>spread it like a contagion. Make other people excited about
<v Speaker 1>this stuff as well. And grow the shit out of everything,
<v Speaker 1>to grow the shit out of all the plants you
<v Speaker 1>can make, you know, spread this. You know, there's so
<v Speaker 1>much you could do, you know, just don't just focus
<v Speaker 1>on that world. Don't pull out of that world and
<v Speaker 1>get immersed in this dark, make believe dystopic reality that
<v Speaker 1>the humans have created in the United States. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's the country that doesn't want to believe, the country
<v Speaker 1>that's in denial. Right, it's going to be morning in
<v Speaker 1>America again. All over all you have to do is
<v Speaker 1>say it, say it three times and click your heels
<v Speaker 1>and it'll happen. While the price of eggs never went
<v Speaker 1>up anyway, God fucking okay. So yeah, so the Paramo,
<v Speaker 1>we'll talk more about that later. That was some pretty
<v Speaker 1>fucking wild habitat and just just the diversity. And then
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I've got so many videos to edit to
<v Speaker 1>and put clips to put together, and I'm still working
<v Speaker 1>on Chile stuff. I'm really busier than I ever have been.
<v Speaker 1>And then I'm going to be in Chicago at the
<v Speaker 1>end of this month, at the end of February to
<v Speaker 1>do a presentation, to give a presentation at the Wild
<v Speaker 1>Things Conference. Then I got to come back here. I've
<v Speaker 1>got shit signed up for June, which is like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I've got like four presentations I'm giving in the next
<v Speaker 1>few months. So anyway, but back to the Amazon, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the most diversity in the lower regions that we were in,
<v Speaker 1>not the Paramo. We've moved on to talking back about
<v Speaker 1>the elevations between thirty two hundred feet four thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>Below three thousand feet, I think it probably gets a
<v Speaker 1>lot more miserable, just like humid as hell, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>probably a lot more buggy. But but where we were
<v Speaker 1>at like thirty six hundred and thirty seven hundred feet,
<v Speaker 1>the most common families that we sawcaus nariac for sure,
<v Speaker 1>which is in the order lamy alas. So you got
<v Speaker 1>bilatteroidsymmetrical flowers, generally opposite leaves, lots of adaptation and hummingbird pollination.
<v Speaker 1>Some really wild forms too, like they just the tropical
<v Speaker 1>plants are so crazy to me. I mean, huge leaves,
<v Speaker 1>you know, hairs in some parts, but overall pretty glabrous
<v Speaker 1>to shed water, especially on the top. There's a ton
<v Speaker 1>of aeroid diversity and thoriums and philodendrons everywhere, which that
<v Speaker 1>philodendrion that all the uh, you know, the aeroid nerds were,
<v Speaker 1>like the covid era aeroid nerds were paying like six
<v Speaker 1>thousand dollars for phill Dendron varicosum or some of those lookalikes.
<v Speaker 1>There was this giant ass Bogonia that it got to
<v Speaker 1>like fifteen feet tall, was parvifolia, with which were the
<v Speaker 1>plants were diecius to. I went and looked at the flowers.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of bogonias will have male and female flowers.
<v Speaker 1>You could tell them apart because the female flower they
<v Speaker 1>look alike, but the female flowers will have an ovary
<v Speaker 1>subtending the flower. It looks like a little winged fruit,
<v Speaker 1>immature fruit. But they've both got that yellow, you know,
<v Speaker 1>basically yellow sexual parts. Like the female flowers on begonias
<v Speaker 1>try to make it look like they're producing pollen because
<v Speaker 1>the bees that hit them are pollen collecting bees and
<v Speaker 1>so anyway, but normally you'll find both sexes on the
<v Speaker 1>same plant. With this one, it was like fucking fifteen
<v Speaker 1>feet tall, huge leaves, you know, foot and a half
<v Speaker 1>two feet across, well maybe foot and a half eighteen
<v Speaker 1>inches across, and it will it's uh, it was just
<v Speaker 1>they were dioecious, you know, it's monsters. There was a
<v Speaker 1>really cool tree called Brownia, which was in its own
<v Speaker 1>subfamily of the legume family, a subfamily that I don't
<v Speaker 1>normally encounter very much. I've only seen a few members
<v Speaker 1>of it. It was a detereoid e D. E. T. A. R. I, O, I, D,
<v Speaker 1>E A E. What else is in the terrioid. It's
<v Speaker 1>a weird family. Uh uh oh shaddy, yeah, I think
<v Speaker 1>I've seen some. Actually it's got h yeah, well let's
<v Speaker 1>see genus Anea A, Gourdia, gabonius i, Curia labor vilias, Sindoropsis.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know anyway, it's a fucking weird Uh. It's
<v Speaker 1>a weird subfamily of Fabase that was only created a
<v Speaker 1>few years ago once, uh, you know, due to due
<v Speaker 1>to some new ship, due to some incoming molecular evidence.
<v Speaker 1>But you look at the flowers and they look remarkably
<v Speaker 1>different from most p flowers. They look more like say,
<v Speaker 1>sell pinioid, almost like a centa or a camacrista. But
<v Speaker 1>the flowers are axillary. They're these big red flowers that
<v Speaker 1>come or not accilary, excuse me, calliffloris. So they come
<v Speaker 1>right out of the you know, the plant is coalesce
<v Speaker 1>and it's got a main stomach, gets upwards of like
<v Speaker 1>thirty feet tall maybe in some cases really unique philotaxi
<v Speaker 1>to cool leaves, and the flowers just come right out
<v Speaker 1>of the main trunk. And what's cool is that before
<v Speaker 1>the flowers open. I've noticed there are ants that just
<v Speaker 1>guard the opening flower buds. I'm not sure if they're
<v Speaker 1>collecting some sort of material or wax off of it
<v Speaker 1>or what I've seen that. I remember seeing that with
<v Speaker 1>like pae andies. My mom when I was growing up,
<v Speaker 1>you used toll grow peonies and the when the as
<v Speaker 1>the flowers would open, before they would open the air
<v Speaker 1>would always be ants crawling around the flower buds. Tons
<v Speaker 1>of antiversity too. I got to see the Atta species
<v Speaker 1>down there, Atta, the leaf cutters, because we get at
<v Speaker 1>in Texas too. We get leafcutter ants in Texas. It's
<v Speaker 1>out of Texana up here, but down there it was
<v Speaker 1>a different species. You know, all these connections to which
<v Speaker 1>was cool. I mean, you know, similarities. When you see
<v Speaker 1>a plant that's similar enough to one you already know
<v Speaker 1>that occurs, you know, one thousand miles north of it,
<v Speaker 1>you can you get a window into how that might
<v Speaker 1>have evolved or speciated. And the distribution of these plants,
<v Speaker 1>of these plants, well, my voice keeps fucking cracking. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what. I don't know why. So that was yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Brownia was wild. There was the aeroid diversity was nuts.
<v Speaker 1>We saw an anthorium up in the paramol too at twelve
<v Speaker 1>thousand feet. Uh. The neotropical palms was fucking crazy. God,
<v Speaker 1>there's so many cool ones. This Ethnobodany video that I
<v Speaker 1>got coming out next week, I mean, it really shows
<v Speaker 1>the importance of some of these palm species, both for
<v Speaker 1>fiber and for fruit. The what was it that was
<v Speaker 1>Bactris is the genus of palm, and the fruit that
<v Speaker 1>it produces is like a little golf ball sized fruit.
<v Speaker 1>You gotta peel it, and then the fruit tastes like squash.
<v Speaker 1>It's delicious. It tastes like kabocha squash, and then you
<v Speaker 1>just you know, the spit out, the spit out the seed.
<v Speaker 1>You kind of have to eat around it. Seeds kind
<v Speaker 1>of big. The fucking market there was wild. And then
<v Speaker 1>the last day, crews made us go to this market
<v Speaker 1>with didn't make us. He suggested it sounded cool. I
<v Speaker 1>went there. It was fucking great, and it was just
<v Speaker 1>loaded with with all kinds of cool shit. It was fun.
<v Speaker 1>Mostly native fruits there. I mean they had stuff that
<v Speaker 1>wasn't native that like, you know, bananas obviously aren't native
<v Speaker 1>to to the Americas. Same with rambutans. They're not native
<v Speaker 1>to the Americas. They're in the you know, they're related
<v Speaker 1>the light cheese. They're in the maple family. Step in Dacy.
<v Speaker 1>But they had these big ass beetle grubs too, which
<v Speaker 1>was the genus was rinko forests. They're like two or
<v Speaker 1>three inch long beetles. They live in the palms. And
<v Speaker 1>then and you can eat them and grill them whatever,
<v Speaker 1>fry and whatever. They're supposed to be fucking delicious. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't actually end up trying any. And then the beetle
<v Speaker 1>that it makes is cool too. It's not like one
<v Speaker 1>of those rhinoceros beetles. It's one of those circoulianids which
<v Speaker 1>has like a long snout, like a weavil like snout.
<v Speaker 1>You got to get down with eating bugs. Don't be
<v Speaker 1>fucking weany about it, Okay. It's but also like seeing
<v Speaker 1>the ecology too. I mean, these things are connected to
<v Speaker 1>the palms. They're using the palms. They eat the palm.
<v Speaker 1>It's not wood, because palms are not you know, they're
<v Speaker 1>not woody, they're fibrous. Monocots don't produce wood. They don't
<v Speaker 1>produce you know, lateral marris, theems. They don't produce secondary
<v Speaker 1>growth except for a few of the few of them,
<v Speaker 1>like you know, a few monocuts do, like the fucking
<v Speaker 1>some drosinas I guess, and other I should actually do it. Well,
<v Speaker 1>we'll mention that later. We'll get into like secondary growth
<v Speaker 1>and monocuts. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
<v Speaker 1>you really should, because this is a key point of
<v Speaker 1>angiosperm anatomy. Dicots and udikots and conifers, which are obviously
<v Speaker 1>not angiosperms, produce vascular cambium. They can grow laterally, not
<v Speaker 1>just up and down. Palms and monoca, which are monocot
<v Speaker 1>can only grow up and down. They don't ever get wider.
<v Speaker 1>That's why when you look at a palm tree, it's
<v Speaker 1>a spindly rod. It's been the same with its entire life.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't get bigger. But some palms have found a
<v Speaker 1>way around that, including some that I encountered down in
<v Speaker 1>the Amazon, like what was it Eriardia del toida, the
<v Speaker 1>dick palm. It produces, you know, these lateral roots that
<v Speaker 1>come out at a forty five degree angle to form
<v Speaker 1>this kind of flanged base, which is primarily you know,
<v Speaker 1>it forms like an hour glass base basically so that
<v Speaker 1>it can't be tipped over in this squishy soil or
<v Speaker 1>get blown over. But when these things germinate there like
<v Speaker 1>pencil thin a couple maybe that were I think a
<v Speaker 1>little bit bigger, but but they can basically get a
<v Speaker 1>little bit wider as they grow, you know, up to
<v Speaker 1>a certain point by forming these lateral roots, which I'm
<v Speaker 1>really curious about the physiology of that too, Like you
<v Speaker 1>send out this lateral root, but where is the bud
<v Speaker 1>for the lateral root, and it's it's further they look
<v Speaker 1>like they end up looking like a mangrove because they're
<v Speaker 1>not the original stem kind of rots away as the
<v Speaker 1>tree matures, and then they've just got this series of
<v Speaker 1>thirty or forty roots coming out at forty five degree
<v Speaker 1>angles and with their you know, they come out like
<v Speaker 1>three feet above the ground and then eventually root into
<v Speaker 1>the soil. They come out, you know, at a forty
<v Speaker 1>five degree angle outwards and then eventually root into the soil.
<v Speaker 1>And that's how the palm stabilizes itself. Because these palms
<v Speaker 1>get like thirty, forty, fifty, sixty fucking feet tall, and
<v Speaker 1>they've got fishtail leaves too. Really weird, not like any
<v Speaker 1>washing tony is that you see in North America. Complete
<v Speaker 1>different file a taxi or like the Phoenix canary ancess.
<v Speaker 1>It gets planted all throughout California, including it. The old
<v Speaker 1>Southern Pacific Railroad stations like Southern Pacific Road used to
<v Speaker 1>plant Phoenix Canary ancest everywhere wherever they would put up
<v Speaker 1>a depot, you know, Canary island palm or Phoenix deck,
<v Speaker 1>the liffra the date palm complete different fileottaxi complete different
<v Speaker 1>leaf shit, not phileo taxi, but leaf shape. I guess
<v Speaker 1>it is a pilotaxi because it looks like these little
<v Speaker 1>fishtail palm leaves that come off the racus just so much.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I would see shit and just be like,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck is that? I have no idea. I
<v Speaker 1>need to know what that is. I need to learn
<v Speaker 1>about that. So I head up Scott Zona. You know
<v Speaker 1>you got any references on neotropical palms, And he referenced
<v Speaker 1>the book that I ordered. I found it on the
<v Speaker 1>internet for like ten bucks, which was cool. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>check lib jin. It's probably on there, but hold on,
<v Speaker 1>I get your name, I'll get you to name it.
