Oaks Are the Beasts of An Ecosystem! A Discussion with Dr. Andrew Hipp

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to another episode of the Crime Pace of BONDI doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>Today I'm here with doctor Andrew Hip, director of the Herbarium,
<v Speaker 1>and senior scientists and researcher in plant systematics at Morton
<v Speaker 1>Arboretum just outside Chicago, and we're going to talk about oaks.
<v Speaker 1>Andrew you there, I'm here. Okay, great, So let's just
<v Speaker 1>get right into it, man. I mean, this is a
<v Speaker 1>huge subject. This is one of the most ecologically successful
<v Speaker 1>plant plant genera in I mean, it's huge all over
<v Speaker 1>the world, especially in Mexico, temporate latitudes in North America.
<v Speaker 1>Europe's got quite a few. How many does Europe have
<v Speaker 1>compared to North America? Are there more in Europe than
<v Speaker 1>North America? Sam amount or what? No?
<v Speaker 2>In North America? North America in the US is like
<v Speaker 2>ninety species, Mexico Central America like maybe one sixty, and
<v Speaker 2>Europe has got what's the number, Europe may be on
<v Speaker 2>the order of twenty five for thirty or so.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, yeah, so not as much, yeah, not as
<v Speaker 1>much of us?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And then East Asia's East Asia's up near maybe one ten,
<v Speaker 2>one twenty. I actually haven't I've counted up by lineage,
<v Speaker 2>but I don't think I've counted up by region in Asia.
<v Speaker 2>Maybe so because I think that Cyclobalinopsis, the ring cupped oaks,
<v Speaker 2>which are endemic to East Asia. I think those number
<v Speaker 2>ninety species.
<v Speaker 1>Is that a genus Cyclobalinopsis, No section, it's one of
<v Speaker 1>the lineages, Yeah, that arose from the oaks.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so it's part of the oaks.
<v Speaker 1>So we're still just talking the genus quirkers, because I
<v Speaker 1>know there's some other weird genera in Asia too, just
<v Speaker 1>like there's not the Letocarpus in California, the tan bark oaks.
<v Speaker 2>You get, well, what exactly so you got you have them.
<v Speaker 2>So if you go back, like the oaks originate like
<v Speaker 2>fifty six million years ago, and here I'm talking about
<v Speaker 2>the oak genus up in the northern temperate zone like
<v Speaker 2>a you know, maybe straddling North America what is now Greenland, Europe,
<v Speaker 2>somewhere up in that area. The oaks probably arose around
<v Speaker 2>fifty six million years.
<v Speaker 1>This is really warm back then. I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>we're talking Eocene, Paleocene, Eocene. This is like.
<v Speaker 2>Totally this is right before the hottest time that we've
<v Speaker 2>seen in sixty million years, you know, So it was
<v Speaker 2>like ten degrees centigrade warmer than it is now worldwide.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so yeah, so this is a this is so
<v Speaker 1>that you could see how this would be a ripe
<v Speaker 1>environment and climate for for plants. So it's if people
<v Speaker 1>hear that and think, oh, Greenland, they're not thinking about
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't covered in fucking ice and et cetera yet.
<v Speaker 2>So no, at that point, it was like this is
<v Speaker 2>the like where we're standing right now, where where you
<v Speaker 2>are in Texas, where I am, and well for sure
<v Speaker 2>where I am in Chicago. This was broad leaved evergreen
<v Speaker 2>forest down here at this point, and the only temperate
<v Speaker 2>forests were little outposts up in the Arctic.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so Chicago back then was like the climate of
<v Speaker 1>southern Louisiana probably probably, so yeah, okay, okay, cool, all right,
<v Speaker 1>So moving to move around. So they they originate there,
<v Speaker 1>and they're they're in uh the family PAGECI in the
<v Speaker 1>order of for gaillies. They're not. There's no oaks. There's
<v Speaker 1>no native oaks in the southern hemisphere.
<v Speaker 2>Right, boy, there's a couple squeak just gets out of
<v Speaker 2>the equator and you know in Southeast Asia.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean just barely just like pines. Like there's
<v Speaker 1>no there's only like one Pinus species in the Southern hemisphere.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's in like highland Indonesia. But generally it's
<v Speaker 1>like a this is a Northern Hemisphere genius. The Southern
<v Speaker 1>hemisphere has the n though vegas and the quote she oaks,
<v Speaker 1>the castine a c which looked like pine trees. But
<v Speaker 1>we're just talking qurcas. There's there's no carcas really in
<v Speaker 1>the Southern hemisphere.
<v Speaker 2>That's right. So when you're looking at the when you
<v Speaker 2>look at the oak family, the oak family dates back
<v Speaker 2>probably closer to eighty five million years ago, maybe it's
<v Speaker 2>that probably a little bit younger than that still, maybe
<v Speaker 2>maybe more like sixty five million years anyway, I have
<v Speaker 2>to look up the dates on that. But those genera
<v Speaker 2>have spread more widely. So you have Lithocarpus, which is
<v Speaker 2>an East Asian endemic genus. Now you've got right, So
<v Speaker 2>you've got motho h You've got oho vegas in the
<v Speaker 2>Southern hemisphere. Yeah, but these these things all are related
<v Speaker 2>to oaks, but none of them are are the true oaks.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, really quick, what I'm getting too distracted, which I'm
<v Speaker 1>well known for is the lithocarpus. Are those insect pollinated?
<v Speaker 1>Are they win pollinated? Like like the true oaks?
<v Speaker 2>They are insect pollinated?
<v Speaker 1>Wow, just like the tan bark oak. Just like not
<v Speaker 1>the litho Calcornia.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, yep, wow.
<v Speaker 1>That's cool. Okay anyway, sorry.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, as you were saying that that, well we can
<v Speaker 2>get Yeah, that one is sister to all the rest
<v Speaker 2>of the oak which is kind of cool. You've got
<v Speaker 2>this one insect pollinated species in California, right, that is
<v Speaker 2>sister to like the four hundred and twenty five true oaks.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. It's such a great species, man, there's so and
<v Speaker 1>they grow so fast and they're just fucking beautiful trees.
<v Speaker 1>I miss them. They're anyway. Yeah, we're gonna be all
<v Speaker 1>over the place in this podcast. That's fine, but uh so, okay, well,
<v Speaker 1>going back to going back to the uh the genus
<v Speaker 1>corcuso it originates probably in where like like Western Hemisphere,
<v Speaker 1>Eastern hemisphere, northern latitudes where where.
<v Speaker 2>It's northern latitudes, and it's really unclear. We don't have
<v Speaker 2>a clear I mean, the many of the many of
<v Speaker 2>the relatives of the oaks are East Asian Butthocarpus is
<v Speaker 2>limited to us in North America. There's a chance that
<v Speaker 2>knows Althocarpus, that one species may have been you know,
<v Speaker 2>in East Asia as well, because there were good connections
<v Speaker 2>between western North America and East Asia at that time.
<v Speaker 2>But it's unclear. So we suspect that the that the
<v Speaker 2>ancestor of the entire oak genus was widespread. And to me,
<v Speaker 2>what makes most sense is that this is a widespread
<v Speaker 2>population that was kind of straddling the continents. Europe, Greenland,
<v Speaker 2>North America are all squeezed pretty close together at fifty
<v Speaker 2>six million years ago, and they're spreading apart. So you
<v Speaker 2>can imagine a situation where you've got this widespread population
<v Speaker 2>moving between the continents. Maybe it's even a few species
<v Speaker 2>that are interbreeding, right, so, but it's a it's an
<v Speaker 2>interbreeding population and as the continent spread, the first speciation
<v Speaker 2>ancient deep split that we see in the oaks is
<v Speaker 2>between Eurasia and North America. That is the first deepest
<v Speaker 2>split in it. So that's where you when you look
<v Speaker 2>at the genomes, you can see this deep, deep division
<v Speaker 2>between those two that dates back to somewhere between fifty
<v Speaker 2>and fifty five many years ago or.
<v Speaker 1>So in what are those clams, I mean we talk
<v Speaker 1>a subgenera or sections or.
<v Speaker 2>What what we call them now yet so then as
<v Speaker 2>of twenty seven, so the classification that I'll talk about
<v Speaker 2>all goes back to twenty seventeen. It was written by
<v Speaker 2>Thomas Dank who's a really great palaeobotanist and taxonomist, and
<v Speaker 2>he got a group of people together to write a
<v Speaker 2>book chapter sort of translating what we know about evolutionary
<v Speaker 2>history into a taxonomy. So as of that publication, those
<v Speaker 2>are two different subgenera. So the Eurasian subgenus is subgenus Sarus,
<v Speaker 2>so we're talking about Quercus is the genus. Subgenus Sarus
<v Speaker 2>is today limited to Eurasia. And then the North American subgene,
<v Speaker 2>the American subgenus is subgenus Quercus. Look, it's a little confusing.
<v Speaker 2>You've got Quercus is the genus, the subgenus is Quercus,
<v Speaker 2>and that is limited mostly in North America, but there
<v Speaker 2>have been a couple of migrations back to the Old World.
<v Speaker 1>So subgenus is it series and then subgenus Quircus.
<v Speaker 2>Or what yep, Cerrus is ce r R S Eurasian.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, cool, But that's that's the evolutionary fork in
<v Speaker 1>the road. And bio geographically speaking, that makes sense too,
<v Speaker 1>because you know, the way I I guess the way
<v Speaker 1>I look at it too, is you know, the circumference
<v Speaker 1>of the Earth obviously is a lot smaller at higher latitude,
<v Speaker 1>so it's not such a big deal for things to
<v Speaker 1>go back and forth between continents, especially if they're not
<v Speaker 1>that far apart tectonically. Back then fifty fifty six million
<v Speaker 1>years ago, and and.
<v Speaker 2>Then is it right?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and then as the climate starts to cool and
<v Speaker 1>things change and they can move down and lower latitudes
<v Speaker 1>because they're adapted to cooler temperatures. Generally speaking, they kind
<v Speaker 1>that's like the fork in the road. I mean they basically, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>one goes towards North America and one goes towards Eurasia.
<v Speaker 1>So that's right. Sense.
<v Speaker 2>It's worth remembering that even at forty until mammals are
<v Speaker 2>even moving between the continents a far north until about
<v Speaker 2>forty nine million years ago. Now, plants are still able
<v Speaker 2>to move between them, but as the temperature is cool,
<v Speaker 2>they get shoved southward right right, and so you've got
<v Speaker 2>the continent spreading and those plants all moving away from
<v Speaker 2>each other where the temperate you know, these little outposts
<v Speaker 2>of temperate forest that we got in the far North
<v Speaker 2>when the globe is largely tropical. And here we're talking
<v Speaker 2>again still between fifty five, fifty six and fifty million
<v Speaker 2>years ago, but you've got these areas in the far
<v Speaker 2>North where it's dark for a lot of the year, right,
<v Speaker 2>and it's light for the rest of the year. That
<v Speaker 2>favors the evolution of deciduous plants. Ah, very good chance
<v Speaker 2>that decidiony originates in parts due to that seasonality. Seasonality
<v Speaker 2>will generally tend to favor deciduous species. It's one way
<v Speaker 2>of avoiding difficult times.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you can avoid just going just getting ready late, right,
<v Speaker 1>exactly right, right. Dormancy evolves, you know, seasonal dormancy evolves
<v Speaker 1>in trees in the tropics where they have a pronounced
<v Speaker 1>dry season. And also most people think that it just
<v Speaker 1>evolves in response to cold temperatures the winter, but not so.
<v Speaker 1>It can evolve in response to not having light for
<v Speaker 1>half the year either. Because you're so high, high up,
<v Speaker 1>so high latitude. So this is okay, So this is
<v Speaker 1>fascinating stuff. So, but there are oaks have always been
<v Speaker 1>wind pollinated? Are there's no insect pollinated members of the
<v Speaker 1>genus Quircus, correct.