<v Speaker 1>A book in a second. Yeah, Field Guide to the
<v Speaker 1>Palm of the Americas by Henderson looks like it came
<v Speaker 1>out in the nineties, but god damn man. Yeah, just
<v Speaker 1>just you know, I'm fair stated by this shit. But
<v Speaker 1>I also know that in learning about it, I'll probably
<v Speaker 1>learn about other things, because everything's connected, you know this. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>you learn about one thing that might seem inconsequential and unimportant,
<v Speaker 1>and then you end up realizing, oh, it's not. It's
<v Speaker 1>like through learning about that thing, you learn a new
<v Speaker 1>example of how something is biologically accomplished, or how something evolves,
<v Speaker 1>or or just something as simple as what other species
<v Speaker 1>this plant. You're not initially concerned with what it might
<v Speaker 1>be connected to. So learning that kind of shit, because
<v Speaker 1>I've seen that happen so many times. Something I'm not
<v Speaker 1>interested in initially because I find it boring, and then
<v Speaker 1>later on I learn, oh, it's actually connected to this thing.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck that's cool. Now I'm interested in it. And also
<v Speaker 1>just you know, I'm not gonna lie. A lot of
<v Speaker 1>this just comes from like complete revulsion at the human
<v Speaker 1>world in front of me, you know, especially like what's
<v Speaker 1>going on in the United States right now. Like I
<v Speaker 1>just watched the country I have to live in getting
<v Speaker 1>dumber and greedier and just more disgusting culturally speaking. And
<v Speaker 1>so I just you know, Bondi's not just an escape,
<v Speaker 1>it's also the answer. It's not just an escape. I
<v Speaker 1>feel like it's also there's some good instructions for living
<v Speaker 1>and for morality by studying the living world. So don't
<v Speaker 1>be a dumb dick. That's basically what I'm saying. Okay, Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>what other diversity the gasnierriads the well. First off, hummingbirds
<v Speaker 1>are of course big pollinators, so we saw tons of
<v Speaker 1>red tubular flowers. Bats are big pollinators to Bremysterra is
<v Speaker 1>another genus that was really interesting to me. And I
<v Speaker 1>was just showing my kid something about because we were
<v Speaker 1>looking at bat nation. I was trying to show our
<v Speaker 1>pictures of bats pollinating things because I showed her some
<v Speaker 1>pictures of these bats that we saw in a cave
<v Speaker 1>that we went into. Nobody got COVID, as much as
<v Speaker 1>I would have loved to bring back COVID two point
<v Speaker 1>oh to the United States, nobody got it. And the
<v Speaker 1>people have been going in this cave for a while anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So uh, but I was trying to show where you know,
<v Speaker 1>bats can pollinate things. Then they went there. There's like
<v Speaker 1>videos and sguaros and shit whatever. But there was a
<v Speaker 1>nice video on Bermeestra, which is a lobilioid. It's related
<v Speaker 1>to Lobilia, and it's got that same flower structure with
<v Speaker 1>the fused anther tube and a little pollen presenter that
<v Speaker 1>pops out of it, and you know, is male on
<v Speaker 1>the first day and it becomes female on the second or
<v Speaker 1>third day whatever, and so uh anyway, but Bremeistra, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you see this thing and you can tell it's a
<v Speaker 1>Lobilia or it's a Lobilia relative because of that fused
<v Speaker 1>anther tube and the pomp presenter. But then you look
<v Speaker 1>at the flower. It's got a really distinct morphology to it.
<v Speaker 1>CenTra Pogon was down there to it. Another cool genus
<v Speaker 1>in Lobilioidy of companilacy, the bellflower family. Anyway, but these
<v Speaker 1>little these bermeyestras were out everywhere, and they're not red,
<v Speaker 1>they're not tubular, and they're you know, they're they're obviously
<v Speaker 1>possessing the traits that have been selected for by bats.
<v Speaker 1>The bats have like actively bred these things over millions
<v Speaker 1>of years. Whatever. You know, the bats, the ones that
<v Speaker 1>are most appealing to the The flowers that are most
<v Speaker 1>appealing to the bats are the ones that end up
<v Speaker 1>getting pollinated and then producing more of themselves. The ones
<v Speaker 1>that aren't, you know, appealing, appease appealing to them for
<v Speaker 1>whatever reason, don't you know. It's typical natural selection how
<v Speaker 1>it works. But the fruits, I'm curious about what disperses
<v Speaker 1>these fruits because the fruits were like these inflated hollow
<v Speaker 1>bags and then on the center like the burmeister are
<v Speaker 1>fruit I saw, at least I don't know what species
<v Speaker 1>it was. Very few of my e naturalists observations have
<v Speaker 1>been you know, put to species level. They're just genera
<v Speaker 1>or family whatever, And it's good enough for me. And
<v Speaker 1>that's the most you can hope to get in such
<v Speaker 1>a dense, diverse, species rich area that's also probably understudy.
<v Speaker 1>There's so much shit in many of these places that's
<v Speaker 1>understudied because there's just so much out there and there's
<v Speaker 1>not enough botanist to work on it whatever. And there's
<v Speaker 1>actually a lot of good bodany that's been done on Ecuador.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you just go to like Google scholar, you'll
<v Speaker 1>see a shift ton of papers. But this fruit was
<v Speaker 1>like a bagfruit. And then in the center of it
<v Speaker 1>was like a little nodule. And then on that nodule
<v Speaker 1>where all the you know, hundreds of tiny seeds because
<v Speaker 1>lobilioid seeds are tiny. That's probably part of the reason
<v Speaker 1>they're all over the fucking globes, because the seeds are
<v Speaker 1>so tiny. But but fuck man, was it was. You know,
<v Speaker 1>anytime you're encountering a new genus, it's it's pretty exciting,
<v Speaker 1>especially with such a like distinct and unique flower morphology,
<v Speaker 1>because all these flowers are a little puzzles, right, they're
<v Speaker 1>little clues at what this thing evolved with, or what
<v Speaker 1>pollinates it, or what its ecology is, et cetera. So
<v Speaker 1>Bremstra was a genus we frequently encountered. I also saw
<v Speaker 1>some cool micoheterotropse, of which there's many. Most of the
<v Speaker 1>fungi in the Amazon, the micorrhizal fungi is arbuscular mico hisea.
<v Speaker 1>These are fungi that don't that disreproduce a sexually. For
<v Speaker 1>the most part, they don't. They don't produce mushrooms. They're
<v Speaker 1>not basidio my seats. They're glomero mi seeds, and so
<v Speaker 1>they're mostly just you know, infused everywhere in the soil,
<v Speaker 1>but they're also associating with probably most of the plants
<v Speaker 1>eighty percent of the plants there, if not more. But
<v Speaker 1>there's a number of plants that have found a way
<v Speaker 1>to exploit this, Plants from unrelated families like Burmanniac or
<v Speaker 1>Gentian Ac Gentians. Voi Rihea was one that I saw,
<v Speaker 1>jim No Siphon Andy saw, which is in uh that's Burmaniac.
<v Speaker 1>I believe what else was there, Teco phile Ace, there
<v Speaker 1>was quite a few. Field Museum of Chicago has a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of good PDFs and they've been a huge, huge
<v Speaker 1>source of help seeing those PDFs online. They were when
<v Speaker 1>I was in Brazil too, and I think that's what
<v Speaker 1>I was referencing. There's a PDF on mico heterotrophs of
<v Speaker 1>Brazil and it's just thumbnail photos. It's a single thumbnail
<v Speaker 1>photo for each species. But you know, when you see that,
<v Speaker 1>then then that can at least point you to what
<v Speaker 1>genus you're looking at. It's been immensely helpful. Let me
<v Speaker 1>find this thing because there's that it'd be cool to
<v Speaker 1>throw some names out there. At least tell you where
<v Speaker 1>you can look it up. God, okay, yeah, voiriea. Of
<v Speaker 1>course we mentioned that already Gentienac. It was triur not
<v Speaker 1>tecophile ac was excuse me sorry, triurid ce t r
<v Speaker 1>I U R I D A C E A E.
<v Speaker 1>The PDF is called Micoheterotrophic Plants of Reserva particular de
<v Speaker 1>patrimonial natrural do Crystallino. It's Portuguese, uh, which is in
<v Speaker 1>Matto Grosso, Brazil. But yeah, burmanniac triurid a C. That
<v Speaker 1>is a fucking femine. It's not even on my radar yet.
<v Speaker 1>Triurid s thismyac. Of course, some really cool thismia is
<v Speaker 1>down there, which I did not No, I did not
<v Speaker 1>think of it. Thimia milanomitra looks fucking insane. Uh ooh
<v Speaker 1>what is this? So they got corloid root morphology. A
<v Speaker 1>lot of these micoheterotrophs, when you look at their roots,
<v Speaker 1>they've got these things that look like these papillomas. Aenal
<v Speaker 1>peppoaloma Rein's previous anal peppaloma. Just had to get that
<v Speaker 1>out there, Marco Rubio anal peppa paloma. Uh hopefully you're
<v Speaker 1>getting some terrible imagery. Oh god, I hate it. Here triurid.
<v Speaker 1>They see Sia philip propriria, these papaloma like roots, like
<v Speaker 1>wardy roots. They look like cauliflower, like col knobs of califlower,
<v Speaker 1>which attached I assume are just infused with this arbuscular
<v Speaker 1>micro rise. And you know, I'm trying to think of
<v Speaker 1>how these relationships go, because it's not just we anthropomorphise, right,
<v Speaker 1>we say the plant is just stealing from fungi. That's
<v Speaker 1>an easy way to introduce the idea to people. But
<v Speaker 1>of course it's it's a simple, it's an oversimplified way, right.
<v Speaker 1>It lacks the complexity that's going on in this relationship,
<v Speaker 1>which obviously started as a two way relationship and might
<v Speaker 1>still in some way be a two way relationship. The
<v Speaker 1>fungus might be benefiting somehow, but to us on the surface,
<v Speaker 1>it just appears like this plant is a pit. In
<v Speaker 1>any case, it's fucking fascinating. Triua deacy. I gotta look
<v Speaker 1>at it. I'm gonna have to consult the angiosperm phylogeny poster,
<v Speaker 1>which is down by the way plant Gateway, dot com
<v Speaker 1>or dot org, whatever it is. Is down, they're updating it.
<v Speaker 1>I can't get a hold like guy James being a
<v Speaker 1>friend of a friend in I guess he's moving to
<v Speaker 1>a new botanical institution in Europe. I don't know. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what these guys. I don't know what they're doing.
<v Speaker 1>You know, nice guy though, he said I could use
<v Speaker 1>that angiosperm phylogeny poster from my book, which will be
<v Speaker 1>out in fucking nine years. Thanks Abrams Press. Uh. I
<v Speaker 1>can't wait to do unpaid labor for you when I'm
<v Speaker 1>designing it on in design. You know, if only I
<v Speaker 1>wasn't a dumb ass and had had my lawyer look
<v Speaker 1>at the contract before fuck me? You know, why? Why
<v Speaker 1>have an angry Irish attorney, you know, who's just a
<v Speaker 1>fucking bottle of piss and vinegar. I love him, He's
<v Speaker 1>a perfect attorney for me. Why have one of those
<v Speaker 1>if you're not going to use him. I didn't use him.
<v Speaker 1>I thought that the lady who reached out to me
<v Speaker 1>from the book company he doesn't even work there anymore.
<v Speaker 1>From the publisher, I thought she's so nice, she's such
<v Speaker 1>a nice lady. Why she wouldn't fuck me over? You know,
<v Speaker 1>she wouldn't screw me over. There's not even got nothing
<v Speaker 1>to worry about. I'll just sign this contract. I'm sure
<v Speaker 1>it's fine, And I ended up signing. This was a
<v Speaker 1>while ago. This book has been under for a while. Then.
<v Speaker 1>I'm working on another book, which I'm actually pretty excited about,
<v Speaker 1>which is should be done here soon. But I'm just
<v Speaker 1>I'm up to my knees and shit and good shit,
<v Speaker 1>but it's just shit, and I'm so fucking busy, and
<v Speaker 1>I've just stopped responding to text and emails and every
<v Speaker 1>I just don't give a fucking rudt of time. Sorry, Okay, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>the andrew spronphilogic, but I don't have to look this
<v Speaker 1>up because I've not try her a daisy. What the fuck?
<v Speaker 1>It's a monoc family. Let me let me go look
<v Speaker 1>at this. Okay, but this anyway, the point I was
<v Speaker 1>getting to about the andrew Sprimfilogny poster. It's down for now,
<v Speaker 1>but it's gonna be back up again. I guess they're
<v Speaker 1>working on it. They're gonna there's some new revisions that
<v Speaker 1>need to be made, and it'll be up again at
<v Speaker 1>some point in the meantime. If you need a copy
<v Speaker 1>of it. Email me. Make it short. I'm not gonna
<v Speaker 1>do anything but just send you a link. Uh and
<v Speaker 1>uh that's it. Yeah, okay, hold on all right, my
<v Speaker 1>mind is blown. I'm so happy I got one of
<v Speaker 1>those posters on my wall. I can just go right
<v Speaker 1>to the wall and look at it. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>have to go online. I threw a fit today and
<v Speaker 1>was about to throw this fucking cannon print through out
<v Speaker 1>the window. God, I just think about it and I
<v Speaker 1>feel bouts of rage. I just want to strangle the
<v Speaker 1>fucking thing. I want to like. Oh God, I just anyway, sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't get the printer to hook up today. I
<v Speaker 1>had a nervous breakdown. I've had this problem for eight months,
<v Speaker 1>and of course the company doesn't give a fuck you.
<v Speaker 1>I just I bought a paper weight. Now I'm fucked.
<v Speaker 1>That's the thing, you know, just these little bits, you know,
<v Speaker 1>where the system is getting one over on you, right,
<v Speaker 1>Just it's just one example of the many ways. It's
<v Speaker 1>not like equivalent to having to call the health insurance company.
<v Speaker 1>I tried to get health insurance too. Uh, and then
<v Speaker 1>I realized I can't do it. It Just I feel
<v Speaker 1>like it's a scam. I'm being robbed. I'm not going
<v Speaker 1>to pay four hundred dollars. This is insane and so
<v Speaker 1>but now they just have been billing me anyway, even
<v Speaker 1>though I'm any coverage and I had to get the
<v Speaker 1>tax credit, and so the government's probably going to the
<v Speaker 1>irs is probably gonna still charge me the tax credit.
<v Speaker 1>The whole thing is fucked. I don't know more CEOs,
<v Speaker 1>you know more Luigi's free Luigi. Okay. Anyway, Trieridas is
<v Speaker 1>related to veloziac in the order pandinals family and order.
<v Speaker 1>Should always be asking what family and order is this
<v Speaker 1>fucking plant that I'm interested in? Ge get a little
<v Speaker 1>bit more context for uh, for life, and then if
<v Speaker 1>you don't know that family or order, well what the
<v Speaker 1>fuck is in and ask about go to in neet,
<v Speaker 1>hit the explore feature type in the family name uh,
<v Speaker 1>look at pictures of that plant, learn about it, and
<v Speaker 1>then click on the map and see where it's distribution occurs.
<v Speaker 1>Very interesting, it'll help you know, zoom out in larger world,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. But triarid Ace is, yeah, it's in. It's
<v Speaker 1>another weird fucking family in the order Pandinales, the screw
<v Speaker 1>Pine order if you don't know what a screw pint is,
<v Speaker 1>it's fine, it's you know, you can you can be forgiven.
<v Speaker 1>Because they're not really in in North America anywhere. They're weird.
<v Speaker 1>They're all weird. But the Lows, the Ac and uh,
<v Speaker 1>the the Panama hat family cyclant the see is also in.