<v Speaker 2>No, and it's one. So when you define oaks, like
<v Speaker 2>what makes an oak and oak? Because you got this
<v Speaker 2>this whole family. You have a cluster of species, a
<v Speaker 2>cluster of or together that some of several of which
<v Speaker 2>produce acorn like fruits. You talked about, Note the Lithocarpus
<v Speaker 2>endemic to California, it's got an acorn litho Carpus, which
<v Speaker 2>is again this other genus that's widespread in East Asia.
<v Speaker 2>Some of its species produce fruits that look like acorns.
<v Speaker 2>Cast Anopsis, which is another East Asian oak family for
<v Speaker 2>Gaycee genus, produces some acorn species that have acorn like fruits.
<v Speaker 2>So when you get into oaks, though, what shifts between
<v Speaker 2>all these The shift to wind pollination is a big
<v Speaker 2>deal in the genus Quercus. If you look out in spring,
<v Speaker 2>you go walking around in the spring and you look
<v Speaker 2>at the look at the trees. You see in the oaks,
<v Speaker 2>these dangling you know, strings of male inflorescences. These are
<v Speaker 2>called the catkins. They almost look like tinsel hanging off
<v Speaker 2>the tips of the branches. Those are the inflorescences, the
<v Speaker 2>male inflorescences. Each one of those catkins has clusters of
<v Speaker 2>little male flowers on them, and all they are is,
<v Speaker 2>if you've looked closely, you'll see the petals are gone,
<v Speaker 2>the sequels are gone. All you see is basically there
<v Speaker 2>are petals.
<v Speaker 3>You know, there are floral parts there.
<v Speaker 2>But basically what you see is the dangling stamens. All
<v Speaker 2>those things are there for is to get that pollen
<v Speaker 2>right out on the wind.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. You can look at a wind pollinated flower. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you can look at a wind pollinated flower on any
<v Speaker 1>wind pollinated plant, and if you know what to look for,
<v Speaker 1>you can tell this is probably wind pollinated. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the floral parts are reduced, they don't need to attract pollinators.
<v Speaker 1>The petals and sepals are reduced, right, The anthers are
<v Speaker 1>just out there. You look like ambrosia. You look like
<v Speaker 1>ambrosia flower heads up close, the same thing. Yeah, they're
<v Speaker 1>just getting it out there. And then of course when
<v Speaker 1>you tap it, when it's actually you know, producing pollen,
<v Speaker 1>it you get huge clouds of yell polant coming off.
<v Speaker 1>So but this is so let's talk about floral biology.
<v Speaker 1>The oaks too, because they're they're unisexual flowers. They produce
<v Speaker 1>unisexual flowers. But a plant, an oak tree, will have
<v Speaker 1>both sexes on the same plant. That's known as being
<v Speaker 1>monecious as opposed to dioecious, which not many plants are,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like silk tassels, cannabis, et cetera. They've only
<v Speaker 1>got unisexual flowers, but one plant only has one sex
<v Speaker 1>of flower on it, So the plant is functionally functionally unisexual,
<v Speaker 1>you know, male or female. But oaks are oaks are monycius.
<v Speaker 1>They've got both sexes, but they they're unisexual flowers. So
<v Speaker 1>this this evolved. And then that they've got the catkins
<v Speaker 1>like we talked about, but then they've got these the
<v Speaker 1>female flowers. The piste late flowers are tiny. They're really
<v Speaker 1>hard to find in some cases unless you know what
<v Speaker 1>to look for.
<v Speaker 2>Right, that's right if you look along the branch, so
<v Speaker 2>about the time that the catkins are coming out, so
<v Speaker 2>in our area, look around in like afl or even
<v Speaker 2>late March, depend on the year. Look on the branch
<v Speaker 2>and you'll see what looks like little buds, and some
<v Speaker 2>of them will start to put out the stigmas, and
<v Speaker 2>it's going to look like three little curved lobes that
<v Speaker 2>come out of the tip of each pistol of flower.
<v Speaker 2>This is the female flower. Those are there. They're going
<v Speaker 2>to be reddish yellowish oranges. They're going to be look
<v Speaker 2>bright and healthy and ready to grab pollen. And about
<v Speaker 2>the time that pollen is flying, the pollen will the
<v Speaker 2>anthers from the stamens will crack open and each one
<v Speaker 2>will release a thousand or more pollen grains, so billions
<v Speaker 2>of pollen grain, tens of billions of pollen grains off
<v Speaker 2>of every tree. And they fly in these clouds and
<v Speaker 2>they may go one hundred meters, they may go five
<v Speaker 2>hundred meters in some cases that we know of pollen
<v Speaker 2>effectively pollinating oak trees thirty kilometers away, so they can
<v Speaker 2>fly quite a little distance. Yeah, and then they and
<v Speaker 2>then these pollen grains hit. Most of them are going
<v Speaker 2>to fly them against the side of a car. They're
<v Speaker 2>going to hit a leaf and just do nothing. They're
<v Speaker 2>going to land on a big blue stem and do
<v Speaker 2>have you know? All that work for nothing? But a small, small, small, small,
<v Speaker 2>small percentage of them will land on a stigma of
<v Speaker 2>the same species or a close relative, and you may
<v Speaker 2>get ten, fifteen, twenty pollen grains all landing on this stigma.
<v Speaker 2>And what the stigma does is it stimulates them to grow.
<v Speaker 2>So each pollen grain man grows a little pollen tube.
<v Speaker 2>That pollen tube pierces the surface of the stigma and
<v Speaker 2>it starts to grow down the style, which is the
<v Speaker 2>neck that connects those stigmas down to the ovaries, right,
<v Speaker 2>and it grows down and down, And these pollen grains
<v Speaker 2>are racing, right, and so if the if one is faster,
<v Speaker 2>is more fit, it's going to reach earlier. If one
<v Speaker 2>is from the wrong species, there's a very good chance,
<v Speaker 2>not always, but there's a very good chance that that
<v Speaker 2>the that the female flower, that is the flower is
<v Speaker 2>gonna block it, is gonna stop it. If one is
<v Speaker 2>from the same tree, the female flower will often block it.
<v Speaker 2>I was just about right, And they're trying to get
<v Speaker 2>down there, and then they all get down to the
<v Speaker 2>point where then like the bass of the style, and
<v Speaker 2>then they stop and they and they may stop for
<v Speaker 2>weeks or months like in the white oaks, or they
<v Speaker 2>may stop for a year like in many of the
<v Speaker 2>red oaks. Not all of them, but many of the
<v Speaker 2>red oaks. And then after that they start up again
<v Speaker 2>and they try and get down to an ovule, and
<v Speaker 2>these pollen tubes are raising each other. They try and
<v Speaker 2>get down to the ovule, and some of them never
<v Speaker 2>wake up after that delay. This is called delayed fertilization.
<v Speaker 2>So some of them never wake up. But it's usual.
<v Speaker 1>The way hold on is this delayed fertilization is this?
<v Speaker 1>This is a thing that doesn't happen in a lot
<v Speaker 1>of angiosperms, right.
<v Speaker 2>This happens in I have to look up the number
<v Speaker 2>of families. There might be like twenty five plant families
<v Speaker 2>or so.
<v Speaker 1>There's been some, but it's not common.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's a special thing, and it's it's throughout. You
<v Speaker 2>mentioned the group of the gailies, this cluster of families
<v Speaker 2>that includes the Birch family. It includes then then Jugli
<v Speaker 2>and Daisy, the Walnut family, includes the Oak family, Beach family.
<v Speaker 2>These all have delayed fertilization. So it's a cluster of
<v Speaker 2>closely related families that all do this.
<v Speaker 1>And what what does go? Why? Why why do they
<v Speaker 1>stop and take a break. They're just they're just pooped,
<v Speaker 1>they're just wiped out. Or what I mean, what a
<v Speaker 1>great question.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no, no, no, it's like it's costly, right, it's
<v Speaker 2>risky in a way for the tree to do this.
<v Speaker 2>So that suggests that there's some advantage. So I've seen
<v Speaker 2>there's a there's a couple of interesting theories. One has
<v Speaker 2>been that if you delay fertilization, it gives the pistol
<v Speaker 2>at flower more time to select among pollen grains. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>so that's one possibility. Is that it that So that
<v Speaker 2>means that and that makes sense right, so the female
<v Speaker 2>flower does not want to waste her energy on suboptimal pollen,
<v Speaker 2>gets the female opportunity to just select them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, this is this is fucking blowing my mind. I'm
<v Speaker 1>so glad. I asked, you know, I wasn't expecting this
<v Speaker 1>in depth, but this is like, this is three hundred
<v Speaker 1>percent better than what I was expecting. This is Oh,
<v Speaker 1>I'm so glad.
<v Speaker 3>I'm glad.
<v Speaker 2>I said, you're the had Wilson principle, like the breath.
<v Speaker 1>No, this is odd. This is like in depth because
<v Speaker 1>I wonder about this ship. I'm like, you know, there's
<v Speaker 1>not just one Poulin grain landing on a stigma. There's
<v Speaker 1>got to be twenty thirty. Sometimes you know, how do
<v Speaker 1>how does what gets selected?
<v Speaker 2>You know there are and they're duking it out. But
<v Speaker 2>here's another possibility. Also, go Joey is my colleague men,
<v Speaker 2>dang at you non university. She's amazingly does this amazingly
<v Speaker 2>detailed pollen work. She has studied delayed fertilization in I
<v Speaker 2>think it was queer to zacutissima. It's one of these
<v Speaker 2>Asian species. And what she found is, she said, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>we knew already that the pollen tubes get delayed down
<v Speaker 2>at the base of the style. But what she suggested
<v Speaker 2>is that in fact this may play almost like the
<v Speaker 2>opposite role of what I was just saying, is, instead
<v Speaker 2>of like winnowing out things, it actually gives everyone a
<v Speaker 2>chance to start over again French, right. So if you
<v Speaker 2>land on the pollen on the on the on the
<v Speaker 2>on the stigma and your pollen tube grows slowly, this
<v Speaker 2>gives you one more chance because everyone gets stuck at
<v Speaker 2>a second.
<v Speaker 1>This is Andrew. This is there's a turn into like
<v Speaker 1>a very holistic approach to fertilization and angiosperms. This is
<v Speaker 1>very I feel already you know in this fuck that
<v Speaker 1>day and age we live in. Everyone's fighting over stupid bullshit.
<v Speaker 1>Everyone's turned up. The left is constantly attacking itself. That
<v Speaker 1>kind of yeah, this is like, this is good. This,
<v Speaker 1>I feel cleansed. This is like psychologic therapy. Does I
<v Speaker 1>got a question? Does another really cool plant? I don't
<v Speaker 1>want to go too far off here, but another really
<v Speaker 1>cool plant in the order for gaillies is Comptonia peregrina.
<v Speaker 1>Uh I forget this's what do they call it? Sweet fern?
<v Speaker 1>It's a shrub, It's a woody shrub. It is fucking gorgeous.
<v Speaker 1>It's one of the coolest native plants. If you live
<v Speaker 1>in the upper latitudes and you don't have that, you're
<v Speaker 1>not trying to get this in new yard, You're an asshole.
<v Speaker 1>This is I'm just kidding. Of course, to anyone listening,
<v Speaker 1>I said, you just don't know about it, But now
<v Speaker 1>you know about it, you gotta look it up. Does
<v Speaker 1>this do delayed fertilization too or what?
<v Speaker 2>So far as I know, as far as I know,
<v Speaker 2>everything in the Fagales and I Joey, I can't remember
<v Speaker 2>which genera have and have not been studied, but I
<v Speaker 2>believe near a Casey which is the family that includes Comptonia.
<v Speaker 2>The amazing sweet furniture've gone Like if you've been in
<v Speaker 2>horse pastures of sandy Field in the north Woods. Yeah, man,
<v Speaker 2>and you've smelled this this sharly sweet smell. It's wonderful. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's great.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, and it just looks cool. It's just a beautiful plant, man,
<v Speaker 1>And it's and the seeds can live in the seed
<v Speaker 1>bank for like a century or two. I mean it's yeah.