<v Speaker 1>It's just the weird order of monocots. But apparently triarid Ac.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder, I suppose all of triarid A s is micoheterotrophic. God,
<v Speaker 1>that's cool. God, these fucking weird, weird things, these strange
<v Speaker 1>and beautiful things. So ethysmyac triarid A s. In gent
<v Speaker 1>On an unrelated note, and I know I'm all over
<v Speaker 1>the place. Just bear with me, okay, all right. Was
<v Speaker 1>drew from Carnivoro, the carnivorous plant nursery was over earlier
<v Speaker 1>this morning. Stopped by my house to shoot the shit,
<v Speaker 1>and because he was down here anyway for family stuff,
<v Speaker 1>and he was telling me about a front of his
<v Speaker 1>that that has discovered a bunch of new carnivorous plant species,
<v Speaker 1>including one in the Amazon that's underwater for a few months.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's got a dormancy strategy, but most plants
<v Speaker 1>with a dormancy strategy. It's a response to cold or
<v Speaker 1>to dry they grow in like cold temperate latitudes, or
<v Speaker 1>they've got they're grow in seasonally dry places or deserts.
<v Speaker 1>But this is a plant that's got a dormancy strategy
<v Speaker 1>in relation to being inundated with water and you know,
<v Speaker 1>blocked off from sunlight because it's growing. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>under six feet twelve feet of water whatever, and and
<v Speaker 1>uh and then once the you know, the water's subside,
<v Speaker 1>then it comes back, it springs back to life and
<v Speaker 1>you know, that's it's never died, you know what I mean,
<v Speaker 1>figure of speech and starts doing its thing. But that's
<v Speaker 1>that was totally novel to me too. A fucking dormancy
<v Speaker 1>strategy in response to being flooded. All this shit is
<v Speaker 1>so foreign to me. The whole Amazon. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>was looking at maps with my friend Zane, who's a
<v Speaker 1>herpetologist down there, and and we were looking at you know,
<v Speaker 1>I was like, I, for some reason, I don't know why,
<v Speaker 1>I thought you could just like drive east from Ecuador
<v Speaker 1>and you're just driving to Brazil. There's I know, it's
<v Speaker 1>all the Amazon, but there's surely a highway that goes
<v Speaker 1>through it. Yeah, I was so fucking ignorant. And then
<v Speaker 1>I looked and I'm like, oh, there's nothing like It's
<v Speaker 1>really like people use boats to get around. There's no roads,
<v Speaker 1>there's you can't it's so thick and just water log
<v Speaker 1>there's no Uh. It's like a such a huge portion
<v Speaker 1>of Earth's service. It's amazing. I'm so curious about it now.
<v Speaker 1>I want to go there and get deng gay and
<v Speaker 1>you know some other horrible tropical diseases. Zaying, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>had leish maniasis, which is a protist that you get
<v Speaker 1>from uh and causes the horrific rash that you get
<v Speaker 1>from something called sand fleas or sand flies. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>these little diptera, these little flies that just can spread this.
<v Speaker 1>That sounds fucking awful. And he's got a friend who
<v Speaker 1>got out in his nose and ate half his face.
<v Speaker 1>Now he's fine. His nose came back, he grew it back.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if you got to get a skin
<v Speaker 1>graft from his ass or something or whatever, but it
<v Speaker 1>sounds fucking bad. And it pops up like six months
<v Speaker 1>after the originally infected with it. What fun. One of
<v Speaker 1>many tropical diseases you can get. It's just like, it's
<v Speaker 1>so fucking humid down there. Shit just thrives. Not where
<v Speaker 1>I was, it was fine. I might still have denga.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but uh, Alex got denga. You know,
<v Speaker 1>he was out for you can't do anything. It's he
<v Speaker 1>was out for a few weeks. But he's fine now.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, this, uh yeah, check out that Mike Mico
<v Speaker 1>heterotrophy pdf. I just saw a little voi rhea. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what species it was, but some of these things,
<v Speaker 1>it's fascinating. They're fucking fun to draw it through. They're
<v Speaker 1>really cool. Excuse me, I just burped. Somebody wrote me saying,
<v Speaker 1>I listened to this guy's podcast, but it's disgusting. I
<v Speaker 1>can hear you drinking water, And then I had to
<v Speaker 1>remind her, well, it's a good thing you can't hear
<v Speaker 1>me pissing in bottles because I do that too. You know,
<v Speaker 1>if I'm like right now, I could just pause and
<v Speaker 1>go to the bathroom. But if I'm talking with someone, hey, buddy,
<v Speaker 1>I don't have time to I'm not gonna take away
<v Speaker 1>from the conversation. You know, that would affect you the listener,
<v Speaker 1>you'd hear the pausing or whatever. I'm just gonna piss
<v Speaker 1>in a bottle. They don't know. I just mute the
<v Speaker 1>thing a pissing a bottle. I had to inform where
<v Speaker 1>that happens too, and she was repulsed. It was she
<v Speaker 1>understood though. It was all good fun. So uh so, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the fucking micae heterotrophy thing was cool. Well, and then
<v Speaker 1>I think I probably have a I'm getting a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of a more of an interest in ethno botany.
<v Speaker 1>I've always been interested in etho botany. I've always been
<v Speaker 1>interested in human relations to plants. That's one of the
<v Speaker 1>few times I feel hopeful about humanity or just about
<v Speaker 1>people as individuals, is seeing them get excited about plants,
<v Speaker 1>especially kids. When people are dead on the inside and
<v Speaker 1>they no longer have that appreciation for the living world,
<v Speaker 1>nor do they have the capacity to get excited about it.
<v Speaker 1>That's when I'm I just don't you know, like really, like,
<v Speaker 1>what do you do? What's going on up there? Really?
<v Speaker 1>You don't like see any greater context. You just video
<v Speaker 1>games and fucking sport, Like what do you deal with
<v Speaker 1>your time? Like sports cars are fucking collecting shit to pray.
<v Speaker 1>You know what, I don't understand the I don't understand it.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, no judgment is they say bless their hearts.
<v Speaker 1>Ah So anyway, but the ethno botanical aspect of all
<v Speaker 1>this is, especially if some of these plants, you know
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking wild, islex y Usa, which is in the
<v Speaker 1>genus islex same genus as yerba mate, same genus as yopon,
<v Speaker 1>which you know we get up here. It's a caffeine
<v Speaker 1>source native North American caffeine source Islex vamitatoria. Unfortunate species name.
<v Speaker 1>A friend of mine makes a makes macha out of
<v Speaker 1>that species and sells it. He's got like a little company.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's sold for a lot of money and whole foods.
<v Speaker 1>But you could probably pocket it from the store though
<v Speaker 1>you know it's gonna he's gonna make money either way.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, but yeah, Ilex Yusa is like a thirty
<v Speaker 1>to forty foot tall tree. In some cases it's larger.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think it's one of those plants. It's like
<v Speaker 1>Salvia divi norm where, which is supposed to not occur
<v Speaker 1>in the wild. It's a cultagen. It's been in human
<v Speaker 1>cultivation for so long that or is probably a product
<v Speaker 1>of human cultivation. Maybe who knows that the species itself
<v Speaker 1>or that genome, whatever it is, doesn't exist in the wild.
<v Speaker 1>It's just predominant in cultivation. But it's it's man, they
<v Speaker 1>drink this shit like it's just water down there. It's
<v Speaker 1>great and it's you know, they'll make it really light,
<v Speaker 1>so it's not overpowering. But it's got caffeine and it
<v Speaker 1>feels like a much softer, more pleasant to the taste
<v Speaker 1>yerba mate because yerba mate will give me a headaches
<v Speaker 1>sometimes and it's got kind of a weird flavor to it.
<v Speaker 1>This stuff is pleasant, this pie, and it feels good.
<v Speaker 1>Of course I fuck it up and make it too strong.
<v Speaker 1>But it's what's enabled me to quit coffee for the
<v Speaker 1>last month. Except for a few times, I've mostly been
<v Speaker 1>off the coffee, which is great. I needed to be
<v Speaker 1>off of it because I just overdid it. I've been
<v Speaker 1>addicted to coffee since I was like fourteen or fifteen.
<v Speaker 1>Uh yeah, so it's been nice. I feel less. I
<v Speaker 1>feel slightly less ince anyway. On the uh the subject
<v Speaker 1>of ethnobotany, a plant that was I found really fascinating
<v Speaker 1>and that I had never been exposed to before was
<v Speaker 1>Crescentia couhetae, which is in Big Noniac, the Catalpa family,
<v Speaker 1>the trumpet vine family, some North American relatives, the desert
<v Speaker 1>willow family, Big Noniac order. Lamy a leis uh so
<v Speaker 1>you know bilatterally symmetrical flowers opposite leaves generally speaking. But
<v Speaker 1>the name for this is calabash tree. And it produces
<v Speaker 1>these fruits that look like many basketballs, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>the little ones. So you might see it like a
<v Speaker 1>game at the you know when you you go to
<v Speaker 1>like fucking daven Busters or chuck E Cheese, you know,
<v Speaker 1>one of those like basket the little mini the mini
<v Speaker 1>basketballs like that size, not the big ones. And uh
<v Speaker 1>my cult trill references, they really place me. I used
<v Speaker 1>to I used to go to Chunkie Cheese. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you take take your take the kid there and she's
<v Speaker 1>run all over the place. You gotta go there on
<v Speaker 1>the weekdays, you know, because it's a fucking Petrie dish.
<v Speaker 1>Otherwise now it's a ripoff, but you could always find it. Wait,
<v Speaker 1>there's scams. You could pull a chuck E Cheese, you
<v Speaker 1>know with the ski ball machine or something. The whole
<v Speaker 1>place is a scam. Really, when it comes down to it,
<v Speaker 1>they're just milking you anyway. Uh. The calabash tree family
<v Speaker 1>Bignonia ac order lamy alies produces this fruit that's the
<v Speaker 1>size of one of those mini basketballs. You cut it
<v Speaker 1>open and it's got this uh woody exocarp. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a woody it's part of the fruit. It's beneath the rind,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's woody tissue and it creates a perfect bowl.
<v Speaker 1>So these imagine like one of those mini basketballs cut
<v Speaker 1>in half. It creates a perfect bowl. They're fucking everywhere. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>and I think, let me stick at the range map.
<v Speaker 1>It is the distribution. I mean it's planted throughout Southeast
<v Speaker 1>Asia now too. This is obviously see an immensely useful
<v Speaker 1>plant because you basically have a bowl from it. Right.
<v Speaker 1>It's like it's not the hardest wood it's got. I
<v Speaker 1>mean you could definitely step on it and break it,
<v Speaker 1>but you've basically got it. What. Yeah, it sin Dominican,
<v Speaker 1>it's throughout the Caribbean, it's throughout southern Mexico, and it's
<v Speaker 1>I think it's is it colifflorous, two flowers popping right
<v Speaker 1>out of the trunk. Yeah, it parts, yeah, but it's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking cool It's a really cool plant. Odd pinnate leaves,
<v Speaker 1>big noniac, just like the sausage tree, which is also
<v Speaker 1>big noniac, which I've I grew a few of those.
<v Speaker 1>I've got seeds, actually stuff. I got sausage tree seeds.
<v Speaker 1>Who wants a sausage tree? Anybody out there work for
<v Speaker 1>a conservatory that could use Kegelia africana, would you like
<v Speaker 1>a sausage tree. I'll send you these seeds. It's a
<v Speaker 1>great plant for a fucking conservatory, especially, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>obviously you need a glasshouse. You need to be in
<v Speaker 1>Florida or southern Califia or in my case, deep South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>But it still dies back. Mine just died back in
<v Speaker 1>a freeze. Once they get big enough, they don't fully
<v Speaker 1>die back. The leaves will die. It's like a thirty
<v Speaker 1>foot tall one. We got it froze. It got down
<v Speaker 1>to like twenty eight here for a few hours, and
<v Speaker 1>I was freaking. I had to bring all that. Hovier
<v Speaker 1>brought all my shit inside for me because I was
<v Speaker 1>in Chile. Thank god, you know, uh, and then then
<v Speaker 1>it was supposed to get fucking cold again because most
<v Speaker 1>of the native cac died down here. Are fine, you know,
<v Speaker 1>all the mammalarias and all the native any native cactus
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas can take a freeze. But I've got
<v Speaker 1>other stuff that I you know, like someone gave me
<v Speaker 1>one of those. Uh. I think Andy Andy from Andy's
<v Speaker 1>Orchids gave me one of those ant house orchids. It's
<v Speaker 1>like the stems are you know, it's a mermecophile and uh, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>some of those are just I've got shit that's that's sensitive.
<v Speaker 1>You know. Some of them are tillococtus you might use
<v Speaker 1>for grafting or something, and well are sensitive to this stuff.
<v Speaker 1>And I've got like columnars like my pack of series
<v Speaker 1>wherebe I the tip died, so this will be less
<v Speaker 1>of an issue. As they get bigger, they can take
<v Speaker 1>these early morning freezes for a few hours, you know,
<v Speaker 1>dipp into like twenty eight without dying back. But while
<v Speaker 1>they're small still it can so anyway, it's just anyone.
<v Speaker 1>It's the pain in the ass. But yeah, if you
<v Speaker 1>want those Kagelia affri kind of seeds, email me and
<v Speaker 1>I'll send you some. A friend of mine who has
<v Speaker 1>a seed company in Rwanda gave them to me and
<v Speaker 1>I've already grown a few and it'd be great. It's
<v Speaker 1>definitely a cool plant to show people because the fruit
<v Speaker 1>does look like a fucking sausage. And then the flowers
<v Speaker 1>are incredible to It's got these pendent influorescences that are
<v Speaker 1>pollinated by birds and bats, you know, the huge flowers.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, but yeah, this Criscientia cool heade was was
<v Speaker 1>really cool to see and I had no prior knowledge
<v Speaker 1>of it. You see, when you see the fruit, you
<v Speaker 1>think it would be either some sort of large palm
<v Speaker 1>fruit or it would be in Kukerbatasi it would be
<v Speaker 1>a cucumber fruit. It's neither. It's from big noniac. I
<v Speaker 1>wonder what this thing evolved with. What you know, the
<v Speaker 1>inside of the fruit is filled this white meae substance
<v Speaker 1>that it was probably megafun I guess, of course, but
<v Speaker 1>this white meae substance with you know, many seeds inside.