<v Speaker 1>There was a paper that came out where it was
<v Speaker 1>those the seeds were just they were I forget what
<v Speaker 1>the methodology was that they figured out, but but the
<v Speaker 1>seeds had been laying dormant, uh in this forest because
<v Speaker 1>this is not a this is not a shade town
<v Speaker 1>or plant. They've been laying dormant in this forest. The
<v Speaker 1>forest got cleared and they popped up like in numerous
<v Speaker 1>places and there wasn't any nearby and it was anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>really cool plant. Can you put me in touch after
<v Speaker 1>the podcast with someone who studies castinacy in the Southern Hampshire,
<v Speaker 1>like a southern hemisphere equivalent that you do you know what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, cool, Okay, I'll look I'll look around and see,
<v Speaker 2>I know somebody can put you in touch with who
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, someone immediately she will.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, cool, right anyway, Okay, so I'm moving along. So
<v Speaker 1>we got delaid fertilization because this with another thing about
<v Speaker 1>oaks is it takes a while for those acorns to mature.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of angiosterms, a lot of flowering plants, they
<v Speaker 1>flower and they're producing fruit within you know, six months tops.
<v Speaker 2>You know, right, So okay, so you've got this delayed fertilization.
<v Speaker 2>And again, so around here in most of North America,
<v Speaker 2>I think most of your listeners probably are. Is there
<v Speaker 2>that the white oaks are all producing annual acorns. This
<v Speaker 2>means that the delayed fertilization is only a few weeks.
<v Speaker 2>The red oaks are almost all, but not all, almost
<v Speaker 2>all have biennial accorns, so it takes them two years.
<v Speaker 2>So in a red oak in the in the upper
<v Speaker 2>Midwest here you get you get pollination in the spring.
<v Speaker 2>Let's say, let's think about the acorns that are fall off.
<v Speaker 1>Which actually the red oaks.
<v Speaker 2>This is sarahs Okay. So now this is subgenus Quercus,
<v Speaker 2>but it's section lobati.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Okay, subgenus. So we're we're this is all in
<v Speaker 1>subgenus quirkus already, it's.
<v Speaker 2>All SubGenius quirkers I'm talking about right now. But we
<v Speaker 2>also get two year acorns and cycle of alnopsis. We
<v Speaker 2>also get to your acorns in some of islects, I think,
<v Speaker 2>which is the these are East Asian anyways, so you
<v Speaker 2>get so you in. But let's imagine the red oaks
<v Speaker 2>that are falling in our area right now. Those were
<v Speaker 2>pollinated in twenty twenty three in the spring. The pollen
<v Speaker 2>raced down to the base of the style and sat
<v Speaker 2>there through the summer of twenty twenty three through the
<v Speaker 2>fall of twenty twenty three, through the winter of twenty
<v Speaker 2>twenty three and twenty twenty four, and in spring of
<v Speaker 2>twenty twenty four, those pollen grains started moving, those pollen
<v Speaker 2>tubes started moving again, and they only successfully fertilized the ovules.
<v Speaker 2>And I say ovules because a couple or two or
<v Speaker 2>three mile agap fertilized initially in spring of twenty twenty four.
<v Speaker 2>Then in an oak typically and I'm gonna say maybe
<v Speaker 2>it's ninety nine times out of one hundred. Typically, once
<v Speaker 2>one ovule is successfully fertilized and begins growing, it will
<v Speaker 2>suppress the others. So here's one more opportunity for competition.
<v Speaker 2>Joey is like, all these all these congrains are racing
<v Speaker 2>to fertilize an ovule. Suppose three ovules get fertilized out
<v Speaker 2>of the six that are in there, the best one,
<v Speaker 2>the one that's doing best at suppressing the others, will win.
<v Speaker 2>So one more chance to compete. Right, So you're trying
<v Speaker 2>to get the fittest, the fittest acorn every time. That's
<v Speaker 2>why when you open up an acorn, you usually find
<v Speaker 2>only one big seed in there.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, this is okay. So you have six ovules in
<v Speaker 1>a single female oak flour, that's but only one turns
<v Speaker 1>into it and you only get one acorn out of it.
<v Speaker 2>So usually, but that's not always the case. I was
<v Speaker 2>out in Maple Grove forest preserved this. This was it
<v Speaker 2>this year last year, I can't remember, it was this
<v Speaker 2>year last year, and I looked at a seedling that
<v Speaker 2>was growing in the woods, and I looked at it
<v Speaker 2>and I'll send you a photo of this.
<v Speaker 1>You'll love this.
<v Speaker 2>And what you could see is that it was actually
<v Speaker 2>two seedlings that had been smashed together into one acorn
<v Speaker 2>and about one out of a hundred trees. And here
<v Speaker 2>I'm totally making it up because we don't have a
<v Speaker 2>lot of data on this. There was a study in
<v Speaker 2>burrows where they found one population where it was like
<v Speaker 2>one out of fifty we'll produce a two seeded acorn. Now,
<v Speaker 2>when you get a two seeded acorn, these are rare,
<v Speaker 2>and they are rare for a reason. They're selected against
<v Speaker 2>because they grow more slowly, So we have good reasonably
<v Speaker 2>they' selected against because the fighting couldn't stand nutrients.
<v Speaker 1>Right, they grow more slowly, but there's not really a benefit.
<v Speaker 2>So there's that's what I think.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I think.
<v Speaker 2>They tend to get windowed out.
<v Speaker 1>This is blowing my mind. So do all oaks? Do
<v Speaker 1>all Corcus female oak flowers that regardless of section or
<v Speaker 1>subgenus have six ovules?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so and to clear out up for anybody. An
<v Speaker 1>ovule is an unfertilized uh seed and then once it
<v Speaker 1>becomes fertilized, then it's the seed what's the what's the
<v Speaker 1>technical name for that, just embryo or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it becomes it, it becomes an embryo exactly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so ovule versus embryo. Okay, So okay, so this
<v Speaker 1>is not so so when all is said and done,
<v Speaker 1>from pollination to actually one the acorns drop is about
<v Speaker 1>eighteen months. It's about a year and a half.
<v Speaker 2>In the red oak grewp in the red over the
<v Speaker 2>white oak crew. In the white oak group it's closer.
<v Speaker 2>And there's most of the red group because like, if
<v Speaker 2>you get down to Mexico, you've got annual red oaks.
<v Speaker 2>If you get into California, there's some annual red oaks. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but then in the in the white oaks, and in
<v Speaker 2>the annual any annual in any of the species that
<v Speaker 2>produced annual acorns. It's like, let me think, maybe like
<v Speaker 2>March to the end of August, or I could do
<v Speaker 2>the math.
<v Speaker 1>Here, let me let me use this as an opportunity,
<v Speaker 1>let me I'm gonna pause this really quick and save
<v Speaker 1>it one second. Okay, we're back, hopefully, hopefully the auto
<v Speaker 1>ad input puts some of those terrible and obnoxious ads,
<v Speaker 1>which I'm completely against except for the fact that they
<v Speaker 1>pay me in and you were able to fest forward
<v Speaker 1>through it if you're listening. So anyway, Okay, So getting
<v Speaker 1>back to this, Andrew, let's talk about because we have
<v Speaker 1>sub genera which are for the most part restricted to continents,
<v Speaker 1>like like one subgenus to Eurasia, one subgenus to North America.
<v Speaker 1>Is that correct today?
<v Speaker 2>That is mostly true?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, Yeah, biogeography in a lot of cases follows taxonomy,
<v Speaker 1>not always, but with most plants. That's why a lot
<v Speaker 1>of plants that were formerly in the same genus that
<v Speaker 1>occurred in both you know, say, I don't know Europe
<v Speaker 1>and North America. Not all of them, but a lot
<v Speaker 1>of them have been you know, actually put in a
<v Speaker 1>two separate generic because they turns out they were they
<v Speaker 1>diverged quite long ago because of that Atlantic Ocean thing
<v Speaker 1>or Pacific Ocean whatever. But but then we've got sections
<v Speaker 1>in North America too, correct, What is it the white
<v Speaker 1>and the red oaks? Now, what what are the sections
<v Speaker 1>and what are the differences case?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so well let's stick with Let's start with the
<v Speaker 2>Americas where there's five sections embedded in the subgenus square Kiss,
<v Speaker 2>and here's what they are, and they sort of split
<v Speaker 2>off in this order. So the one that is isolated
<v Speaker 2>from all the others that we say as sister to
<v Speaker 2>all the others is the red oak section, that section
<v Speaker 2>low body, and that includes I'm not going to run
<v Speaker 2>the number of species, maybe t one hundred and twenty.
<v Speaker 2>Don't quote me on that. Well, I guess it's okay.
<v Speaker 1>You've done so spectacular on this podcast already. It's okay
<v Speaker 1>if you don't remember the exact number of species.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, we've got so we got we got a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of those. And these are mostly by any LaGG corns.
<v Speaker 2>You recognize them in most of the flora by a
<v Speaker 2>few features. One is they they tend they have leaves
<v Speaker 2>with bristle tips. Right, So if you look at the
<v Speaker 2>tips of the lobes on the lobe species, or the
<v Speaker 2>tip of the leaf on the unloabed species, you generally
<v Speaker 2>see what looks like a little bristle. In the white oaks,
<v Speaker 2>you may find a little tooth, but it's not going
<v Speaker 2>to be like a little bristle. So think of like
<v Speaker 2>a if you look at a classic northern red oak,
<v Speaker 2>if you look at a black oak, if you look
<v Speaker 2>at an if you look at a scarlet oak, you
<v Speaker 2>see really distinctive bristles on the tips. So that's the
<v Speaker 2>red oak. Grow. The other things that distinguish that. If
<v Speaker 2>you open up the acorn on a red oak and
<v Speaker 2>look the anything in that in that section, look at
<v Speaker 2>the inside of the of the acorn wall, it's hairy.
<v Speaker 2>That's not true of the white oaks.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, the way, way, hold on, What are those hairs doing?
<v Speaker 1>What are they are they actually trying?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know what they're doing there. It's just fuzzy
<v Speaker 2>in there.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 2>Has it got a feature except to be sweet and
<v Speaker 2>nice and something we can identify? I don't know.
<v Speaker 3>It's like, yeah, right, it's fuzzy.
<v Speaker 2>The whole the whole group has that. All the red
<v Speaker 2>oaks do, and they cover all sorts of habitats, So
<v Speaker 2>I doubt that it's this. You know that it's a
<v Speaker 2>special function. It's like unique to some habitat or something
<v Speaker 2>like that.
<v Speaker 1>Right, And the hair is that they're not exposed to
<v Speaker 1>the atmosphere, so it's not like it's doing any reflecting flats.
<v Speaker 2>I have no idea. Maybe somebody someone on the podcast
<v Speaker 2>and I said, love, give me a holler. I'd love
<v Speaker 2>to know.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, anyway, Sorry, I'm sorry to distract you. I digress.
<v Speaker 1>Here we go.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no, Then there's four other sections that are
<v Speaker 2>all fall in a separate clade. Here, I'm going to
<v Speaker 2>use the term clade. All clade is is. It's a
<v Speaker 2>name of a group of organisms that are all each
<v Speaker 2>other's closest relatives, that all descend from a single ancestor.
<v Speaker 2>So like when I say primates, primates are a clade.
<v Speaker 2>When I talk about birds, birds are a clade. When
<v Speaker 2>I talk about dinosaurs, dinosaurs are not a clade unless
<v Speaker 2>you include within the dinosaurs the bird birds.
<v Speaker 1>Right, You needn't to be monophyletic. Now, I've told these
<v Speaker 1>listeners they better know what a clade. If anybody out
<v Speaker 1>there doesn't know what monophyletic means, you're we're gonna we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna talk. Okay, we're gonna sit down the top. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>you don't know what monophyletic is, email me. I'll send
<v Speaker 1>you a little diagram. You need to know this because
<v Speaker 1>it's such a cool way to think about anything humans including.