<v Speaker 1>And now I want to grow this thing because it
<v Speaker 1>seems like it's got a drought tolerance too. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>again all this shit and the climate's so fucked up
<v Speaker 1>and the jet stream. You know, the Arctic's warming so
<v Speaker 1>much that the jet stream isn't stable. So now we
<v Speaker 1>get these polar vortexas. Remember whenever that cold air is
<v Speaker 1>dipping far down south on the other side of it,
<v Speaker 1>just like a wave and a trough, you've got warm
<v Speaker 1>air going way up to the Arctic too. The Arctic
<v Speaker 1>warms like one of the during the deep freeze that
<v Speaker 1>happened here in Texas and was it twenty one? I
<v Speaker 1>think Alaska that day was like warmer than fucking somewhere
<v Speaker 1>in Arizona. And I forget anyway. Uh, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>all it's all part of the the general trend of
<v Speaker 1>warming climates. I can't believe that fucking people like Joe
<v Speaker 1>Rogan are full on climate deniers now. It's fucking insane. God,
<v Speaker 1>it's so it's so fucking crazy. I shared a clip
<v Speaker 1>on a YouTube channel yesterday by climate Town, which is Uh,
<v Speaker 1>that guy Roley, I forget his fucking name. He's out
<v Speaker 1>in New York. He's got a climate science policy degree,
<v Speaker 1>but he says it with like a it's kind of
<v Speaker 1>tongue in cheek. But he runs climate Town the YouTube channel,
<v Speaker 1>which is great. It's fucking hilarious, hilarious, and it's good info.
<v Speaker 1>But I posted it because I kept seeing people sharing
<v Speaker 1>that land Man show. I don't know if you know
<v Speaker 1>about that. You're you know, suburban dads, boomers, climate deniers.
<v Speaker 1>They love this show because it's the main clip from
<v Speaker 1>it is this billy Bob Thornton, who really went out
<v Speaker 1>on the deep end. I said, wow, you know, he's
<v Speaker 1>got like a he's doing like a Captain Jack Sparrow
<v Speaker 1>impression in his daily life. He's dressed like a fucking pirate.
<v Speaker 1>You know, he's dressed like a drag queen pirate. No shade,
<v Speaker 1>I'm just saying it's, you know, anyway. So, but he's
<v Speaker 1>doing this. He plays this West Texas land man who
<v Speaker 1>works for the oil companies. It helps get land. And
<v Speaker 1>there's this scene where he's it's so fucking tongue in
<v Speaker 1>chee man, it's not tongue and she it's so cliche,
<v Speaker 1>like it's so like, this is what I would imagine,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a Joe Rogan bro or like a West
<v Speaker 1>Texas bro who's never left West Texas would think of
<v Speaker 1>like the California liberal. You know, the roles are very
<v Speaker 1>cliche it's very cartoon, it's very predictable. But you've got
<v Speaker 1>this landman played by Billy Bob Thorton, and then the
<v Speaker 1>the liberal out there who's all for renewable energy, and
<v Speaker 1>he's telling her how none of this is renewable. It's
<v Speaker 1>those windmills are bullshiting, you know, blah blah, and oil's
<v Speaker 1>all we got. Yeah, everything's out here is made of oil.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, like the typical thing, the typical argument
<v Speaker 1>you hear against electric cars. And I'm not for any
<v Speaker 1>of this shit. I'm not four cars, I'm not four windmills.
<v Speaker 1>Any of this. It all feeds the tumor. It's all
<v Speaker 1>part of the same disease, just a different source. I
<v Speaker 1>will say, I don't like oil, though I don't like cancer.
<v Speaker 1>I don't like the fucking smell of exhaust. That was
<v Speaker 1>something that was running through my mind the whole anytime
<v Speaker 1>I go to Latin America, because the fucking air pollution
<v Speaker 1>is so bad. There's no catalytic converters on most of
<v Speaker 1>the cars. Mexico City smells like a fucking parking garage.
<v Speaker 1>I love Mexico City, I just it smells like a
<v Speaker 1>parking garage. The fucking auto pollution is terrible. It's all
<v Speaker 1>car pollution. It gives me a fucking headache. I want
<v Speaker 1>to puke. I literally get a nauseous when I smell that,
<v Speaker 1>And I'm just like, man, you know, cars fucking suck.
<v Speaker 1>But like if shit was electric, like infrastructure had slowly
<v Speaker 1>been moved to electric. Of course it couldn't have been
<v Speaker 1>because the technology didn't exist yet, and electric cars have
<v Speaker 1>their own downsides, especially when it comes to temperature and
<v Speaker 1>then the minerals required whatever. But either way, you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>be you know, fucking robbing. You're gonna be looting the
<v Speaker 1>habitat to get the materials you need for any of this.
<v Speaker 1>But the answer is just less cars and better better
<v Speaker 1>urban planning. But regardless, the whole time, I'm just thinking,
<v Speaker 1>like God, man, like electric cars, like internal combustion engines
<v Speaker 1>are just so inefficient, you lose so much energy to heat,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. Electric cars are fewer moving parts, better pick up,
<v Speaker 1>they don't and most importantly, they don't fucking stink. They
<v Speaker 1>don't like spew poisoned into the air. All right, I'm
<v Speaker 1>not a booster for any but anyway, so I shared
<v Speaker 1>this Climate Town clip because I just got so tired
<v Speaker 1>of seeing that landmank that from this TV show. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, this is just I've been hearing these parroted
<v Speaker 1>arguments when people parrot arguments, and you know, people on
<v Speaker 1>the left do this too, of course, like the American left.
<v Speaker 1>They part these stupid talking points and then like try
<v Speaker 1>to pass them off like they thought on them themselves,
<v Speaker 1>like they're they're educated, though you've never heard this before
<v Speaker 1>or you know, and everybody's doing it right, especially of course,
<v Speaker 1>and that's what they're always you always reading the comments
<v Speaker 1>like those electric cars, the minerals and blah blah blah,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, climate's always changing. The climate deniers have
<v Speaker 1>their own round of this shit. But people basically they're
<v Speaker 1>repeating shit that you've heard nine thousand times already, and
<v Speaker 1>it was stupid as fuck the first time you heard it.
<v Speaker 1>And then they're they're telling you to telling it to
<v Speaker 1>you like you've never heard it before, like you're supposed
<v Speaker 1>to be blown away by this. This is some new new
<v Speaker 1>information they're going to blow your mind with. And then
<v Speaker 1>they're like passing it off as their own and it's like, man,
<v Speaker 1>I know, you just heard that somewhere else. You didn't
<v Speaker 1>even fucking think about this or look at look into it.
<v Speaker 1>You're just using it to back up your dumbass opinion.
<v Speaker 1>It just it's it irritates the fuck out of me.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's like, man, I wasn't born. Yesterday I
<v Speaker 1>met a fucking idiot. And also you're not an original
<v Speaker 1>thinker regardless. I shared this clip on the YouTube channel
<v Speaker 1>yesterday and the amount of like climate deniers I was
<v Speaker 1>seeing in the comments was blowing my mind. I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>how the fuck did you get Why do you follow
<v Speaker 1>this channel? Do you know what I do? Like? You
<v Speaker 1>just think the fucking you think like the fact I
<v Speaker 1>curse or I have like a problem. I have a
<v Speaker 1>problem with cursing, right, I curse far too much some time?
<v Speaker 1>You just what is it that? How did you get here? Like?
<v Speaker 1>What are you doing here? You know it's like seeing
<v Speaker 1>a crackhead in an AA meeting? Well, actually that makes sense. Sometimes,
<v Speaker 1>you know, people relapse and they just stand up back
<v Speaker 1>in the meetings. You know, the door's always open, come
<v Speaker 1>on in here. You know you could come into this
<v Speaker 1>meeting still spun out of your mind. It's fine, you
<v Speaker 1>know we're gonna give you the recovery you need, even
<v Speaker 1>though we know it's not gonna work. Nobody's denied. But
<v Speaker 1>you know what I mean, this the climate denial shit again,
<v Speaker 1>this is just more I just can't fucking I need
<v Speaker 1>to get out of this country at some point. You know,
<v Speaker 1>every place has its own flavor of poison. Every place
<v Speaker 1>is filled with idiots in human toxicity. And there's nice
<v Speaker 1>things in every place too, of course, don't forget that.
<v Speaker 1>Live laugh left, But I just need to I can't
<v Speaker 1>sit still. So this is just the home base. I'm
<v Speaker 1>just here from my daughter. And then, you know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know where. I don't know where to. Wind will
<v Speaker 1>blow me later on, you know, hopefully not off a cliff.
<v Speaker 1>But uh yeah, the US is rough, Texas is rougher,
<v Speaker 1>culturally speaking. Wonderful plants and animals here, Okay anyway, So
<v Speaker 1>Krishanthia Kueta, I'm gonna try to grow that. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant. It's it's gotta grows in areas with a
<v Speaker 1>seasonally dry climate. I really like those seasonally dry areas,
<v Speaker 1>not quite deserts, you know, men as your eyes. Brazil,
<v Speaker 1>parts of the Dominican Republic love to be there in
<v Speaker 1>the wet season, so I could really you know, I'm
<v Speaker 1>not misled into thinking it's more dry than it is
<v Speaker 1>or that it's just whatever it's season. Like if you
<v Speaker 1>go to Wahaka cloud Forest during the rainy season, you're like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>this is just a cloud forest, you know, rainy whatever,
<v Speaker 1>and it never dries out here. And then you go
<v Speaker 1>there in the winter and during the dry season you're like,
<v Speaker 1>oh shit, this is like the roads are dusty. It's
<v Speaker 1>completely different. It's complete and you want to get that
<v Speaker 1>full picture. Anyway, what are we talking about here? Where
<v Speaker 1>are we going with this? Let's keep moving on. So
<v Speaker 1>on another note, there was a really cool orchid that
<v Speaker 1>we encountered, fragment Pedium, which I think is one of
<v Speaker 1>five genera in subfamily and orchid subfamily siper pedioid E,
<v Speaker 1>which has two anthers instead of only one anther like
<v Speaker 1>orchid doity. The subfamily like the terrestrial orchids in North
<v Speaker 1>America or Australia, or epidendroid E, a lot of which
<v Speaker 1>are the most epidendroids I think are Epiphytes siper pedioid
<v Speaker 1>the lady slipper orchids. What a stupid names. Lady slip,
<v Speaker 1>what is that that's not culturally relevant to me? It's
<v Speaker 1>a little bag. They're a bag orchids just what I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna call them, the Jewel bag orchids, like a bag
<v Speaker 1>you get from the Jewel Osco, which is a Chicago
<v Speaker 1>supermarket chain. Do they still do it? They still have
<v Speaker 1>plastic bags? That did jewe Losco? Or do the woke
<v Speaker 1>Bob type of away well, all plastics just like the
<v Speaker 1>plastic straws. The woke Bob took away the plastuck straws
<v Speaker 1>at a plastic bag. Anything's a woke mob. Anything you
<v Speaker 1>don't like that tries to like do a little bit
<v Speaker 1>of environmental good in a world as a woke mob.
<v Speaker 1>Just reminder for all the Americans here, what a what
<v Speaker 1>an idiotic dystopi? Okay? Anyway, the Jewel bag orchids, the
<v Speaker 1>Jewel Losco bag orchids, the siper pedioid E two anthers,
<v Speaker 1>the staminos really cool flower morphology orchids of course always
<v Speaker 1>have such a fascinating flower morphology. The flowers are like
<v Speaker 1>little puzzles where you look at this thing and you say,
<v Speaker 1>what is it doing there? How is it doing it
<v Speaker 1>what pollinates it lots of specialists pollinators, lots of deceptive pollination.
<v Speaker 1>Many times no nectar or pollen being offered. It's you know,
<v Speaker 1>pheromones that are alluring in uh, pollinators to dupe them all, right, epipac,
<v Speaker 1>this gigantea which we get here in Texas, all the
<v Speaker 1>way west to California, is pollinated much the same way
<v Speaker 1>that this fragment pedium is. It's it. It lures in
<v Speaker 1>flies hoverflies that are are that mostly uh, I believe
<v Speaker 1>they all are meant most of them lay eggs in
<v Speaker 1>aphid colonies and then the eggs hatch, the larvae eat
<v Speaker 1>the the aphids, and so to lure them in, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you need some sort of bait to fool them into
<v Speaker 1>thinking that there's an aphid colony there, whether it's pheromones
<v Speaker 1>or in the case that is fragment pedium. It's thought
<v Speaker 1>that the lure is these splotches that look like aphids
<v Speaker 1>on this bag flower. So uh, I believe all of
<v Speaker 1>these not ladies, slipper orchids, but the jewel bag orchid
<v Speaker 1>because that labellum is a little pouch. It's a big
<v Speaker 1>inflated bag. The insects crawl in there, and then it's
<v Speaker 1>got this trap and least pollination system, just like aeroids do,
<v Speaker 1>and just like aristolochia do. Really fascinating It temporarily traps
<v Speaker 1>the insect, makes it hang out in there for a
<v Speaker 1>day or two Aristolochia does. I don't know how long
<v Speaker 1>it is with the jewel bag orchids, the siper pedioids,
<v Speaker 1>and then lets them out. But when they go out
<v Speaker 1>in the case of fragment pedium, in the case of
<v Speaker 1>like Aristolochia, the pipevines like Aristolochia erecta that we get
<v Speaker 1>in Texas, which is a fucking wonderful species that I'm
<v Speaker 1>trying to propagate a lot more of we need if
<v Speaker 1>you live in Texas, propagate the shit out of Aristolochia erecta.
<v Speaker 1>It's not grown enough. They're easy to grow from tuber
<v Speaker 1>I think like to just take cuttings of and you
<v Speaker 1>should just set aside a little area of your yard
<v Speaker 1>to grow this plant. And they're also the host plant
<v Speaker 1>for really dope caterpillar and butterfly, the swallow tails orange
<v Speaker 1>black caterpillars. They turn into these fucking really cool butterflies.
<v Speaker 1>And we saw some wild aristolochia down at this little
<v Speaker 1>butterfly sanctuary this lady had set up in her yard
<v Speaker 1>down there in Mara, Ecuador, and I've got to do
<v Speaker 1>the video on it. God, it was fucking wild. It
<v Speaker 1>was like a six inch eight inch tall bag of aristolochia.
<v Speaker 1>And there were caterpillars there, of course, And there's caterpillars
<v Speaker 1>on coca plants Erythroxylum coca as well, which makes sense
<v Speaker 1>all those fucking alkaloids in the leaves. You know that's
<v Speaker 1>you got a plant with strong toxic fhito chemistry, you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna get a caterpillar that evolves to bioaccumulate that stuff
<v Speaker 1>and hold it in its tissue, so that if a
<v Speaker 1>bird comes neaeds the caterpillar of pukes, it's a great defense, right,
<v Speaker 1>gain a tolerance to these compounds, then bioaccumulate them so
<v Speaker 1>if anything tries to eat you with pukes and doesn't
<v Speaker 1>try to eat any more of your species, selective advantage
<v Speaker 1>in that. So God, the erythroxyland was so cool. What
<v Speaker 1>a cool genus, not even just for like the stupid
<v Speaker 1>drug aspect, because I think cocaine's fucking awful. It makes
<v Speaker 1>people so intolerable to be around, almost as much as
<v Speaker 1>alcohol does. But it's a really cool, curious genus. I
<v Speaker 1>chewed on Erythroxylum grisillipes leaves that had been planted a
<v Speaker 1>century or two before at this research station and at
<v Speaker 1>forty eight hundred feet in the upper Amazon of Ecuador,
<v Speaker 1>and it like made my mouth nomin and gave me
<v Speaker 1>a little bit of a boost. I didn't like it
<v Speaker 1>because I don't like blow. I haven't done blowing like
<v Speaker 1>fifteen years. But the feeling of it is gross, Like
<v Speaker 1>it's mostly the comdown too, Like I got like a
<v Speaker 1>little peppa. It was like a coffee It felt like
<v Speaker 1>a more unpleasant coffee crash. But the fact that it
<v Speaker 1>numbed my mouth, I was like, Jesus Christ, this is potent.
<v Speaker 1>The whole thing was covered in moss and lichens and
<v Speaker 1>algae growing on the leaves too, really wet. Environment wasn't
<v Speaker 1>that hot, Like it was chilly at night. God, that
<v Speaker 1>was such a lovely morning, waking up after it fucking
<v Speaker 1>pissed all night, and the sounds of the birds and
<v Speaker 1>the forest, and you know, we were up on top
<v Speaker 1>of this mountain where they built this research station. They
<v Speaker 1>didn't haul anything up there. They built it with trees
<v Speaker 1>from the surrounding area. Really dope, set up to drinking
<v Speaker 1>Guayusa tea at night, solar panels, they had the fucking
<v Speaker 1>starlink so they had good internet there, microscopes, a library.
<v Speaker 1>It was like a dream. That's like what I want
<v Speaker 1>to have at Thorn Scrubs Sanctuary sometime, like a research
<v Speaker 1>station like this, and they host visiting groups. It was
<v Speaker 1>so pleasant, you know, and it had it not been rainy,
<v Speaker 1>you could look across and see these volcanoes. Like Alex
<v Speaker 1>was showing me pictures, like nobody could see this giant volcano.
<v Speaker 1>And he showed me pictures of like the volcano with
<v Speaker 1>like lava spewing out of it too, like this is
<v Speaker 1>a small eruption. Anyway, what was I talking about? So
<v Speaker 1>the uh this trap and release mechanism, which aeroids do it?
<v Speaker 1>Aeroids will temporarily trap their pollenate ARISTOLOCHI will temporarily trap
<v Speaker 1>its pollinators. And this fragmentpedium did it as well. And
<v Speaker 1>I looked up this paper called pollination of slipper Orchids
<v Speaker 1>siper pedioid e review by Pemberton, Florida Museum of natural
<v Speaker 1>history and it's fucking fascinating. And it turns out see this.
<v Speaker 1>I was never into orchids before Peter Bernhardt got me
<v Speaker 1>into them because he studies them and he studies their
<v Speaker 1>unique pollination systems, and that's what is so cool about them.
<v Speaker 1>It's like every fucking orchid is a puzzle. You know,
<v Speaker 1>when you stop seeing these things, is this is the
<v Speaker 1>pretty flower? Who gives a fuck about that? I don't
<v Speaker 1>care about aesthetics, that's nice, whatever. I'm interested in this
<v Speaker 1>like ornate morphology that's evolved in so many orchids, just
<v Speaker 1>having like intricate ornate morphology to their flowers. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a puzzle everything is. In this case, this Fragmentpedium pierci,
<v Speaker 1>which we saw growing on these limestone rocks that are
<v Speaker 1>on this river. That and the river is they're surely
<v Speaker 1>submerged at some point because there's so much rain that
<v Speaker 1>you get torrents. I mean, there was a giant boulder
<v Speaker 1>in the middle of this river that I'm sure you know,
<v Speaker 1>it was the size of a fridge, probably weighed, you know,
<v Speaker 1>two thousand pounds. I'm sure it didn't be pushed there
<v Speaker 1>in an epic flood however, long ago, right, and a
<v Speaker 1>series of those epic floods, these epic torrents where the
<v Speaker 1>river is just swollen and it ends up moving at
<v Speaker 1>another one hundred feet, and then it sits there for
<v Speaker 1>a century, and then another flood comes by. It sits
<v Speaker 1>there for twenty years, then another flood comes by and
<v Speaker 1>moves it a little bit further down the river. Just wild, wild,
<v Speaker 1>fucking god, it was so cool. I mean, this habitat
<v Speaker 1>is just so rich. I'm gonna fucking I'm gonna do
<v Speaker 1>to Ayahuashka thing. I don't care, you know, I don't care.
<v Speaker 1>It's a cliche. You know, the hanky's going down here,
<v Speaker 1>the gringoes, whoever, you know, the techies to do psychedelics
<v Speaker 1>in a place like that, because psychedelics and nature just
<v Speaker 1>go hand in hand. That's what's psychedelics are. They're probably
<v Speaker 1>a way, they're probably away for the plant to fucking
<v Speaker 1>get us to chill out with whatever stupid shit we're doing.
<v Speaker 1>You know, this race to nowhere where we're completely shitting
<v Speaker 1>all over the place, right, behaving like a teenager that
<v Speaker 1>just found a liquor cabinet. Now we're just puking and
<v Speaker 1>shitting all over the place, you know, bottles, we're just
<v Speaker 1>trashing the house, right This maybe what the plants are doing.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe if I, you know, blow these people's minds, maybe
<v Speaker 1>they'll they'll have a moment of clarity and settle down.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I get a little woo wu. But
<v Speaker 1>it's a nice theory. But to do ayahuasca, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>when you do ayahuasca, you're not even there anymore. You're
<v Speaker 1>off somewhere else. It's like a prolonged DMPT trip. But
<v Speaker 1>to do any kind of psychedelic and we did encounter
<v Speaker 1>quite a few silosophy species zop at the korum young
<v Speaker 1>gensis or is it young ee I forget uh, and
<v Speaker 1>a couple of a couple other like the more or
<v Speaker 1>higher altitude Mexican species. Uh. We encountered there too. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Zapata korn was there. We saw Zapata oh who chiganyi too.
<v Speaker 1>The psilosophy with the sharpest nipple saw that as well.
<v Speaker 1>Mushroom trip in it that kind of habit. That would
<v Speaker 1>be amazing too, because that's what, you know, that's what peyote.
<v Speaker 1>Any of these things therefore talking to the plants, therefore
<v Speaker 1>being surrounded with nature, and also, you know, facing the
<v Speaker 1>shit you don't want to face so you can become
<v Speaker 1>a better person, a little bit of introspection. Anyway, this
<v Speaker 1>fragment pedium was growing on these boulders of limestone that
<v Speaker 1>had fossils in them. On this river. It had been
<v Speaker 1>pissing all day, it had been raining. I was trying
<v Speaker 1>to keep my camera dry. I still got it wet.
<v Speaker 1>But if you ever get a camera wet, the way
<v Speaker 1>around that is buy some fucking silica packets online and
<v Speaker 1>put it in a bag with a shit ton of
<v Speaker 1>silica packets and they will absorb the humidity. And then
<v Speaker 1>of course you could just dry the silica packets out
<v Speaker 1>in the oven. Great method for you know, especially for
<v Speaker 1>phones too. Fuck rice, get the silica. Get the silica packets.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the stuff, you know, the ones that say
<v Speaker 1>do not eat when you get a bag of that,
<v Speaker 1>the seaweed stuff, you know. But this fragmentpedium, the floral
<v Speaker 1>structure was insane. And there's I'd later found out from
<v Speaker 1>this paper it's pollinated. It's dependent supposedly on a single species.
<v Speaker 1>Three of the four I'm quoting the paper now three
<v Speaker 1>to four insect pollinated. Fragment pedium species are narrow specialists,
<v Speaker 1>being pollinated by a single insect species. Fragment Pedium perci
<v Speaker 1>and fragment pedium called datum are each pollinated by female
<v Speaker 1>hoverflies of a single species Pemberton twenty eleven. Fragment Pedium
<v Speaker 1>longe of folium is pollinated by both a female hoverfly
<v Speaker 1>and a halictid bee. See. I don't even know what
<v Speaker 1>a helictid bee is. Now, I gotta look it up. Now,
<v Speaker 1>I gotta look this up. What's what the fuck is
<v Speaker 1>a helicted bee? Sounds fascinating? What is it? Now? Are
<v Speaker 1>sweat bees? All right? Helictid bees belonging to the family
<v Speaker 1>Helictity are known as sweat bees. They are at a
<v Speaker 1>verse group of bees found worldwide, with over forty five
<v Speaker 1>hundred species described. Here are some key characteristics and facts
<v Speaker 1>about helicted bees, size and appearance. Helicted bees are generally
<v Speaker 1>small to medium size, ranging from three to ten millimeters.
<v Speaker 1>Where did I encounter one of these that wouldn't leave
<v Speaker 1>me alone? I encountered a sweat bee. They literally go
<v Speaker 1>for sweat. It wouldn't It was a mean all the time.
<v Speaker 1>It was kind of cute. It never stung me. I
<v Speaker 1>don't even know if this thing could sting, but it
<v Speaker 1>was really interested that I was sweating like a pig,
<v Speaker 1>sweating like a whore in church, and I just, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I forget where that was. I remember it was in
<v Speaker 1>a video. Interesting. You know, the sweat bees are called
<v Speaker 1>sweat bees because they're attracted the human sweat. You know,
<v Speaker 1>this is because they need salts and minerals. So where
<v Speaker 1>would they get that if there weren't people around now?
<v Speaker 1>And if there's an OrCAD that's pollinated by halictied bees,
<v Speaker 1>by sweat bees, what does it do to get him
<v Speaker 1>in there? How do you get those guys in there?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Now, I gotta look up this species
<v Speaker 1>fragment Pedium, lounge of folium, this stuff. I am endlessly
<v Speaker 1>fascinated by this kind of shit, these relationships, How does
<v Speaker 1>this stuff evolve? The floral morphology and the things are
<v Speaker 1>just fucking beautiful too. But this this uh orchid had
<v Speaker 1>had two anthers, which was unique. Again, most orchids only
<v Speaker 1>have one, a single anther, with each anthro theica uh
<v Speaker 1>per ethiki producing a a polinia, a pollinium. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because orchid pollen is arrogated into these little
<v Speaker 1>knobs called the polinea, just like milkweeds. And then so
<v Speaker 1>it had two anths. And then this stamino with these
<v Speaker 1>little eyelash looked like a mustache kind of. And then
<v Speaker 1>the whole column is fascinating. And then of course that
<v Speaker 1>big bag pouch with the splotches on it. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>you see these things and you're like, I know something's
<v Speaker 1>going on there. That's an incredibly ornate flower. It's incredibly complex.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck? And you look into it and sure enough,
<v Speaker 1>I would love to sit there and do pollination studies.
<v Speaker 1>They don't quite have the patience for it. Maybe you
<v Speaker 1>could put a little camera or something that might be hard.
<v Speaker 1>But I fucking hate sitting still. That's the big problem
<v Speaker 1>with me for for like getting work like this done,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like for like writing or whatever. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>I just I gotta get some fucking activity. Can't sit down,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you stand up and do squats. That was why,
<v Speaker 1>you know, when I got my locomotive license, I knew
<v Speaker 1>it was wasn't gonna last. I couldn't do that. I'd
<v Speaker 1>be fucking miserable being trapped sitting down anyway, before I forget,
<v Speaker 1>I want to play the sound of an oropendula, and
<v Speaker 1>I'll probably play this again. These are these birds that
<v Speaker 1>make these hanging nests. They're related, They're in the same
<v Speaker 1>family is the birds that make the hanging nests here
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas, the ultimira orioles. And this is what
<v Speaker 1>I woke up to every morning. Just listen to this.
<v Speaker 1>I had to. I should have recorded these guys earlier.
<v Speaker 1>Those are two separate verds. One does the little water
<v Speaker 1>drop puts down in the other response the fuck? What
<v Speaker 1>did I saying to each other? I don't know? Oh god?
<v Speaker 1>So uh anyway, shout out to Cora. The genus Cora
<v Speaker 1>a basidio liking. Most liking is asco my seats. This
<v Speaker 1>is a basidio my seat, and it associates with cyanobacteria too.
<v Speaker 1>I put an Instagram post up about that, if you
<v Speaker 1>want to see photos a fucking gorgeous organism. It looks
<v Speaker 1>like a basidium my seat. It looks like a shelf fungus,
<v Speaker 1>but it's got the habit of a lichen and it's
<v Speaker 1>growing epiphytically with a bunch of moss. Where I encountered
<v Speaker 1>It was growing epiphetically with a bunch of moss and
<v Speaker 1>a little blueberry member called spherrospermum bucks of folium with
<v Speaker 1>bright purple fruits, an epiphytic one of the epiphytic bloomberries.
<v Speaker 1>What are the many many species? And I think the
<v Speaker 1>first time I saw where else? I saw it in
<v Speaker 1>Brazil And maybe I saw it that. Where else did
<v Speaker 1>I see? Let me look this up? Got inga edgeless
<v Speaker 1>the ice cream bean with a bean pod three feet long,
<v Speaker 1>tried growing at once that hated South Texas. Where did
<v Speaker 1>I encounter this? I think it was just maybe it
<v Speaker 1>was just Brazil. I feel like I've seen it in
<v Speaker 1>other places too. Yeah, it was near Nova Friebergo, Brazil.
<v Speaker 1>Different species of cora, there's probably I think there's like
<v Speaker 1>hundreds of species of Cora, each growing in different habitats.
<v Speaker 1>But uh god, it's just a fucking beautiful, beautiful organism.