<v Speaker 2>And it's the whole the whole world is divided. That
<v Speaker 2>evolutionary history is this history is producing clay anyway, that's
<v Speaker 2>part of.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, no, we could go on a tangent about that,
<v Speaker 1>because that's so cool. When I learned that, that changed
<v Speaker 1>the way I thought of everything around me. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that was a groundbreaking shift in my own perspective on
<v Speaker 1>my own life and how I interpreted the world. It
<v Speaker 1>was like, whoa, everything is related, and it takes the
<v Speaker 1>form of these little triangles that branch off from larger triangles,
<v Speaker 1>and it's I mean, it's so important. I mean learning
<v Speaker 1>that about plants, and that's why I always push systematics
<v Speaker 1>and taxonomy so hard. It's like, you know, because taxonomy
<v Speaker 1>wasn't always about systematics. Now it is for the most part,
<v Speaker 1>but there's still constraints to it because you know, at
<v Speaker 1>the end of the day, we're a bipedal primate trying
<v Speaker 1>to interpret how evolution works.
<v Speaker 2>So I feel the same way. And it's such a beautiful,
<v Speaker 2>exciting vision and only part of the story, but it's
<v Speaker 2>such an important part of the story understanding the Tree
<v Speaker 2>of life. M anyway, Okay, so you got the Red Oaks.
<v Speaker 2>That section sectional body sister to all the rest of
<v Speaker 2>the American Oaks.
<v Speaker 1>Which are four other sections.
<v Speaker 2>Which are four others.
<v Speaker 1>Oh Christ, this is I thought this this, I thought
<v Speaker 1>this was going to be easier.
<v Speaker 2>Joey, Joey we're gonna make any peeling off. Next comes
<v Speaker 2>the come the intermediate or golden cup to oaks. This
<v Speaker 2>is section proto Balonis. It's limited to California and some
<v Speaker 2>squeak into Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico. This is things
<v Speaker 2>like the Quirkus chrysolitis Curecus palmer. In fact, the oldest
<v Speaker 2>oak we know of in the world is in this section.
<v Speaker 2>It's quirk As Palmuri. It's in southern California. It's a
<v Speaker 2>thirteen thousand year old estimated to be thirteen thousand year
<v Speaker 2>old clone in the hills around Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, wait, hold on, because someone's going to ask how
<v Speaker 1>do they know that? How do we know that? I
<v Speaker 1>mean radiocarbon dating on some sort of root tissue or something.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no, no, this is a this is a bit
<v Speaker 2>of a digression. But the Quirkus Palmuri story is in
<v Speaker 2>a two thousand and nine article published at plus one,
<v Speaker 2>so you can so it's open access publication. Anyone who
<v Speaker 2>googles like thirteen thousand year old Quercus palmer i plus one,
<v Speaker 2>you'll find this article. And as I recall, it's been
<v Speaker 2>a while since there The article as I recalled. They
<v Speaker 2>did it by actually estimating the growth rate and the.
<v Speaker 3>Size of the clone.
<v Speaker 2>So I don't know if there was radio dating in
<v Speaker 2>this article or not.
<v Speaker 1>But this thing's fucking old, though, I mean, it's really old.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's old, and it's out of place. That's the
<v Speaker 2>thing that's crazy about it. It's been orphaned as been
<v Speaker 2>as the glaciers receded northward, right, it got sort of
<v Speaker 2>orphaned down here where it's it's down at lower elevations
<v Speaker 2>than the rest of its colleagues, who's sort of you know,
<v Speaker 2>trammeled the hills and gone up up slope following the
<v Speaker 2>following climate change.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So this is a this is a shrub oak
<v Speaker 1>that produces multiple stems, and the stems, none of the
<v Speaker 1>stems are thirteen thousand years old. But the rude itself,
<v Speaker 1>the individual, that individual specific genome, is thirteen thousand years ago.
<v Speaker 2>That's right. The claim we're making, the claim the authors
<v Speaker 2>are making, is that an acorn germinated somewhere around thirteen
<v Speaker 2>thousand years ago, give or take a few thousand years,
<v Speaker 2>and it grew to produce this twenty five meter wide
<v Speaker 2>clone that we observe today.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus Christ. Where exactly in California is it?
<v Speaker 2>You know, I'll have to look it up and send
<v Speaker 2>you I can send you a bunch of links after
<v Speaker 2>we're done.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I've been hearing about this thing for years, but
<v Speaker 1>I've never actually gone and seen it. But I mean,
<v Speaker 1>California is full of instances like that where you know,
<v Speaker 1>they'll find pack rat midtens with you know, tree species
<v Speaker 1>in it encrusted in piss like pack rats do. Thank god,
<v Speaker 1>you know, kudos to them. You know where the tree
<v Speaker 1>now grows like two thousand feet higher in elevation that
<v Speaker 1>species does. That's been a big clue to you know,
<v Speaker 1>climatic change from the Pleistocene. So it's yeah, that's a
<v Speaker 1>really cool.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>You know, that's a really cool thing to think about.
<v Speaker 1>Is that I wonder if it's producing seedlings. Still, probably not,
<v Speaker 1>because it's like in the I don't.
<v Speaker 2>Know, I don't I don't know. Yeah, No, I do
<v Speaker 2>know that that particular individual is at risk from developments
<v Speaker 2>would not a sperm maybe not such a surprise, but
<v Speaker 2>but upsetting.
<v Speaker 1>A bunch of apes who lost their way. That's that's
<v Speaker 1>that's what what we tend to be sometimes, Okay, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>keep going.
<v Speaker 2>Sorry, Okay, so that's the intermedia. Then the next clade
<v Speaker 2>that peels off that sister to all the rest of
<v Speaker 2>the white oaks. The next one to peel off is
<v Speaker 2>goofy clade of two species only the pontas. Okay, one
<v Speaker 2>of them quickest, sad Lariyena is endemic to northern Cola.
<v Speaker 1>Is such a cool one.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, and southern organ and the Siski Mountains. And
<v Speaker 2>this thing is sister to a species quirk As pontica
<v Speaker 2>that is limited to the Caucuses.
<v Speaker 1>It right, So this is old. This is an old clade.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, if that's this whole thing, I mean, that's wild.
<v Speaker 1>There's so many that's another thing. There's so many plants
<v Speaker 1>in northern California, and the Siski use like brewer spruce
<v Speaker 1>Picea Breweriana, Like what's the closest relative is in like
<v Speaker 1>Russia or something. Such an incredible species, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>just fucking weird. You can tell this thing is old.
<v Speaker 1>It just got landlocked here. It's just the time capsule,
<v Speaker 1>you know, that's it's Yeah. Anyway, so keep going. So quirkusidariana,
<v Speaker 1>that's like another small shrub maybe three feet four feet high.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and it will it will hybridize with with a
<v Speaker 2>wide oak with I think it hybridizes with with our
<v Speaker 2>quirkus Garyana. But it's but yeah, it's it's like it's
<v Speaker 2>sort of a phile. It genetically evolutionary isolated species because
<v Speaker 2>it's sister's way over in the caucases and its sister
<v Speaker 2>species has gone in for a whole nother thing we
<v Speaker 2>could talk about when we get to the Eurasian clay.
<v Speaker 2>So then the next group to peel off is all
<v Speaker 2>the rest of the white oaks, and it's only two
<v Speaker 2>sections left. One is Section Yrnees. Now, this is a
<v Speaker 2>group that includes the fantastic like if you've seen the
<v Speaker 2>angel oak, this magnificent southern live oak. That's the section
<v Speaker 2>that that's included that uh Vranes includes that space.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, Virginiana, Yeah, there you go.
<v Speaker 2>Crecus Virginia is one of the one of the live oaks.
<v Speaker 2>These are the southern live oaks. The again only like
<v Speaker 2>six species that range from the southeastern US down to
<v Speaker 2>Central America. There's one species, Quircus olioides, which is one
<v Speaker 2>of the few truly tropical oaks, Greeks olioides goes all
<v Speaker 2>the way down to Central America.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh god, I want to try to go that
<v Speaker 1>where I live, because it's hot as balls where I
<v Speaker 1>live at all times of the year. And that's that
<v Speaker 1>it grows just south of me in tom Alipis we
<v Speaker 1>get few siformists Quirkus fusiformists up there on the sandsheet
<v Speaker 1>and in the Edwards plateau that's also in Varentees, right. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>You know what blew up my mind about this section
<v Speaker 1>is that I always assumed that uh Corcus fu siformists
<v Speaker 1>was just like a more drought adapted version of Virginiana.
<v Speaker 1>It was just Virginiana that got an ecotype of Virginiana
<v Speaker 1>that got selected for for you know, as the continent
<v Speaker 1>dries out as you move west. But then I read
<v Speaker 1>that paper about this whole section and that's not what happened.
<v Speaker 1>It's its closest living relative is Quirkus brandigii down in
<v Speaker 1>southern Baja, which really blew my mind. I mean that's correct, right.
<v Speaker 2>It's absolutely well that you're talking about Chanin's paper, right, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>this is yeah, for anyone who's interested in this group.
<v Speaker 2>Janine Cavender Barras, formerly of University of Minnesota. Just I'm
<v Speaker 2>moving over to Harvard University. H Now, she's done all
<v Speaker 2>this amazing ecophysiological, evolutionary phylogenetic work on this section, an
<v Speaker 2>amazing body of work at Byrantis.
<v Speaker 1>That's that's crazy, but so so Yeah, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I guess I just didn't expect that because Quirkus fusiformists
<v Speaker 1>looks so much like Virginiana could be so hard to distinguish.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you just kind of go by the the
<v Speaker 1>gist of it, you know, like what what sum it up?
<v Speaker 1>You know, like what it looks like. You just kind
<v Speaker 1>of have that feeling. But there's no like hard characters
<v Speaker 1>as far as I know, between few siformists in Virginiana
<v Speaker 1>are there.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, I don't know the byrantzis.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Sorry, sorry this strikes, but keep going about okay.
<v Speaker 1>But and also Quirkus Virginiana is not it's in a
<v Speaker 1>different section than Agrifolia, which is the California livok bingo.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So when we use the term live you know,
<v Speaker 2>common names, as your listeners will probably all know, common
<v Speaker 2>names can be super deceptive live oak. That term is
<v Speaker 2>often used generally for just evergreen oaks. But when I'm
<v Speaker 2>talking about the southern live oaks, then I'm talking about
<v Speaker 2>this clade that includes Virginiana pusiformis, brent dgi Olioides, and.
<v Speaker 1>Am Okay, okay, so okay, so in yeah olioid man,
<v Speaker 1>I gotta see that. That's only in Mexico, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's the only place. Yeah, I've not and I've
<v Speaker 2>not been to Central America. I've seen it in I
<v Speaker 2>think in Tamilpas. Yeah, because I've.
<v Speaker 1>Seen it, Okay, okay.
<v Speaker 2>And then then the very last group is the white oaks.
<v Speaker 2>So this is sister two by Ronzies, and it's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of species. This has been the most successful clade
<v Speaker 2>of oaks in a way because so.
<v Speaker 1>What what section is is what's the name of it?
<v Speaker 4>Oh okay, sorry, this is Quercus subgenus quercus section quercus.
<v Speaker 4>Oh christ right, So this is a yeah, so this
<v Speaker 4>is the one that like when you say this, this one,
<v Speaker 4>you've got four.
<v Speaker 2>Lines of quirk because you've got four quackuses lined up,
<v Speaker 2>because you got the the oh maybe three, You've got
<v Speaker 2>the genus, you've got the sub genus, and then you've
<v Speaker 2>got the section. You're right, but you got to do it.
<v Speaker 1>That's the way we're specific matter, man, It's how this
<v Speaker 1>stuff evolves erectly.