<v Speaker 1>This one was like this bright turquoise teal color with
<v Speaker 1>you know, striations in it. A fucking yeah, man, And
<v Speaker 1>I don't think you get them in any of the
<v Speaker 1>northern latitudes. Actually, let me see, like you know what,
<v Speaker 1>let's see that. Let's see you get Cora's in uh
<v Speaker 1>anywhere in North America. I should have checked this earlier.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta eat something I didn't fucking eat today. Just
<v Speaker 1>had some way USA. Let's see taxonomy, Cora. Now, I
<v Speaker 1>don't think none of the United States. No observations in
<v Speaker 1>the US. Some in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>did I not see? Did I not? You know? I
<v Speaker 1>think I saw some in Chile. Maybe I didn't get
<v Speaker 1>any photos. What a jackass? What a jig? None in
<v Speaker 1>the Amazon. None in Central South America, like this center
<v Speaker 1>of the con that. I'm not sure if that's just
<v Speaker 1>not been observed or what. I'm so curious, you know,
<v Speaker 1>get your shots. Go to the state of Amazonas in Brazil.
<v Speaker 1>I just want to see what it's like. Just take
<v Speaker 1>a little just go down a river there. God man,
<v Speaker 1>so much, so much cool stuff out there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>so much cool stuff to observe. Well, you want to
<v Speaker 1>spend your time thinking about depressing things and this this
<v Speaker 1>flailing ending empire. Okay, anyway, let's uh, let's go back
<v Speaker 1>and keep talking here another yes, anyway, inga edgelist. I
<v Speaker 1>talked about that briefly, but that was another plan from
<v Speaker 1>the Ethnobotany market. Three foot long bean, delicious fruit, white
<v Speaker 1>mealy pulp around the the relatively large inch and a
<v Speaker 1>half long seeds. And they're fucking delicious too. Yeah, but
<v Speaker 1>they you know, I think they grow in Veracruz, Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>it's probably the closest. But they need warmth, they don't
<v Speaker 1>tolerate freezing, and they also need a lot of water.
<v Speaker 1>So this is gonna, you know, during those long dry
<v Speaker 1>spells we get in South Texas, it's going to be miserable.
<v Speaker 1>You could probably grow them in part portions of Florida
<v Speaker 1>before it's you know, submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>fucking delicious. But that's I mean. The cool thing too
<v Speaker 1>is they were volunteering in disturbed areas like roadsides and
<v Speaker 1>shit all over, you know, this little area near Marra
<v Speaker 1>and Puyo, Ecuador, which makes sense. I mean, you buy
<v Speaker 1>this thing at a market for fifty cents. You lit
<v Speaker 1>me fifty cents for this three foot long bean, and
<v Speaker 1>then it's got like forty thirty seeds in it. You're
<v Speaker 1>eating all of them, eating this stuff around them. You
<v Speaker 1>spit them out land, you know, the seed lands and
<v Speaker 1>and doff. The climate here barely ever dries out, so
<v Speaker 1>it's moist all the time. The duff is going to
<v Speaker 1>be moist all the time. And you could see how
<v Speaker 1>these things just they spread like cow. I mean that is,
<v Speaker 1>it's a plant that's taken very well to producing the
<v Speaker 1>sweet material that's you know, enjoyed by humans, and then
<v Speaker 1>the humans basically distribute the seeds everywhere. God, there was
<v Speaker 1>so much cool shit in that fruit market. You know,
<v Speaker 1>tons of back rist species. Two up in a paramo,
<v Speaker 1>we saw back risk and this the Looides, which is
<v Speaker 1>one of those winged leafless stembackris stem coyote bush. Saw
<v Speaker 1>some cool flug marrieurs up there, to those really weirdlycopods
<v Speaker 1>that look like you know, inch diameter worms that can
<v Speaker 1>be two feet long in some cases. Jamisonia, which is
<v Speaker 1>one of the Chylanthoid fern genera, some really fucking weird
<v Speaker 1>ones in that that genus. But I want to I
<v Speaker 1>want before I go back to talking about the parmo,
<v Speaker 1>I do want to focus on the lower elevations because
<v Speaker 1>this is where a lot of the weird stuff was.
<v Speaker 1>How have I not even mentioned the genus Socropia yet? Right?
<v Speaker 1>These are most. I think all Cycropia are New world
<v Speaker 1>they're all neotropical, but they're they're a pioneer. They're all
<v Speaker 1>pioneer species for the most part. You know, they're the
<v Speaker 1>first to re colonize disturbed land, the first to start
<v Speaker 1>to reclaim the land after humans have fucked it or
<v Speaker 1>ruined it. You know, they they get around easily, and
<v Speaker 1>they have huge peltate leaves. There's quite a few species.
<v Speaker 1>I remember seeing what species did I see in Brazil
<v Speaker 1>with the silver undersides? The family is ertic Casey and uh,
<v Speaker 1>let's see what species was it? I think they were
<v Speaker 1>in their own family for a while, or they've been
<v Speaker 1>in more ac as well. It was yeah, Socropia hollow Luca,
<v Speaker 1>Socropia hollo luca. And uh, where do I see shriber
<v Speaker 1>shri bariana? Where was that? Oh that was in the
<v Speaker 1>d Aren't the Meinican Republic. But really cool leaves umbrella
<v Speaker 1>like leaves, peltate leaves, a really cool pilotaxi. When the
<v Speaker 1>leaves are emerging, they look all wrinkled and just have
<v Speaker 1>this beautiful form as they emerge from the bud. And
<v Speaker 1>then the fruits of course are you know, eaten by
<v Speaker 1>a number of animals. These are immensely ecologically important trees,
<v Speaker 1>especially since they're they're i mean, being a pioneer species.
<v Speaker 1>They're one of the first plants to show up and
<v Speaker 1>then get the land ready for the next succession of
<v Speaker 1>species that are not pioneer species, for next you know,
<v Speaker 1>the next line of plant species that wind up growing there,
<v Speaker 1>that need a little bit more forest cover, that need
<v Speaker 1>that living skin on the earth. They can't just you know,
<v Speaker 1>before they can get established, you know, they can't do
<v Speaker 1>the species that are secondary or third in succession to
<v Speaker 1>you know, to recolonize an area after it's been cleared
<v Speaker 1>or destroyed for agriculture or pasture or whatever. You know,
<v Speaker 1>those pioneer species are important. That's basically what you're doing
<v Speaker 1>when you kill your lawn, You're you're you're helping the
<v Speaker 1>land reclaim. You're helping the life, the living skin reclaim
<v Speaker 1>what was taken and destroyed. You know. So those pioneer
<v Speaker 1>species are important, and then you plant those first so
<v Speaker 1>that the secondary, secession secessional species can get established. The
<v Speaker 1>stuff that might need a little bit of shade or
<v Speaker 1>might not be able to thrive, you know, on barren soil.
<v Speaker 1>That's getting beaten to death by sun might need a
<v Speaker 1>little bit of cover. Maybe can't compete with weedy stuff
<v Speaker 1>too well. You plant, you know, it's a process, and
<v Speaker 1>then after a decade or so, you've got the hopefully,
<v Speaker 1>you know, maybe you could create not a climax community,
<v Speaker 1>but close enough to it. That's basically what I did
<v Speaker 1>here in South Texas. That's what I do when I
<v Speaker 1>kill lawns. I'm not like, I'm not so much. I'm
<v Speaker 1>not a fucking designer. I'm trying to just recreate the
<v Speaker 1>living skin. You plant the stuff that's gonna cover. Especially
<v Speaker 1>where I am the sun is so hot. You plant
<v Speaker 1>those pioneer species first with the full intent of maybe
<v Speaker 1>later removing them or having them only be temporary, just
<v Speaker 1>as a way to increase the immediate humidity, which they
<v Speaker 1>do to act as a living shade cover, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>Because there's a feedback loop at some point. Anytime you
<v Speaker 1>kill a lawn, you know, the plants start thriving. When
<v Speaker 1>it reaches a certain density, stuff starts growing a hell
<v Speaker 1>of a lot faster because the immediate humidity's been upped.
<v Speaker 1>The plants are creating humidity for themselves. You know, holding
<v Speaker 1>helping hold humidity in and that layer of air beneath
<v Speaker 1>the little canopy they've created, even if it's just a
<v Speaker 1>shrub layer or a you know, you've got like a
<v Speaker 1>scrubby setting, if it's only four feet tall, they're preventing
<v Speaker 1>the sun from hitting the ground, baking the ground, you know,
<v Speaker 1>causing the ground to lose less moisture than it otherwise
<v Speaker 1>would be. You know, they're acting like a living mulch
<v Speaker 1>in a way, well, performing the same the same service
<v Speaker 1>that mulch does, you know, just more cover and then
<v Speaker 1>you just you know, go in there, let it get
<v Speaker 1>out of control, and then just go in there and
<v Speaker 1>just give it a haircut so you can walk through it,
<v Speaker 1>keep it trimmed, keep the city off your back. Whatever. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I digress. Socropio is everywhere beautiful plant, immensely important and
<v Speaker 1>especially important ecologically, you know, for the services in food
<v Speaker 1>it provides to the things that eat the fruit as
<v Speaker 1>well as the things that palm it. You know, cecropia
<v Speaker 1>are wind pollinated, but you know some insects can assist.
<v Speaker 1>There is I'm sure even with a lot of wind
<v Speaker 1>pollinated plants, I'm sure there's still insects going in there
<v Speaker 1>and eating pollen. But but yeah, the main the main
<v Speaker 1>benefit is in the fruits. But yeah, they're fucking everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>They get huge and multiple species. I mean, it's they
<v Speaker 1>could be hard to identify because often the leaves are
<v Speaker 1>so high above the canopy unless you're in a disturbed
<v Speaker 1>area where they just grew. But you know, you see
<v Speaker 1>a lot of them in the forest too. Especially they're
<v Speaker 1>especially easy to make out, like when you're on the
<v Speaker 1>other side of a river on a narrow, sketchy road
<v Speaker 1>in a canyon and you can see just these giant
<v Speaker 1>peltate leaves, especially if some of the more silvery species,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like Howlo Luca for instance, I mean, they
<v Speaker 1>stand out, like the leaves look so unique and different
<v Speaker 1>from anything else. Another common plant that that I encountered
<v Speaker 1>there was triplerois comingiana, which is in the family Polygones.
<v Speaker 1>It's in the buckwheed family. But it's like an eighty
<v Speaker 1>foot tall tree, if not taller, and you could see
<v Speaker 1>them from far away because they've got these the flowers
<v Speaker 1>have these bright red bracts. No idea what pollinates. It's
<v Speaker 1>probably a hummingbird or something like you know what I
<v Speaker 1>should look that up while I'm here. Oh wow, wind. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I guess that makes sense. And so it's wind just
<v Speaker 1>like cecropia, it's dioecious. So the individual plants, either male
<v Speaker 1>or female, just like cecropia. And those red bracs, of course,
<v Speaker 1>are only on those red bracts are they're like wings
<v Speaker 1>for dispersal, They're only on the females. That red color.
<v Speaker 1>I'm curious about that. I wonder why why so bright red?
<v Speaker 1>I suppose it's Oh, you know what, this actually makes
<v Speaker 1>sense because there was an article that just came out
<v Speaker 1>recently about the red color on stigmas or on other
<v Speaker 1>tissues of wind pollinated plants. Why the red color if
<v Speaker 1>it's wind pollinated, the flowers don't need to be showy,
<v Speaker 1>there's no why would they be creating this this pigment.
<v Speaker 1>Turns out that, of course that red color is created
<v Speaker 1>by anthocyanins. In the case of polygonace, this would be
<v Speaker 1>you know, since there are carriophilales, this would be it this,
<v Speaker 1>it would be beta aine pigments. But still beta aine
<v Speaker 1>pigments are of course analogous to to anthoscionance. Just for
<v Speaker 1>the order Carriophilales, the cactus and beat order. Anyway, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's it's protective, it's it's basically like a like a
<v Speaker 1>plant sunscreen. There was this article that came out I
<v Speaker 1>think it was from Washington University where the research was done,
<v Speaker 1>but it was about windo. I forget what what plant
<v Speaker 1>genus they were looking at, but it was a wind
<v Speaker 1>pollinated plant. And this researcher was curious because the stigmas
<v Speaker 1>were red. What's the point of that? And I'll see
<v Speaker 1>that in a lot of carric species sometimes or even grasses,
<v Speaker 1>the stigma will be red. Well, it's that tissue on
<v Speaker 1>the stigma is extra thin. We meaning it's also you know,
<v Speaker 1>much more susceptible too. And it's thin because it has
<v Speaker 1>to be so pollen grains can land in Germany out
<v Speaker 1>germanate on it and when it since it's so thin,
<v Speaker 1>it's also that makes it more susceptible to UV damage
<v Speaker 1>or cold damage, et cetera. Which, of course, these red pigments,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's anthocyanins or betolanes, whatever, stress pigment provides some
<v Speaker 1>protection against. So that that makes sense, I guess, because
<v Speaker 1>there's there's no attractive benefit in the fruits of a
<v Speaker 1>well maybe I guess for dispersal. But these wings on
<v Speaker 1>this triplearis, this tree, the polygones look they certainly look
<v Speaker 1>like maple samaras. They've got that like helic helicopter thing
<v Speaker 1>going on. Surely wind dispersed anyway, I I guess I
<v Speaker 1>should look home on. Let me look into this too. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it is, it is pollen. It's it's or wind dispersed,
<v Speaker 1>wind pollinated, wind dispersed. Another study said insect pollinated. But
<v Speaker 1>that's not fucking right, there's no I no. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>see any males though, but again the males wouldn't be
<v Speaker 1>showy because they don't know those red bracks, so they
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't be as not showy, but as conspicuous the either way.
<v Speaker 1>Triplais kaminguiana is another pioneer species. Like Ciba, it very common,
<v Speaker 1>it's fast growing again families polygonac, the buckweed family, and
<v Speaker 1>it's got mutualisms with ants, which with the which Cycropia
<v Speaker 1>also does. Like Cycropia, it's wind pollinated and uh and
<v Speaker 1>got a mutualism with ant with ant species. This was yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this was a really conspicuous tree that I
<v Speaker 1>just was completely unfamiliar with until Now another another plant
<v Speaker 1>that fucking blew my mind down there with Guadua and Gustafolio,
<v Speaker 1>which is a bamboo, some of the shoots of which
<v Speaker 1>can reach ninety feet tall. I mean, this is a
<v Speaker 1>monstrous bamboo species. It's a native New World bamboo, a
<v Speaker 1>native neotropical bamboo that forms these massive colonies and the
<v Speaker 1>forest there, and I'm curious how to get established and
<v Speaker 1>how big the seeds are. But you'll see new shoots
<v Speaker 1>that are six feet tall and just look like these
<v Speaker 1>these sharp asparagus buds six foot tall asparagus buds sticking
<v Speaker 1>out of the forest floor there. And then you know,
<v Speaker 1>forming these massive colonies. I mean that the diameter of
<v Speaker 1>these things is like ten inches in some kind. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>they're fucking massive. And then they form these lateral branches
<v Speaker 1>that are covered in spikes that nobody likes. They make
<v Speaker 1>it very unpleasant to touch these things, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>an inch long spike. Maybe they can be bigger. The
<v Speaker 1>ones I saw were an inch. And then the deligules
<v Speaker 1>of these bamboos, well, I guess it would be the lamina,
<v Speaker 1>like the little leafy part, but it's like a bract
<v Speaker 1>that in many cases of the guad the guadua. Probably
<v Speaker 1>pronounced it wrong, guad dua it was. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>like a foot to eighteen inches tall, the fucking little
<v Speaker 1>protective bract is, and it's covered in these like rusty
<v Speaker 1>maroon hairs, these little that feel like a shark tongue.
<v Speaker 1>Just fucking crazy. Such a cool that's such a plant.
<v Speaker 1>I would have loved. I would have loved to spend
<v Speaker 1>more time with it, observing it. You know, I'm curious
<v Speaker 1>what the flowers look like. How often it flowers, probably
<v Speaker 1>not very often. What are the inflorescences look like? A
<v Speaker 1>wild species? The ant? I mean, this is a nothing
<v Speaker 1>I need to look into, Like I've got notes of
<v Speaker 1>all this shit I need to look into and research.
<v Speaker 1>But like the the the abundance of ant symbiosis down there,
<v Speaker 1>like tripleeris uses ants as defenders. It's got this mutualism
<v Speaker 1>with the ants. These these scale insects are they eat
<v Speaker 1>the tripleris, But apparently there's a payoff because the ants
<v Speaker 1>then farm the scale insects and also provide protection to
<v Speaker 1>the tree, like ant bouncers, you know, from things that
<v Speaker 1>might eat it. Socropia of course has ant bouncers. In it.
<v Speaker 1>There's someone sent me a paper of these ants that
<v Speaker 1>hang out on socropia leaves, kind of looking like they're
<v Speaker 1>questing like ticks to you know, like hanging on to
<v Speaker 1>it with their legs and then another set of legs
<v Speaker 1>and a pair of legs reaching out and they'll catch
<v Speaker 1>things like moths and shit, just and you know, like
<v Speaker 1>essentially trapping other insects and then eating it. It's fucking
<v Speaker 1>it's crazy down there. There's so much to study ecologically,
<v Speaker 1>but the ant relations were especially cool. It was a
<v Speaker 1>really just mysterious thing to see. I mean, you go
<v Speaker 1>there and if you're paying attention, you just end up
<v Speaker 1>walking away with so many questions. So ant the ant
<v Speaker 1>symbiosis was abundant there. I have a new appreciation for
<v Speaker 1>ants after spending ten days in the Upper Amazon, I
<v Speaker 1>will tell you that. And again I also saw that
<v Speaker 1>native Ada species. What's the leaf cutter? I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>gotta consult that naturalist again. What is the species of Ada?
<v Speaker 1>The leaf cutter? Genus any Amazon? Right? Not like the
<v Speaker 1>ones that we get in Texas. You know, the little
<v Speaker 1>bastards I let hang out my front yard. I appreciate them.
<v Speaker 1>I was happy to see them. It's cold as hell
<v Speaker 1>right now. It's thirty four degrees on a Texas Mexican
<v Speaker 1>border right now. But just yesterday they were out and
<v Speaker 1>they were mad at me too because accidentally stepped on them.
<v Speaker 1>They'll let you know, they'll fucking bite you. And then
<v Speaker 1>Ada Cephalodes that's the one in the Amazon. That's the
<v Speaker 1>leaf cutters in the Amazon, at acephalodes, and boy, they
<v Speaker 1>were you know, they were busy. They were getting to
<v Speaker 1>work feeding their little fungus underground. Which was exciting too
<v Speaker 1>because unrelated to this was with termites. But there were
<v Speaker 1>these termite mounds we would see at the lower elevations
<v Speaker 1>at like three thousand and thirty one hundred feet what
<v Speaker 1>is that meters nine hundred meters and we would see him.
<v Speaker 1>They'd be at the base of a tree. These are
<v Speaker 1>not the termites that are gonna do well. Maybe they
<v Speaker 1>would destroy your house, I don't know. I think they're
<v Speaker 1>mostly just recycling nutrients. They're performing a very essential ecological function,
<v Speaker 1>you know, akin to fire in terms of recycling dead
<v Speaker 1>plant matter and nutrients. They're they're raking and cleaning the forest.
<v Speaker 1>Circa what fucking year was it that moron said at
<v Speaker 1>twenty seventeen. Why did he say raking and cleaning the forest?
<v Speaker 1>There was twenty seventeen. That's what the termites are doing.
<v Speaker 1>They're raking and cleaning the Amazon. But they build these
<v Speaker 1>little wood, these little nests, these little mounds like the
<v Speaker 1>size of a yoga ball, like the sigh of an
<v Speaker 1>erotic yoga ball. You know, I knew this guy. I'm
<v Speaker 1>really all over the place today with the ad D.
<v Speaker 1>I knew this guy who had a fucking what are
<v Speaker 1>the super neurotic dogs, the border collie, And he got
<v Speaker 1>at a yoga ball that he would take it to
<v Speaker 1>the park and let it heard the thing, because it
<v Speaker 1>wasn't enough just to taste the fuck just to take
<v Speaker 1>a fucking tennis ball. He take the yoga ball out
<v Speaker 1>there and throw it his thing with chase the yoga ball.
<v Speaker 1>He lived in Sacramento. There was a long time. It
<v Speaker 1>was like ten years ago. Maybe I don't know anyway anyway, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>but so back as we saw this termite mound and
<v Speaker 1>it had a mushroom growing out of it, and that
<v Speaker 1>was because and the mushroom species was luco A garrighis.
<v Speaker 1>Let me see what what was this? Uh? I think,
<v Speaker 1>let me see what this was, basidio my coda, because
<v Speaker 1>I don't know my mushroom family is that. Well, what
<v Speaker 1>the fuck was this? I got a photo of it. Yeah, oh,
<v Speaker 1>it was a garricus. It was just an Agaricus species
<v Speaker 1>probably undescribed, had a really ahead of really distinct wardy look,
<v Speaker 1>barnacle look kind of on the top of its cap.
<v Speaker 1>But it was fruiting out of a termite mound. And
<v Speaker 1>that's because it was the fungus. It was the mushroom
<v Speaker 1>to the fungus that the termites were farming, and I
<v Speaker 1>guess they would eat this fungus this hole. And you
<v Speaker 1>could see my selam all over this giant yoga ball
<v Speaker 1>sized termite nest. Fucking fascinating, but it was cool to
<v Speaker 1>see the fungus fruiting. And these these leaf cutter ants,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's the ones the added Texana that are in
<v Speaker 1>my front yard here in South Texas or or the
<v Speaker 1>ad of Cephalodes down are on the Amazon, have a
<v Speaker 1>fungus too. That's what they're bringing the leaves for to
<v Speaker 1>feed the fungus, and it would fruit too, presumably when
<v Speaker 1>the when the nest dies. If the nest does die here,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know one of the leaf cutter fungus. How
<v Speaker 1>do you get them to fruit? I think it's a
<v Speaker 1>what is the what is the fungus? Let me let
<v Speaker 1>me ask the oracle here? What is the fungus that
<v Speaker 1>leaf cutter ants farm? Luko Agaricus gongola gongolo for us,
<v Speaker 1>Luco gericas, gongal gonglaers gong You ever have a bad
<v Speaker 1>case of gongalapherus? Uh? You know it's so hard to
<v Speaker 1>get antibiotics these days. That's what you gotta have your
<v Speaker 1>friend in Mexico purchase them for you, because you can't
<v Speaker 1>really just cross the border and go to the pharmacy
<v Speaker 1>and get the antibiotics because those are probably fake. They're
<v Speaker 1>probably knockoffs, you know, knowing if you know the border
<v Speaker 1>towns like I do, you know they're sleazy, slimy and
<v Speaker 1>full of uh miscreant entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes.
<v Speaker 1>And a lot of the drugs you're probably getting are
<v Speaker 1>probably fake too, So be careful with those inhalers, and
<v Speaker 1>certainly be careful with an if you're going there for
<v Speaker 1>ozempic or something, which, uh, what is the connection with
<v Speaker 1>between no zembic and helo monsters. Isn't there one there?
<v Speaker 1>There certainly is. I'm not gonna we're not gonna talk
<v Speaker 1>about that now though, because it's not related to the Amazon,
<v Speaker 1>but just should you should just know, you know, the
<v Speaker 1>helo monsters are helping the American fatties live their cardependent
<v Speaker 1>lifestyles by reducing the appetite. So thank a helo monster
<v Speaker 1>near you. Right, America. What a wonderful land. It's made
<v Speaker 1>walking obsolete. Okay, So anyway, but these aunt symbiosis are
<v Speaker 1>there were ants everywhere and let me see. Did I
<v Speaker 1>get bit by any of them? I think so, I
<v Speaker 1>can't remember. I don't know, but but yeah, I mean
<v Speaker 1>the ants are a bun in the Amazon, and there's
<v Speaker 1>tons of mermeco fights. There's tons of ant symbiosis. And
<v Speaker 1>one of my favorites was from the family Melostomatasi. Well,
<v Speaker 1>first off, like triplayis we talk about that Triplaris That
<v Speaker 1>Trio was just telling me about polygon Ac. The buckwheed
<v Speaker 1>family gets up to eighty feet tall when pollinated, probably
<v Speaker 1>insect pollinated to I believe bees have been observed going
<v Speaker 1>in the flowers. The only way to really tell is
<v Speaker 1>to get up there and go observe the flowers firsthand,
<v Speaker 1>but you would have trouble getting up there climbing the
<v Speaker 1>tree because the stems are hollow and they're inhabited by ants.
<v Speaker 1>It's another more mecophyte obviously. But there was a tree.
<v Speaker 1>It was I thought it was called Demia in obcepta,
<v Speaker 1>not a tree. It was a small herb two or
<v Speaker 1>three feet tall, and it was it's Melastoma tases. So
<v Speaker 1>it's got those really cool flowers with the really fucking
<v Speaker 1>weird anthers, those inflated porcidal anthers, and the distinct leaf pattern.
<v Speaker 1>Remember all melastomes, they're like se and note this, they're
<v Speaker 1>like the genus c and note this is completely unrelated,
<v Speaker 1>but they're like it in the sense that the leaves
<v Speaker 1>have that distinct venation to them. Most notably, I think
<v Speaker 1>in most cases it's it's three main primary veins well
<v Speaker 1>on one mid vein, and then two lateral veins, one
<v Speaker 1>on each side of the mid vein. But it's I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you can see it's one of the few plant families
<v Speaker 1>where you could see leaf and be like, yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>a it's a melostom. Even if it's not in flower,
<v Speaker 1>there's a few exceptions, of course, but for the most part.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, Clydemi and abcept. It was a plant I encountered.
<v Speaker 1>It was everywhere, and only a few places that I
<v Speaker 1>see at flowering with these pink flowers, with these really
<v Speaker 1>cool flower morphology. Fun is fuck to draw like that
<v Speaker 1>kind of you know, that kind of fun, like the
<v Speaker 1>flowers that the anthers are inflated, their portcyl their hollow tubes.
<v Speaker 1>It's got the five pedals, it's got a fuzzy klyx,
<v Speaker 1>fuzzies hell, got the hairs all over it, on the stem,
<v Speaker 1>on the leaves, on the ounder side of the leaves,
<v Speaker 1>and the and the on the sepals and the klyx
<v Speaker 1>of course, and uh, the veins are red, the leaf
<v Speaker 1>is green. And then it's got these swollen petioles. Put
<v Speaker 1>I did a video on us on the integram if
<v Speaker 1>you want to go find it, if you give a shit,
<v Speaker 1>If not, that's fine too. But those swollen petioles and
<v Speaker 1>there they look like little knobs. They're very conspicuously swollen,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and you cut them open and there's ants inside.
<v Speaker 1>There's these little orange aants that don't bite, and they're
<v Speaker 1>they're raising their young in there. They enter on the
<v Speaker 1>underside of the leaf, at the distal end of the knob,
<v Speaker 1>so kind of where this lead the swollen petiole actually
<v Speaker 1>meets the leaf. They crawl in there, there's a little
<v Speaker 1>hole and you can eat them. They taste like lemon.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't eat them because I felt bad. I already
<v Speaker 1>fucked up their day by cutting their home open to
<v Speaker 1>film it and take some photographs. This turned out to
<v Speaker 1>not be Clydemia and Abcepta. It was uh, Miconia, it
<v Speaker 1>was I thought it was a Clydemia got changed to
<v Speaker 1>Maconia and Abcepta. And then one of these aspy you know,
<v Speaker 1>one of the aspy uh I naturalist people, you know,
<v Speaker 1>God bless them, bless their hearts. The people that are
<v Speaker 1>on I naturals all the time but rarely doing much fieldwork.
<v Speaker 1>We need those people. I'm not knocking them. Someone in
<v Speaker 1>Europe who was certainly aspy, very very aspy, just being
<v Speaker 1>like so ablest right now. Uh you know, I'm on
<v Speaker 1>a fucking spectrum to so take it easy with your
<v Speaker 1>with your stupid buzzwords, right, I'm not not being ablest,
<v Speaker 1>I'm just you know, whatever you got to be on
<v Speaker 1>the spectrum a little bit to fucking be on. I
<v Speaker 1>n astress all the time, getting people's identifications to this
<v Speaker 1>this degree. I don't identify shit on aign astress. I
<v Speaker 1>don't care. He was strictly for myself, Okay. I have
<v Speaker 1>a love hate relationship with people like this. I love
<v Speaker 1>the work they do. They can also be extremely fucking annoying.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, and I don't know how to hell this
<v Speaker 1>dude knew this because he was in Denmark. Again, bless
<v Speaker 1>his heart or her, whoever it is. But he said,
<v Speaker 1>certainly not mconya in obsepta, because genus mcconia. It's just
<v Speaker 1>Jenus mconya because genus because mcconyan upsepta has strongly initial
<v Speaker 1>filess leaf pairs and axillary inflorescences. I mean the inflorescence
<v Speaker 1>has just come out of the stems, out of the
<v Speaker 1>leaf axles. This one belongs to the old genus of tococa. Now,
<v Speaker 1>how to fuck would this guy notice if he's not
<v Speaker 1>an expert in melastomes, I don't think power to him.