<v Speaker 2>And so the white oaks are are fantastic. I mean
<v Speaker 2>the white oaks have so when you compare and again,
<v Speaker 2>because in the America's ours, our two biggest sections of
<v Speaker 2>the white oaks white oaks section section quercus and the
<v Speaker 2>red oaks section section lobati, it's worth knowing how to
<v Speaker 2>distinguish these. The white oaks all have annual acorns, whereas
<v Speaker 2>in the north most of the probably throughout its range,
<v Speaker 2>most of the red oaks have biannual acorns, and the
<v Speaker 2>white oaks have I have rounded lobes or just a
<v Speaker 2>little tooth at the tip of the lobe on the
<v Speaker 2>lobes on the leaves on the trees, load leaves on
<v Speaker 2>the trees with out loabed leaves. Again, you can have
<v Speaker 2>a little teeth at the tip, but you're not going
<v Speaker 2>to typically get on bristles, and there are some exceptions.
<v Speaker 2>The other thing that distinguishes these things, if you just
<v Speaker 2>identifying them, pick up an acorn, and the acorns of
<v Speaker 2>the white oaks, their scales tend to sort of be
<v Speaker 2>bumpy on the back you'll we call them to ber
<v Speaker 2>kill it sometimes where's the red oaks tend to have
<v Speaker 2>smoother acorn caps scales not not fully reliable, but you
<v Speaker 2>can learn to identic you can learn to recognize it.
<v Speaker 2>The other thing is the bark. The bark on the
<v Speaker 2>white oaks tends to be flatter plate here, whereas the
<v Speaker 2>red oaks tend to have blockier bark. Again, that that
<v Speaker 2>can be a little bit difficult to see.
<v Speaker 1>Is corcus and sickness in this section?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Gregson signas? Is it true? White oak? God? That
<v Speaker 2>thing is amazing, you know, magnificent?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Oh my god? Who I think it was?
<v Speaker 2>Coon?
<v Speaker 1>SOI Kim who used to work at Morton. Yes, he
<v Speaker 1>gave me years a decade ago. He had some extras
<v Speaker 1>of corcus and signas and he gave me one and
<v Speaker 1>I planted it in Oakland, California. And the thing it
<v Speaker 1>struggled for a while because it's not the temperate or
<v Speaker 1>it's not the rainforests of Vera Cruz, so it wasn't
<v Speaker 1>getting enough moisture. We had those dry summers. But it
<v Speaker 1>finally it got established and did well. But I never
<v Speaker 1>got acorns out of it. But I you know, God,
<v Speaker 1>what an amazing tree. Those giant baseball sized acorns. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's the largest acorn of any oak right.
<v Speaker 2>Well, And I love it, Yes, I believe so. And
<v Speaker 2>I love it because that one grows right with Gecas
<v Speaker 2>skinner eye, which is a red oak up in the
<v Speaker 2>same cloud forests, and also with great, big, honking acorns,
<v Speaker 2>and those are two of the biggest acorns that I've
<v Speaker 2>ever seen in my life.
<v Speaker 1>Was something selecting for big ic acorns? And that, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>do you think there's like some extinct megafauna or something
<v Speaker 1>that was dispersing those.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know about that. That's a really good question. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they're just because they can because it's so
<v Speaker 1>warm and it's so warm and wet.
<v Speaker 2>I don't so maybe so. I mean, one thing we
<v Speaker 2>do know is that acorns, you know, these these great
<v Speaker 2>big acorns have huge cottle eatens inside. The cottle eathens
<v Speaker 2>is just the name for the seed leaves. Like when
<v Speaker 2>you break open a cut open an acorn, and you're
<v Speaker 2>going to see a massive tissue in there. The lion's
<v Speaker 2>share of the tissue is these acorns. And some of
<v Speaker 2>them they fit together like two halves of a Hamburger
<v Speaker 2>bund and others they're fused, but those are the seedling leaves.
<v Speaker 2>They're holding all the food that the female plant, female
<v Speaker 2>flower has provisioned this seed with, and those that food
<v Speaker 2>plays two rolls, two really important roles. One is to
<v Speaker 2>feed the young plants. So when the plant germinates, the
<v Speaker 2>food from these cottle leads just pour into the roots
<v Speaker 2>and get sequestered in there so that the plant can
<v Speaker 2>get a head start, even in a low light environment
<v Speaker 2>before it can start photosynthesizing. But the food in those
<v Speaker 2>cattle leads has a second, equally important role. It's to
<v Speaker 2>lure in disperses because it's feet and so with a
<v Speaker 2>big plant like intact circus and signus has been studied,
<v Speaker 2>they looked at removing cuda eats. So I suppose a
<v Speaker 2>predator comes along, you know, a squirrel or whatever, and
<v Speaker 2>buries this acorn. Okay, great, Then that acorn is probably
<v Speaker 2>gonna germinate pretty nicely if it doesn't get dug up.
<v Speaker 2>But suppose that squirrel eats like a third of the
<v Speaker 2>cotta eat, which is the really tasty part. It will
<v Speaker 2>tend to eat from the portion it's underneath the cap,
<v Speaker 2>which is less defended, has less tannic acid in it
<v Speaker 2>to defend it against the against the predator. You eat
<v Speaker 2>up like half of that cattle. Eating a third of
<v Speaker 2>that kind of eat the plant is still going to germinate.
<v Speaker 2>Just fine.
<v Speaker 1>Oh shit, really, so that's so wow, because I was
<v Speaker 1>just gonna say, if it's eating it, it's killing the embryo.
<v Speaker 1>But no, it's not.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the cattle. And so when you look at the like,
<v Speaker 2>pop open an acorn, and this is a great time
<v Speaker 2>to do it if you're not in North America, is
<v Speaker 2>because they're dropping right now. Pop open the cap. Get
<v Speaker 2>yourself a pair of burning shears if you've got some,
<v Speaker 2>or a good butcher knife, just use it, and use
<v Speaker 2>a cutting board because you don't want to cut your
<v Speaker 2>finger off. Cut that thing open and look at the
<v Speaker 2>look at the cattle leens. What you'll see is that
<v Speaker 2>the portion right underneath the cap, thick you know, meaty,
<v Speaker 2>the babe, the young tree. The growing tips then sort
<v Speaker 2>of shoot tip and the root tip are all the
<v Speaker 2>way down at the opposite end of the acorn. And
<v Speaker 2>so when the female plant is producing this acorn, it's
<v Speaker 2>becoming suffused with tannic acids. Tannic acid is the same
<v Speaker 2>stuff that we use to tan leather, the same stuff
<v Speaker 2>that turns like the Black River in central was in black.
<v Speaker 1>This is uh.
<v Speaker 2>It binds protein. It makes your mouth pucker up if
<v Speaker 2>you try and eat it. If you feed a squirrel
<v Speaker 2>only acorns, that squirrel is going to lose weight because
<v Speaker 2>that acorn doesn't provide enough nutrients and the tannic acid
<v Speaker 2>is sucking up some of some of the proteins that
<v Speaker 2>it needs to live. Uh. But there's less tannic acid
<v Speaker 2>at the sort of north end of the acorn, right
<v Speaker 2>underneath the cap, which is where the growing tips are. Not.
<v Speaker 1>Wow. Yeah, that makes sense because you look at when
<v Speaker 1>acorns germinate, the root comes out, that pointed tip at
<v Speaker 1>the radical comes out that point the tip at the
<v Speaker 1>other end. So that is wow. So the tannic acid
<v Speaker 1>is not evenly distributed throughout the whole acorn. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>only where the important stuff is.
<v Speaker 2>Well, it's throughout the acorn, but there's a gradient the concentration.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So and then the benefit is, of course a
<v Speaker 1>squirrel takes this thing, runs off with it, thinks he
<v Speaker 1>just scored a good meal. And he did, but only
<v Speaker 1>the top and then he just when he's done with it,
<v Speaker 1>throws it throws it the into the duff and that
<v Speaker 1>now that thing germinates. So that's he's disperson.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of the time. Yes, And you can see,
<v Speaker 2>like last year we had a great mass year for
<v Speaker 2>wherecas for the eastern white oak, and a mass here
<v Speaker 2>is a year when the trees produce fruits in abundance,
<v Speaker 2>and oaks are super famous for massing. In that year,
<v Speaker 2>I walk around the woods and I saw all these
<v Speaker 2>quarter third devoured acorns where the squirrels had just like
<v Speaker 2>and they were just like, oh they were they were desulatory.
<v Speaker 2>They would eat just what they wanted and then just
<v Speaker 2>toss the rest away. They didn't care. It is like
<v Speaker 2>like they were just ravaging a candy store. And those
<v Speaker 2>those many of those acorns will subsequently did subsequently germinate.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's that's fascinating. You're blowing my mind, man, So okay,
<v Speaker 1>well think yeah, the thing I want to talk about
<v Speaker 1>now too, because you'll there's a lot of shade tolerance
<v Speaker 1>for oaks. I mean, they can they love full sun
<v Speaker 1>when they are large, when they're adults, but they can
<v Speaker 1>also tolerate shade for years, right, because you'll go into
<v Speaker 1>an understory sometimes and you'll see hundreds, if not thousands
<v Speaker 1>of little oak seedlings only six seven inches tall. It's
<v Speaker 1>too shady for them to really do anything. They can
<v Speaker 1>just are they like redwoods, they can just hang out
<v Speaker 1>and lurk for a while until a tree falls down
<v Speaker 1>you get some sunlight in there or what.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's real context specific because like in our
<v Speaker 2>woods and in sort of in the rich soils around
<v Speaker 2>southern Wisconsin northern Illinois where I've spent most of my
<v Speaker 2>time botanizing, you tend to see if you get a flush,
<v Speaker 2>like we've got a ton of seedlings right now from
<v Speaker 2>last year's mast of Quercus alba, which is the eastern
<v Speaker 2>wide oak is the king of the forest. If you've
<v Speaker 2>read PD's wonderful Natural History of Trees, that's those ceilings
<v Speaker 2>are not going to last forever. They'll stay suppressed for
<v Speaker 2>a little while. But when I get up to northern Wisconsin,
<v Speaker 2>I do see more of this stratification where you get
<v Speaker 2>where you get trees lurking in the understory. Now, I'm
<v Speaker 2>not a community collegist, so I haven't studied this in
<v Speaker 2>any detail. But my sense is that this is very
<v Speaker 2>context specific, and as a consequence, we're not seeing oaks
<v Speaker 2>replacing themselves in most of our woods. Around here. There
<v Speaker 2>is kind of a reproduction crisis really. Yeah. Now, and
<v Speaker 2>I've said about all that I know about that. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>what's influencing it probably fire. I mean around here we're
<v Speaker 2>at the edge of the Prairie province, and around here
<v Speaker 2>the forests are adapted to the savannahs. Forests and prairies
<v Speaker 2>are adapted to fire. But that whole fire regime shifted
<v Speaker 2>in the early nineteen hundreds as we started suppressing fires.
<v Speaker 2>So as a consequence are not seeing kind of ocreute production.
<v Speaker 1>We used to do. Yeah, fire suppression really spilled. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's crazy how many people don't, even in the eastern US,
<v Speaker 1>don't realize how important fire was. I mean, and it's
<v Speaker 1>not just because invasive species, though that the invasive species
<v Speaker 1>problem is made it worse because that really small there's
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the understory. But I mean, even without
<v Speaker 1>invasive species, you've got to burn that stuff off of
<v Speaker 1>for a few years. It's it's healthier for the forest.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's healthier, not only for getting rid of
<v Speaker 1>ticks and siggers and insects, et cetera. But also for
<v Speaker 1>you know, just creating an open, healthier forest. So you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's with lower density, right, I mean, because you've got
<v Speaker 1>too much stuff growing in there. Not everything can thrive totally.
<v Speaker 1>And so even in like oaks savannahs in the Chicago area,
<v Speaker 1>fire was still pretty common. I assume like a lot
<v Speaker 1>of those oaks are fire resistant once they get to
<v Speaker 1>a certain size.
<v Speaker 2>That's right there. Fire some are like it's a really
<v Speaker 2>neat experiment that was done at the UW. Madison Arboretum
<v Speaker 2>in the eighties where they had a savannah that had
<v Speaker 2>gotten clogged with black oak grubs. These little ones, because
<v Speaker 2>they hadn't been burning for a long time, they literally
<v Speaker 2>couldn't get a fire through. So so what they found
<v Speaker 2>is one once they could, they did a really cool
<v Speaker 2>experiment where they like killed off thousands of little baby
<v Speaker 2>black oaks with black oak wilts with a strain that
<v Speaker 2>was already present on the hillside. They trenched around the
<v Speaker 2>whole savannah they were restoring to make sure that the
<v Speaker 2>black oak wilt wouldn't travel through the root grafts, right, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>exact well, it's a It was certainly a strain that
<v Speaker 2>was present on that hillside already. You know what the
<v Speaker 2>genesis of it is, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And then but then once they could get fired through,
<v Speaker 2>what they found is that many of the younger black
<v Speaker 2>olks would repeatedly get burned down to the ground, burn
<v Speaker 2>down on the ground, so they just keep growing over
<v Speaker 2>and over and over again. You find this with burrokes too,
<v Speaker 2>and so you get the little shoot being burned down
<v Speaker 2>and all that energy that would have gone into that
<v Speaker 2>shot being stored in the roots. So you can get
<v Speaker 2>a root that is, you know, eighty years old, and
<v Speaker 2>a shoot that's just up from that one ear But
<v Speaker 2>give that shoot then six seven, twelve years to get
<v Speaker 2>a foothold, then it can resist the fire.
<v Speaker 1>But if you've got an eighty year old root, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's gonna have a lot of juice stored open it.
<v Speaker 1>I mean that thing is like a battery. That is
<v Speaker 1>good that that's exactly right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Yeah, And I think I feel like there's a
<v Speaker 2>passage I read and it may have been in John
<v Speaker 2>Muir in sort of My Boyhood and Youth where he
<v Speaker 2>talks about the someone again, if someone remembers that this
<v Speaker 2>was somebody else who said this, but around the Madison Capital.
<v Speaker 2>I think he talks about all these oaks shooting up
<v Speaker 2>in the wake of fire suppression. Yeah, and it was
<v Speaker 2>exactly that, Joey Wray. You had all these root systems
<v Speaker 2>were growing, growing, growing, and they were stepped to jump
<v Speaker 2>once the fires was they released from fire.
<v Speaker 1>I think that this is a good talking about these
<v Speaker 1>massive root systems, is a good segue into another topic
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk about, which a lot of people,
<v Speaker 1>especially if they're in the Midwest or Northeast, will not
<v Speaker 1>be familiar with. But the habit the phenomenon of scrub oaks,
<v Speaker 1>which are huge colonies of oaks, like you know, Sayqurkus
<v Speaker 1>PALMERI like we just talked about, or Corcus. I've seen
<v Speaker 1>some really cool ones on sand dunes in West Texas,
<v Speaker 1>but you essentially get oaks. Corcus Vexxinifolia is another great one.
<v Speaker 1>I believe that produces actually just straight edible acorns you
<v Speaker 1>can eat. There's another northern California mountain one. But oaks
<v Speaker 1>that don't they're not trees. They don't turn into trees.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe they can, but in habitat they never get taller
<v Speaker 1>than four feet max. Some stay two or three feet.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this is a pretty widespread phenomenon, especially in
<v Speaker 1>North America.
<v Speaker 2>Right, that's right. So you got an well and if
<v Speaker 2>you can done in Mexico, you see these beautiful shrubby
<v Speaker 2>little oaks are quite prevalent. So, yeah, we often think
<v Speaker 2>of oaks as being trees. But I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>percentage of them are shrubs, but it is many. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>you probably know Quercus minima or I'm trying to think
<v Speaker 2>what these other little guys are, quirks cordifolia. These can
<v Speaker 2>be shrubs like like ankle high or cap high. And
<v Speaker 2>some of these species are chrisominous, right, some will really
<v Speaker 2>spread clonally. There's a great article by Cornelius Muller nineteen
<v Speaker 2>fifty one called the Significance of Vegetative Reproduction in Quircus.
<v Speaker 2>He just goes through the natural history of a handful
<v Speaker 2>of these things, Minima of Virginiana, Pyreneica, and Ilex in
<v Speaker 2>the Old World.
<v Speaker 1>Quircus Havardia is another cool one. Another another cool scrub
<v Speaker 1>oak from Yeah, this's from Monahans, Texas. Those cool sand
<v Speaker 1>dunes out.
<v Speaker 2>There, absolutely and Hinkley.
<v Speaker 1>I yeah, yeah, yeah, HINKLEYI Jesus Christ, I've seen that
<v Speaker 1>in habitat. That's unreal talk about a place to scene relict.
<v Speaker 1>But I guess it can get upwards at like ten
<v Speaker 1>or twelve feet tall in cultivation, you know, like Mike
<v Speaker 1>Eason is doing it San Antonio Botanic Garden. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>when you see and set, they're two or three feet tall.
<v Speaker 2>One of the species I think is really interesting is
<v Speaker 2>Quirkus prioides. So one of the most widespread eastern North
<v Speaker 2>American species, Quircus neil and burget. It's called chinkapinoak, right,
<v Speaker 2>and you find this thing. I don't know what exactly
<v Speaker 2>its range is, but it's like, you know, we find
<v Speaker 2>it in northern Illinois, maybe it's even in southern Wisconsin
<v Speaker 2>down throughout almost all of eastern North America as a
<v Speaker 2>tree growing on limestone or and calcarious soils. But then
<v Speaker 2>its close relative is Quirkus prides, which is a shrub oak,
<v Speaker 2>and is it grows as a shrub. Typically it grows
<v Speaker 2>in sand soils, so not on limestone. It's distinguishable when
<v Speaker 2>it's when it's sort of ideal, but there's like intermediates,
<v Speaker 2>And it's unclear to me whether these things are you know,
<v Speaker 2>two separate species, whether or not Prides actually something that
<v Speaker 2>has arisen from ULMBERGII multiple times. The genomic data are
<v Speaker 2>a little ambiguous, but we don't have a lot of
<v Speaker 2>sampling on it. But yeah, I mean Priorities is the
<v Speaker 2>one that is definitely like it's definitely a shrub. LAMBERGIAI
<v Speaker 2>is definitely a tree.
<v Speaker 1>So why do these Why does some turn into trees
<v Speaker 1>and some I mean not with just with this, but
<v Speaker 1>with like a lot of especially in the West, a
<v Speaker 1>lot of Quarkers species just stay low. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>guess there's is there something I mean for most of them,
<v Speaker 1>they will stay low in cultivation too, right, Like that's
<v Speaker 1>not like Kinkley where they'll get get turned into trees.
<v Speaker 1>Like Quirkas Veccinifolia is always whether it's growing in a
<v Speaker 1>garden setting or in the Klamath Mountains, is always going
<v Speaker 1>to be a small three four foot tall shrug.
<v Speaker 2>Right, Yeah, well, I guess it's an. I guess it's an.
<v Speaker 2>There's a certain like you find this too with quirks
<v Speaker 2>a Lisipolia bear oak growing underneath like Quirkers Maryland because
<v Speaker 2>of black jack oak, the black jack oak being the
<v Speaker 2>tree solisifolia, the barre oak being the shrub and they've
<v Speaker 2>each found a place in their habitat where they can
<v Speaker 2>where they can survive. So I guess some of it
<v Speaker 2>is niche differentiation. But then some of it too, is
<v Speaker 2>that there's going to be selection in open environments for
<v Speaker 2>a shrubby or habitat, I would think, but again I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, I've never really Yeah, I.
<v Speaker 1>Guess that makes sense. Yeah, there's going to be selection
<v Speaker 1>if it's really dry. Eventually, any individuals that get too
<v Speaker 1>tall or will continue growing, I mean they just kind
<v Speaker 1>of fall out because you don't Yeah, it's not a
<v Speaker 1>beneficial Yeah. Yeah, it's costly and there's no benefit to
<v Speaker 1>getting that big in a desert where the hot, dry
<v Speaker 1>winds will just you know, take you apart. I want
<v Speaker 1>to talk about plasticity and leaves because for identification purposes,
<v Speaker 1>some of these are not easy, right, I mean, they
<v Speaker 1>can be really tricky, and I'm sure for a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people listening if they're out there trying to figure
<v Speaker 1>out what the hell oak they're looking at, and they're
<v Speaker 1>just looking at leaves, and it's not the flowering timing
<v Speaker 1>or whatever. I mean, flowers aren't even really helpful in
<v Speaker 1>a lot of oaks, I assume because they're so reduced
<v Speaker 1>and simplified, like so many wind pollinated flowers. But leaf
<v Speaker 1>plasticity is a real thing. I mean you can have
<v Speaker 1>three different kinds of leaves on the same individual tree.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean, plasticity is really tricky. So when you're
<v Speaker 2>it's it's like with aquatic plants, Like when you look
<v Speaker 2>at aquatic plants too, super highly plastic. So when you're
<v Speaker 2>studying a tree in the field, you really want to
<v Speaker 2>study the leaves on all sides of the tree. You
<v Speaker 2>go from the edge of the canopy to the inside
<v Speaker 2>of the canopy, you will see the leaves change. If
<v Speaker 2>that tree is cut down and sprouts from the stump,
<v Speaker 2>you can get large, sort of amorphous looking leaves. So
<v Speaker 2>what's governing plasticity, what's governing those leaf shapes. A lot
<v Speaker 2>of it has to do with light environments, a lot
<v Speaker 2>of it has to do with moisture, It has to
<v Speaker 2>do with responses to insects. So all these things can
<v Speaker 2>shaped and shape the leaf in ways that can be
<v Speaker 2>that can make identification difficult. So it's really important if
<v Speaker 2>you're learning the trees and stutting a tree to really
<v Speaker 2>collect from a number of leaves and then look at
<v Speaker 2>the whole population. Ask yourself, is this tree typical of
<v Speaker 2>the population or is it just just an outlier because
<v Speaker 2>it's growing in an odd area.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I think knowing that too is really helpful. Knowing
<v Speaker 1>that with oaks, there's a lot of plasticity. You're gonna
<v Speaker 1>have shade leaves, You're gonna have light you know, light
<v Speaker 1>leaves that get more lights, you know, sun leaves. You're
<v Speaker 1>gonna have juvenile leaves and adult leaves. There's a difference
<v Speaker 1>in those, you know, I think it was a quirksagafolio
<v Speaker 1>for instance. Well have really spiny young leaves which you
<v Speaker 1>just wouldn't want to you know, they discourage your vivery obviously,
<v Speaker 1>and then once they get more that, once they get
<v Speaker 1>higher and more in the sun, they kind of round
<v Speaker 1>out a little bit, or they can I think, I
<v Speaker 1>guess looking at at the underside versus the top of
<v Speaker 1>the leaf, to the texture, is it covered in indumentum,
<v Speaker 1>that kind of thing is probably important too.
<v Speaker 2>It is, and it can be very very helpful. That
<v Speaker 2>can be plastic as well, So some traits are less
<v Speaker 2>plastic than others. But then but the outline is probably
<v Speaker 2>the most plastic traits. So for instance, I when I'm
<v Speaker 2>looking at queer because the lutina versus ellipsoidalys around here.
<v Speaker 2>Usually you can tell from the leaves alone, and I'd
<v Speaker 2>say like eighty ninety percent of the time, but there
<v Speaker 2>are cases where I really want the end buds and
<v Speaker 2>the acorns to be confident or look at the whole tree,
<v Speaker 2>because you get you get clues from the bark, you
<v Speaker 2>clues from the habitat. But yeah, that that plasticity is
<v Speaker 2>super important though, because plasticity is part of what allows
<v Speaker 2>trees to survive. They have to. Trees are stuck, they're
<v Speaker 2>rooted in place. They like think of our quirkess PALMERI
<v Speaker 2>like thirteen thousand years. It's been living there, as ice receded,
<v Speaker 2>as the floor changed around it, as housing developed, developments
<v Speaker 2>started to grow up in the hills around it. So
<v Speaker 2>this is a this is a plant that's had to
<v Speaker 2>put up with a lot, and if it weren't plastic,
<v Speaker 2>it would have gone down. It can't go inside when
<v Speaker 2>situations are nasty, it can't put on a rain coat.