<v Speaker 1>He's just a little ass by, which is fine. That's
<v Speaker 1>fine too, I could certainly relate. And plus people just
<v Speaker 1>go nuts about melastomes. Watch this is like, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know who this is too, but if this is like
<v Speaker 1>a famous melastome researcher, and I'm just like, I'm not slandering.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just teasing. Loosen up, okay, unpucker, all right, unclench.
<v Speaker 1>But it would probably key to Mconia to coca. But
<v Speaker 1>that species has a very wide circumscription, meaning it's it's
<v Speaker 1>probably very broad and needs to be split up. It
<v Speaker 1>encompasses many different ecotypes and species probably species in there
<v Speaker 1>in Meconia tocca. So you just put it in Maconia.
<v Speaker 1>So I need someone who who's a mellostone expert to
<v Speaker 1>go in there and figure out a Nissophilus leaf pairs.
<v Speaker 1>A niophiley is one of a leaf as when a
<v Speaker 1>plant has leaves of different sizes of not a uniform size,
<v Speaker 1>and a lot of tropical plant families do. This especially
<v Speaker 1>gives ni a ace the African violet family. What a
<v Speaker 1>silly common name, huh gives nari As is those hairy bastards.
<v Speaker 1>You know, flowers are hairy. John Clark Studies and we
<v Speaker 1>had John Clark here in a podcast a year or
<v Speaker 1>two ago. Wonderful conversation I wish I remembered more of
<v Speaker 1>it in my extremely overpacked and fucking neurotic brain, but
<v Speaker 1>I don't. But that podcast is out there. Gais nari As.
<v Speaker 1>It's one of those plant families where you'll you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's in lamey a least, so it's got biletteral symmetrical flowers,
<v Speaker 1>it's got opposite leaves, it's got the very hairy you know,
<v Speaker 1>the abundant in the tropics, both New World and Old
<v Speaker 1>World tropics, and very hairy. Everything's harry and a lot
<v Speaker 1>of hummer pollination, and it's very distinct. There was a
<v Speaker 1>ton of Gazneria diversity. I could do a whole other
<v Speaker 1>podcast and the gasnieri Ac diversity in the Upper Amazon,
<v Speaker 1>but obviously won't go into it too much. But yeah, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>a Nissophilus and nissophile isophiley is when all leaves are uniform,
<v Speaker 1>which is what most people are used to, uniform size,
<v Speaker 1>uniform shape, and nisophiley is when they're not uniform. And
<v Speaker 1>it's a very common thing, especially in Melostoma tase this family,
<v Speaker 1>and in Gasneriac and a few others in the tropics.
<v Speaker 1>It's a way to basically maximize light exposure or light
<v Speaker 1>catchment in the understory of what are generally dark forests.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, speaking of the leaf cutters, and it's so
<v Speaker 1>fucking cold right now in South Texas. It's thirty four
<v Speaker 1>and it's gonna be here for the next three days
<v Speaker 1>at these lower and then hopefully that's it and then
<v Speaker 1>it'll be It was just like we were setting up
<v Speaker 1>fencing at Thorn Scrub two days ago, no, yesterday too,
<v Speaker 1>Jesus Christ. We got so much stuff going on. I'm
<v Speaker 1>so busy. It's it's stressing me out. It's kind of
<v Speaker 1>making me miserable. Videos, to edit, presentations, to give it,
<v Speaker 1>a book to finish. I'm just fucking done. I'm done.
<v Speaker 1>But we were at Thorn Scrub yesterday or two days ago,
<v Speaker 1>and it was like eighty five and now it's getting
<v Speaker 1>down to thirty fourth. The you know, the get dream
<v Speaker 1>is all fucked up. It's wavering. So being that we're
<v Speaker 1>in a trough, some the longitude just to the west
<v Speaker 1>of us at higher latitudes is in a crest, and
<v Speaker 1>so it's abnormally warm up there and abnormally cold down here.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, I guess the Texas leaf cutters are limited
<v Speaker 1>from spreading further not by their tolerance to the cold,
<v Speaker 1>but by their fungal food sources tolerance to the cold.
<v Speaker 1>And I guess the genus of that fungus used to
<v Speaker 1>be adam mice's uh ata, after the genus of ant,
<v Speaker 1>but I guess now it's just it's all. And then
<v Speaker 1>it was Luco coprinus for a while, and now it's
<v Speaker 1>Luco Agericus gongailapherus, and it creates this was kind of interesting.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know this, but it produces uh, it's well.
<v Speaker 1>First off, it's completely dependent on ants for survival, with
<v Speaker 1>the workers feeding it cut plant material, and it produces
<v Speaker 1>gonga lydia that's the name. Gonkilophorus and gonga lydia are
<v Speaker 1>nutrient rich hifel swellings, so like these little knobs along
<v Speaker 1>the heifelstrands upon which the ants feed. And so this
<v Speaker 1>seems to be a specific adaptation for its co evolutionary partner,
<v Speaker 1>which is amazing. It's so fucking amazing. But anyway, the
<v Speaker 1>I guess the fungus uh, you know, at higher latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>is much more cold tolerant than ecotypes of the funk
<v Speaker 1>or populations of the fungus or phenotypes of the fungus
<v Speaker 1>at the lower latitudes, and so the ants. But still
<v Speaker 1>even during cold because you get Texas leaf cutters in
<v Speaker 1>Louisiana too, but the ants during cold periods will actually
<v Speaker 1>move these fucking I mean, and I know this because
<v Speaker 1>you know my yard, my house is tiny, My yard
<v Speaker 1>is like a quarter acre almost, but they'll be there's
<v Speaker 1>ant holes all over it. I get harvest the ants,
<v Speaker 1>which I appreciate to and then the leaf cutters as well,
<v Speaker 1>and they don't really do get out too much. But
<v Speaker 1>I think that's why I probably get so many because
<v Speaker 1>I've got those ants. That's why I get like four
<v Speaker 1>different species of lizards, including the Texas spiny lizard, which
<v Speaker 1>a fucking one. I feel like one that was the
<v Speaker 1>size of a hamburger ran by me yesterday, no three
<v Speaker 1>days ago. But anyway, these caverns, these underground their underground layer,
<v Speaker 1>I just want to say the word. Their underground layer
<v Speaker 1>will be like one hundred you know, they'll be enormous
<v Speaker 1>in some cases, you know, one hundred feet deep supposedly,
<v Speaker 1>and so that seems a little excessive though, really, like
<v Speaker 1>who did did some entomologists dig one hundred feet into
<v Speaker 1>the ground. The point is they're fucking massive and they
<v Speaker 1>can probably span for a few a few city blocks.
<v Speaker 1>But the ants will you basically cultivate these gardens of
<v Speaker 1>fungus and keep keep basically, you know, manicure these gardens,
<v Speaker 1>make sure that humidity is right, and then also move
<v Speaker 1>the fungus up and down. You know, obviously move it
<v Speaker 1>deeper if temperature extremes are coming, like if it's getting
<v Speaker 1>too hot or it's it's it's gonna freeze, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>Which is fascinating all this stuff. I used to never
<v Speaker 1>give a shit about ants, but you start seeing how
<v Speaker 1>everything's connected. It's like anything. I start seeing how everything's connected,
<v Speaker 1>and you're like, oh shit, it's kind of cool. There's
<v Speaker 1>a whole system here. There's a whole pyramid of interrelatedness
<v Speaker 1>that's evolved over millions of years. So anyway, I appreciate
<v Speaker 1>the Texas leaf cutter ants, and I mean, fuck, I
<v Speaker 1>appreciate all of them now. But yeah, ants, ambrosia, beetles,
<v Speaker 1>and termites are the only groups of insects to use
<v Speaker 1>fungus based agriculture. To have this kind of co evolution
<v Speaker 1>with a fungus but just fucking insane when you think
<v Speaker 1>about it. That's basically what humans are doing with different
<v Speaker 1>plant species, right, like weed especially. I imagine the amount of
<v Speaker 1>weed lords. I mean, I don't get it. Don't get
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I enjoy I've grown pop before I grew
<v Speaker 1>up my backyard when I lived in Oakland, and I
<v Speaker 1>would just give it away, generally to the dudes that
<v Speaker 1>hung out on a corner. You know, these old guys.
<v Speaker 1>They would hang out on a corner and they they'd
<v Speaker 1>be drinking, and I realized, you know, you give them
<v Speaker 1>some weed, maybe they'll lay off the booze a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but uh but it's it smells good
<v Speaker 1>and it was a fun plant to grow, and it's
<v Speaker 1>easy too. But I guess you know, that's what humans
<v Speaker 1>do with so many plant species. That's what humans do
<v Speaker 1>in the Upper Amazon with ice cream bean, which again,
<v Speaker 1>those pods, those three foot long bean pods were everywhere
<v Speaker 1>fucking delicious, What a delicious plant. I would have loved
<v Speaker 1>to spend so much more time in that fruit market
<v Speaker 1>or in markets like that. God is it was so cool.
<v Speaker 1>It's such a it's such a like unique just I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, man, you know they're really it really sowed
<v Speaker 1>the seeds of ethnobotany. I mean, plenty of things do.
<v Speaker 1>I'm paying attention to that shit all the time, but
<v Speaker 1>especially being there, you know where it's mostly native fruits
<v Speaker 1>and native native plants being used, you know, for rope,
<v Speaker 1>for bowls, for whatever. I wonder if I could grow
<v Speaker 1>Christynthia the Calabash tree, big non eac down here in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. Anyway, It's been two hours and I could
<v Speaker 1>keep going, but I'll say it for another episode. So
<v Speaker 1>with that being said, i'lbe at the Wild Things Conference
<v Speaker 1>in Chicago on the twenty eighth, twenty ninth, and thirtyth No,
<v Speaker 1>there's no fucking twenty you know what I mean, February
<v Speaker 1>twenty eighth and March first and second. I forgot, there's
<v Speaker 1>no it's not a leap year, and February's only got
<v Speaker 1>twenty eight days. But I'm going to Chicago for the
<v Speaker 1>weekend in beautiful Roseman at the Rosemont. We're gonna bring
<v Speaker 1>back the Rosemont Horizon. Did you ever go to see
<v Speaker 1>the WWF SmackDown? What do they call it? This? What
<v Speaker 1>is it? Those guys in a rubber underwear slapping each
<v Speaker 1>other around, hitting each other with chairs and shit in
<v Speaker 1>the That was That was a remember scene. I remember
<v Speaker 1>when I was a kid. I always see the commercials
<v Speaker 1>for the Rosemont Horizon. They'd be wwf in it everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think the Rosemont Horizon exists anymore. What is it?
<v Speaker 1>The All State Arena. Some fucking corporation owns it now,
<v Speaker 1>those fucking crooks. God, ah, it's just the pollution. They
<v Speaker 1>got to put their name on everything. The mental pollution.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a bad fart in an elevator of life
<v Speaker 1>that you can't escape. It's just the corporate branding. God,
<v Speaker 1>it's awful. But I'll be there, uh speaking, and then
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna what else do I don't know. I like,
<v Speaker 1>I said yes to all these things and then forget
<v Speaker 1>what they are, and all I have to protect me
<v Speaker 1>and remind me that they're occurring is the little Google
<v Speaker 1>calendar app. So uh, I don't know. I need to stop.
<v Speaker 1>I need to start saying no, but I probably won't
<v Speaker 1>because I enjoy this stuff. I just you know, my
<v Speaker 1>time is so fucking limited and my brain is going
<v Speaker 1>nine different directions. So uh, anyway, I just want to
<v Speaker 1>go out and look at it again. I had trips.
<v Speaker 1>I was going to try to go to Mexico in
<v Speaker 1>Mars too, but I probably can't. I've got a lot
<v Speaker 1>of shit work to do and anyway, Yeah, but I'll
<v Speaker 1>be doing another podcast episode soon about more interesting stuff.
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk about the work we've been doing
<v Speaker 1>at Thorn Scrub two setting up fencing, which has been
<v Speaker 1>a pain in the ass, but I'm hopeful trying to
<v Speaker 1>shoot the feral pigs there, and yeah, and just good
<v Speaker 1>old habitat preservation. I'm really hoping that we get rained
<v Speaker 1>soon so the biocrust out there can come back to life,
<v Speaker 1>because what is life if it's not filled with little
<v Speaker 1>bits of bio crust here and there, you know, those
<v Speaker 1>little bits of the living, the literal living skin of
<v Speaker 1>the earth that nobody pays attention to. Anyway, that's all
<v Speaker 1>I got. Have a good rest of your day. Try
<v Speaker 1>not to puke. Okay. It's so hard for me coming
<v Speaker 1>back into the United States and looking at the billboards
<v Speaker 1>with the shit eating grins on them everywhere, and people
<v Speaker 1>trying to sell me shit I don't want or need,
<v Speaker 1>and just this money worshiping culture that is so predominant,
<v Speaker 1>not everywhere, but in many places, as if there's nothing
<v Speaker 1>else to live for except just the accumulation of dumb shit,
<v Speaker 1>of dumb bullshit, of shiny shit. No creativity, no art,
<v Speaker 1>no imagination, no adventure, no fun, just fucking buying shit
<v Speaker 1>and status. And it's so hard for me to be
<v Speaker 1>around all that and a culture that just worships that
<v Speaker 1>and not puke. So I think I will puke every
<v Speaker 1>once in a while. You got a puke, just let
<v Speaker 1>it out, right, If not literally, then figuratively, just just
<v Speaker 1>go puke everywhere, Just let it out, Just barf all
<v Speaker 1>over the place, figuratively speaking literally if you have to. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>don't make yourself bulliem it, don'n't be doing it too much.
<v Speaker 1>Just every once in a while. It's a great it's
<v Speaker 1>a great act, all right. Just a little bit of
<v Speaker 1>vomit here in there. It really does you good. If
<v Speaker 1>you're not vomiting in today's dominant society and something's wrong
<v Speaker 1>with you, you're not healthy, you know, you've got to
<v Speaker 1>purge every once in a while. Better out that and
<v Speaker 1>then the other, you know what I mean? All right,
<v Speaker 1>that's all. I gotta have a grocery day. Go fuck
<v Speaker 1>you somebody,