<v Speaker 2>It can't grab a water bottle. It's got to deal
<v Speaker 2>with everything. And roots deal with this as well. The
<v Speaker 2>root in the below ground environment is really heterogeneous. So
<v Speaker 2>roots modify their growing habits, modify their anatomy as they
<v Speaker 2>get into different areas of soil. So, yeah, that plasticity
<v Speaker 2>is one of the one of the tree superpowers, and
<v Speaker 2>oaks are super good.
<v Speaker 1>It's an adaptive trait, definitely. It's a beneficial trait in
<v Speaker 1>terms of dealing with environmental stresses for sure. Yeah, that's right.
<v Speaker 1>Do you're talking about roots, I mean all oaks are
<v Speaker 1>Michael ryzel. I suppose there's none that associate with that
<v Speaker 1>ectinomyce bacteria Frankia is there because I know other members
<v Speaker 1>of the gaies there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, no, No, I believe they're all all just modified microhyzel.
<v Speaker 1>Ectomycro hyzol okay cool, And that of course is a
<v Speaker 1>huge I mean being able to do that as a
<v Speaker 1>huge benefit to none actually carry I mean the micro
<v Speaker 1>hysil is just already in the soil. None actually carry
<v Speaker 1>it with them in their acorn in any form.
<v Speaker 2>Huh No, not to my knowledge. I mean you do
<v Speaker 2>find so when an acorn falls it falls with fungi
<v Speaker 2>and fungi within it. So like then an acorn that's
<v Speaker 2>developing will will sort of collect fungi from the leads
<v Speaker 2>around it. There may be some vertical transmission from the
<v Speaker 2>mob this I don't know for sure. I feel like
<v Speaker 2>I read something. Jenna Urin has done real really cool
<v Speaker 2>work on the on the endophitic fungi, this fungi that
<v Speaker 2>live inside plants, and she did.
<v Speaker 3>An article on this one time.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, so they pull, so they so they gathered
<v Speaker 2>these fungi, and those fungi may help then may help
<v Speaker 2>the acorn sort of fend off other fungi because then
<v Speaker 2>when it drops to the ground, it's surrounded by a
<v Speaker 2>whole new colony, a whole new community of fungi that
<v Speaker 2>are living in the leaf litter, that are living in
<v Speaker 2>the soil. And some of these are going to be
<v Speaker 2>path pathogenic, right, They're going to harm the harm the acorn.
<v Speaker 2>And having a robust community of and the phittic fungi
<v Speaker 2>might be one way of fending those off.
<v Speaker 1>Right, I mean, just associating with micael rhizal fungi in
<v Speaker 1>the soil especially, I mean, they're they have an interest too,
<v Speaker 1>like they have an interest in their own self interest
<v Speaker 1>in keeping the tree alive and preventing it from getting sick. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, protecting from other pathogenic fungi as well. I
<v Speaker 1>mean it's one.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's really great work being done by Luke McCormick
<v Speaker 2>and by Peter Kennedy looking at the microizal fungal associates
<v Speaker 2>at looking at the phenology the timing of those of
<v Speaker 2>those microies of fungi growing, looking at the community structure
<v Speaker 2>sort of which fungi are associating with which trees. But
<v Speaker 2>no matter how you slice it, those microyes of fungi
<v Speaker 2>are astutely essential to the to the to the success
<v Speaker 2>of the tree because they go foraging for nutrients and
<v Speaker 2>gain from the tree carbon in response.
<v Speaker 1>Is yeah, the swapping of ohk so really, I mean
<v Speaker 1>this is a keystone genus. I mean, this is a
<v Speaker 1>keystone plant and basically every every plant community they grow on,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they they feed a number of things, they
<v Speaker 1>hold soil together, they harbor very beneficial fungi that are
<v Speaker 1>that probably benefit a number of other trees in the
<v Speaker 1>forest or scrubland that they're growing as well, especially if
<v Speaker 1>you've got dwarf oaks growing on sand dunes like Corcasovardia.
<v Speaker 1>You're holding, you're stabilizing dune communities for other plants. What
<v Speaker 1>is do you know much about the There's a large
<v Speaker 1>number of caterpillars, moth caterpillars that use oaks as a
<v Speaker 1>host plant, and then of course those caterpillars later feedbirds,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. I perform a number of multitude of other
<v Speaker 1>ecological services. Is that there's a I mean, what's up
<v Speaker 1>with that? There's a there's a huge that's a huge
<v Speaker 1>environmental niche for caterpillars that feed on oak leaves and
<v Speaker 1>other things.
<v Speaker 2>Did right, So there's a few things going on that
<v Speaker 2>I'm aware of, and there's this literature is much larger
<v Speaker 2>than I'm than I know of. But we do know
<v Speaker 2>that oaks harbor a disproportionate diversity of a number of caterpillars,
<v Speaker 2>and that may have to do with sheer biomass. Might
<v Speaker 2>be one reason when you look in North America and Mexico,
<v Speaker 2>oaks have the most biomass, the most stuff being produced
<v Speaker 2>of any of any tree genus. It might be partly
<v Speaker 2>because of diversity. They offer a lot of chemical diversity
<v Speaker 2>to caterpillars. And so we know, for instance, work that
<v Speaker 2>Ian Pierce has been doing since two thousand and nine
<v Speaker 2>and maybe even earlier has demonstrated that insects tend to
<v Speaker 2>be the chewing insects tend to specialize on one clade
<v Speaker 2>or another of oaks, so that tend to be red
<v Speaker 2>oak clade specialists, that tend to be white oakclade specialists,
<v Speaker 2>so that diversity of tree species and lineages may make
<v Speaker 2>oaks disproportionately important to the insects.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know there was a whole that I didn't
<v Speaker 1>know there was a whole fido chemistry here that was
<v Speaker 1>really important to some of these.
<v Speaker 2>There's a whole thing going on. And there's a great
<v Speaker 2>trio of articles that Ian Pierce did in two thousand
<v Speaker 2>and nine preceded the National Academy of Sciences twenty twelve
<v Speaker 2>Evolution on the twenty fourteen paper, and preceeds the royal
<v Speaker 2>piano goal to a royal Oh my bloodherds didn't just
<v Speaker 2>be too anyway. These demonstrate that they look at the
<v Speaker 2>at the leaf chemistry, and they demonstrate that the leaf
<v Speaker 2>chemistry matters to the insects. But the evolutionary history seems
<v Speaker 2>to even predict more of the leaf or bivery than
<v Speaker 2>than the leaf chemicals themselves. So then so the insects
<v Speaker 2>seem to be queuing in on this diversity. Now it's
<v Speaker 2>not like they're doing malecosystematics. It's not like they're reading
<v Speaker 2>the tree of life directly. So they must be queuing
<v Speaker 2>in on the traits of the trees. But they are
<v Speaker 2>traits that are that probably we haven't measured it yet.
<v Speaker 1>Or traits that are restricted to certain clades.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly, trades that are restricted to certain clades and that
<v Speaker 2>we may not have measured yet.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, God, that's yeah, that's so cool. This is is
<v Speaker 1>such wild stuff to think about. And then there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of galls too, because I could California and Mexico
<v Speaker 1>even here because Corcus Virginiana gets planted a lot on
<v Speaker 1>here in South Texas in front of all these suburban
<v Speaker 1>homes they build, which is crazy because Fuciformists is the
<v Speaker 1>native one. It's more drought talent anyway. But but the
<v Speaker 1>we get all these leaf galls in them, these little beads,
<v Speaker 1>they look like little hardened marbles. Some of these galls
<v Speaker 1>can be the size of baseballs in some species like
<v Speaker 1>Carcus garyana out west in California.
<v Speaker 2>What's doing that super diversity? So the lions share these
<v Speaker 2>galls and there's I want to say there's there's hundreds
<v Speaker 2>of them. There's certainly over one hundred of them are
<v Speaker 2>produced by a clade of wasps called the signipid wasps
<v Speaker 2>and the snipid wasps I believe number about nine hundred
<v Speaker 2>species worldwide. These are mostly oak specialists. And again great
<v Speaker 2>work on this by a look at Graham Stones work,
<v Speaker 2>really exciting work on the on the galls on Scott Egan.
<v Speaker 2>Numerous people working on these gulls. But what they do
<v Speaker 2>is the insects come along and they overposit into the tree.
<v Speaker 2>So they've got an overpositors, that little stinger at the
<v Speaker 2>back that is specially designed to get an egg into
<v Speaker 2>the into the plant tissue. So what they'll do is
<v Speaker 2>they'll overposit into the tree. When the egg gets in there,
<v Speaker 2>this little wasp bag, it stimulates the tree to express
<v Speaker 2>a certain subset of the tree zone genes. And that
<v Speaker 2>subset of the genes that are expressed by the tree
<v Speaker 2>in response to the signipid wasp bag produces the gall
<v Speaker 2>and like you're saying. The gall can look like a bullet,
<v Speaker 2>It can look like a gum drop, It can like
<v Speaker 2>a pom pod, it can look like a like a
<v Speaker 2>rubber ball, it can look like any variety of things.
<v Speaker 2>Really cool, uh, cool diversity of galls that then serves
<v Speaker 2>as a nest, a home for the for the wasp inside.
<v Speaker 2>The wasp grows inside. Some of these galls will produce
<v Speaker 2>exodates that are attracted to insects, so they will get
<v Speaker 2>pulled away by ants and taken away from the tree
<v Speaker 2>again to disperse the bays, get them into a safe
<v Speaker 2>place to grow, and some of them will grow large,
<v Speaker 2>like you were talking about, the ones that are the
<v Speaker 2>size of a ping pong ball or so cut one
<v Speaker 2>of these things open. What you'll find is that the
<v Speaker 2>wasp is embedded way away in the middle, almost like
<v Speaker 2>it's being protected, and it is being protected from parasites
<v Speaker 2>from wasps that would like to parasitize. That's a niked wasp.
<v Speaker 2>So there's a whole second set of wasps that parasitize
<v Speaker 2>the sin wasps, which are themselves parasitizing the oak trees.
<v Speaker 1>So it's wild. This is so cool.
<v Speaker 2>It's a really cool sort of story that you ask
<v Speaker 2>about like our oaks, keystone or foundational species. We think
<v Speaker 2>of them often as more more foundational species. They totally are.
<v Speaker 2>You get an ecosystem within an ecosystem, right within the acorn.
<v Speaker 2>Within a single acorn, you get a fungal community, You
<v Speaker 2>get weavils and moths that live on that that devour
<v Speaker 2>the acorn. They will leave, and then sometimes there's a
<v Speaker 2>group of ants that will move in after the weavels
<v Speaker 2>have left it, or move in right alongside the weavels.
<v Speaker 2>They'll they'll modify the acorn so that they have a
<v Speaker 2>better place to live, the pack than pack the hole
<v Speaker 2>that they entered in tighter so that only their their
<v Speaker 2>own offspring can get in and out. Do you get
<v Speaker 2>this ecosystem within ecosystems within ecosy They're so.
<v Speaker 1>Really, they're such important trees. It's I mean a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people might assume, well, no one really, I say
<v Speaker 1>a lot of people, I mean plant people. No one
<v Speaker 1>really thinks about this stuff in general, are too obsessed
<v Speaker 1>with trying to impress each other with meaningful material or
<v Speaker 1>meaningless material goods. Excuse me, but it's my cynical take.
<v Speaker 1>But a lot of people would think, Okay, when pollinated plant,
<v Speaker 1>it's not gonna there's not going to be much benefit
<v Speaker 1>to pollinators. But it's okay. I mean, they make up
<v Speaker 1>for that in the multitude of ecological services they provide,
<v Speaker 1>I mean tenfold. They're so massively important.
<v Speaker 2>If you want to be inspired about this stuff. Actually,
<v Speaker 2>Doug Tellamy's book The Nature of Oaks, he really documents
<v Speaker 2>a lot of these fascinating natural history stories and they're
<v Speaker 2>really they really they're exciting. It's exciting. The more you
<v Speaker 2>drilled into anything in the world, right, you find that
<v Speaker 2>it's more and more interesting. There's more to find. But
<v Speaker 2>that's certainly the case with.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he's a big booster for oaks. So is my
<v Speaker 1>friend Andrew, Andrew the arborist. Yeah, big, big, Okay, they're
<v Speaker 1>so cool. I mean, the thing that blows my mind
<v Speaker 1>whenever I go to Mexico is the amount of diversity
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico. It's insane. And you'll see oaks growing with
<v Speaker 1>cacti like where you know, the kind of the lowlands
<v Speaker 1>start to merge with the high you know, at the
<v Speaker 1>right elevation and the right uh you know ecotone. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>but why is there so much diversity in Mexico? Like,
<v Speaker 1>why there's so many different oak species.
<v Speaker 2>I'm so glad you asked that i'd like to I
<v Speaker 2>need to leave in about ten minutes if you don't mind,
<v Speaker 2>Can we end with with Mexico oak diversity.
<v Speaker 1>That sounds good. I'm gonna get you again though here
<v Speaker 1>just so you know.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, that I would love to. Okay, Okay, So the
<v Speaker 2>Mexican So this is a really exciting story that came
<v Speaker 2>out that I didn't understand when we started working on oaks.
<v Speaker 2>I had no idea sort of what the order of
<v Speaker 2>diversification was. It turns out that so oaks arise in
<v Speaker 2>the Arctic, they move south ranchly over the course of
<v Speaker 2>tens of millions of years from the early Eascene climatic
<v Speaker 2>optimum temperatures are cooling, cooling, cooling. They really spread out
<v Speaker 2>in the Americas, in Europe and East Asia and India
<v Speaker 2>Oligosine you find all these lobes leaves showing up as
<v Speaker 2>the temperatures drop precipitously, maybe twenty three million years ago.
<v Speaker 2>Oaks get into Mexico twice, once in the white oak
<v Speaker 2>clade section Quercus, once in the red oak clade Quercus
<v Speaker 2>lobody and they do it about the same time as
<v Speaker 2>temperatures are really drying and warming in the Miocene, they
<v Speaker 2>sorry drying and cooling in the Biocene. They move on
<v Speaker 2>down into Mexico, and it appears that in both groups
<v Speaker 2>they move into the eastern Mexican mountains by way of
<v Speaker 2>Texas right, so they move into the Sierra Madre Oriental,
<v Speaker 2>they go down, they diversify in the trans Mexican volcanic belt,
<v Speaker 2>send a little shoot down into southern Mexico, Central America,
<v Speaker 2>and then they both moved back up the Sierra Madre
<v Speaker 2>occidenttel the mountains on the western side and send a
<v Speaker 2>few species up into Arizona, New Mexico and one even
<v Speaker 2>over into California.
<v Speaker 1>This path, this is sorry, which is all.
<v Speaker 2>The way we're tracing. This is a wonderful, exciting integration
<v Speaker 2>of field biology, natural history, and genomics. So we're able
<v Speaker 2>to do this by going down working really working with
<v Speaker 2>wonderful collaborators in Morelia, in Puebla, in Drongo in Tamilipis
<v Speaker 2>to go do collections and then generate genome scale data.
<v Speaker 2>So little slivers of DNA scattered across the twelve you know,
<v Speaker 2>chromosomes of the oak genome, the roughly eighty million base
<v Speaker 2>pairs of the oak genome, and getting little snippets of DNA,
<v Speaker 2>and each one of those snippets tells us a little
<v Speaker 2>story about the origin of a clade, about the differentiation
<v Speaker 2>of a species, about the connection of that species to
<v Speaker 2>its ecology. So by putting all these together, all these
<v Speaker 2>data together, this is how we get this story.
<v Speaker 1>So just really good molecular work mixed with field biology.
<v Speaker 1>Are you corroborating it with fossils at all? Are there
<v Speaker 1>many fossils.
<v Speaker 2>Are now really bad? So I mentioned Thomas Dank near
<v Speaker 2>the beginning of his talk. Thomas Dank and his colleague
<v Speaker 2>Guido Grim and there are another colleague of theirs, Johannes Bouchal.
<v Speaker 2>They've been wonderful collaborators, Marco Simoni as well from Italy.
<v Speaker 2>They've been great and helping us connect the fossils to
<v Speaker 2>the genomic data. And it's it's tricky because many of
<v Speaker 2>these fossils. Thomas is brilliant at looking at fossil pollen,
<v Speaker 2>extracting from its characters that help us say what clay
<v Speaker 2>does issconnect to? And that's so important because a lot
<v Speaker 2>of the fossils that we have are pollen. I almost
<v Speaker 2>said merely pollen. They're pollen, And I hate to say
<v Speaker 2>merely pollen because it's so so important. It is merely
<v Speaker 2>pollen in the sense that it's so hard to find characteristics.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you think how difficult it is to identify
<v Speaker 2>an oak from its leaves. Imagine how difficult it is
<v Speaker 2>to identify the oak from its pollen. God, but I
<v Speaker 2>tell you it's well beyond me.
<v Speaker 1>You think about it. For a wind pollinated plant, though,
<v Speaker 1>that's going to be probably a very abundant fossil compared
<v Speaker 1>to say leaves or something, because they're just blowing it
<v Speaker 1>out there bingo.
<v Speaker 2>Our oldest oak fossil is a is a set of
<v Speaker 2>pollen grains known from Austria. It's along a little path
<v Speaker 2>running past Saint Pancrat's Church that was deposited fortuitously fifty
<v Speaker 2>six million years ago during this one hot hot period
<v Speaker 2>at the boundary between the Paleocene and the u Scene
<v Speaker 2>where temperatures spiked.
<v Speaker 1>I know about that.
<v Speaker 2>The PTM is do you know, it's like this one
<v Speaker 2>hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand year period and
<v Speaker 2>these pollen grains are found in that period, so we
<v Speaker 2>know to like within two hundred thousand years when these
<v Speaker 2>oaks grew. Now, those the first oaks in the world. No,
<v Speaker 2>they can't be, because there must have they must have
<v Speaker 2>had parents. But they're they're the oldest oaks we know.
<v Speaker 2>And you know what's just to connect this back to
<v Speaker 2>what's going on right now. The oaks are born during
<v Speaker 2>the p ETM, when temperatures rose like as fast as
<v Speaker 2>we've ever seen. If you look at the temperature as
<v Speaker 2>I know you have the temperature curve for that period,
<v Speaker 2>the PETM looks like a post driven into a hillside.
<v Speaker 2>Temperatures are going up, and then in the PTM they.
<v Speaker 1>Soar and massive CO two, massive cor We're now plugging
<v Speaker 1>CO two into.
<v Speaker 2>The atmosphere at a rate that absolutely dwarfs what was
<v Speaker 2>going on.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, yeah, we're fucked, Okay, I wouldn't say that. Well,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's gonna be an evolutionarily exciting time in the
<v Speaker 1>next it's going to be a million years, in the
<v Speaker 1>next million.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we are executing in experiments that has like it's
<v Speaker 2>not like we have a natural analog. Our natural analog
<v Speaker 2>is so much less dramatic than what we're doing. So, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we're and it's not clear to me, like when you
<v Speaker 2>think about, like what's how Oak's going to respond, I
<v Speaker 2>would give oaks a better shot than humans. Oaks have
<v Speaker 2>been around for fifty six million years. Modern humans we've
<v Speaker 2>been around for about to urn.
<v Speaker 1>Oh there's such fucking beasts. Oaks are such beasts. If
<v Speaker 1>there's anything I mean before, but this podcast especially, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>they've got so many tools in their toolbag of survival.
<v Speaker 1>They're just they're they'll be fucking fine. Some might go extinct,
<v Speaker 1>but they'll also.
<v Speaker 2>That's that's right, And that's that's the punchline I was
<v Speaker 2>going to give is that despite that fact, like so
<v Speaker 2>the background rate of extinction, if you just look at
<v Speaker 2>the background rate of extinction, we should not be seeing
<v Speaker 2>oaks go extinct. Maybe maybe every ten thousand years or so,
<v Speaker 2>but like thirty percent of oaks right now are at
<v Speaker 2>risk of extinction according the IUCN.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I was going to sugget that we're doing that.
<v Speaker 2>No, it suggests we're doing something wrong. So I think
<v Speaker 2>we need to get our act together.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah we can. Yeah, Well, we're Civilization is like a
<v Speaker 1>bad alcoholic. It's not going to change its behavior till
<v Speaker 1>it hits rock bottom, you know. And we're getting and.
<v Speaker 2>It's not too late to slow the train. But we've
<v Speaker 2>got to really be thoughtful about, like what kind of
<v Speaker 2>world do we want this to look like? And what
<v Speaker 2>are we willing to give up to have the nice
<v Speaker 2>things that we we appreciate. I like being able to
<v Speaker 2>drive to work if I feel like it. I like
<v Speaker 2>reading the newspaper, you know, all the things that I
<v Speaker 2>like living in a home, you know, But.
<v Speaker 1>What if you had a street car? What if you
<v Speaker 1>could take a street car to work? Wouldn't that be nice?
<v Speaker 2>I'd be awfully I would be awfully happy.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Happy.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. We're dealing with the crisis of a value system
<v Speaker 1>that was doomed from its inception and it's finally what
<v Speaker 1>it sowed.
<v Speaker 2>So we're going to have to for the sake of
<v Speaker 2>all the things we're We're like, there's been a lot
<v Speaker 2>of extinction that has allowed oaks to to take over
<v Speaker 2>the continent, and thank heavens, but there's a difference this time,
<v Speaker 2>which is like we're driving it, so so we have
<v Speaker 2>a moral culpability that we need to get our hands
<v Speaker 2>around and really make conscious, conscientious decisions about how we
<v Speaker 2>live our lives societally and individually. And one of the
<v Speaker 2>things that that we do know is that oak ecosystems
<v Speaker 2>are highly diverse, and so we can do a lot
<v Speaker 2>to restore and promote oak ecosystems and understand the oaks,
<v Speaker 2>and it's one of the bajillion things we could do.
<v Speaker 1>So everybody should learn their local oaks and just grow
<v Speaker 1>a shit ton of them and collect acorns. You start
<v Speaker 1>start illegally planting acorns and public landscaping, vacant lots, railroad embankments, thoroughfares.
<v Speaker 2>Et cetera. I think getting involved in any kind of
<v Speaker 2>any kind of ecosystem restoration, jump jump on it because
<v Speaker 2>it's a great it's a great way to do something positive.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I would. Yeah, that's especially, but even just
<v Speaker 1>collecting acorns in your pocket. Used to do that all
<v Speaker 1>the time when I lived in California. We just collect
<v Speaker 1>a shit ton and just sow, I'm here and there.
<v Speaker 1>You know. I was like a little graffiti kid, just
<v Speaker 1>planting acorns around wherever, just like the scrub jays do
<v Speaker 1>out there. Because you get quirkisagrifol you're popping up all
<v Speaker 1>over the train yard and you know, kind of run
<v Speaker 1>down areas along fence lines where the scrub jays will
<v Speaker 1>plant them and then forget where they cash them, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>So anybody could do that. If you're listening, do that.
<v Speaker 1>Collect acorns, stash them in your pocket, just disperse them
<v Speaker 1>all around. But I'm gonna get you back. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>let you go, but I'm gonna we're gonna do a two. Okay, buddy,
<v Speaker 1>in the next life.
<v Speaker 2>Life Am I allowed to plug a book?
<v Speaker 1>Well, yes, I wanted to ask you about that too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm just going to recommend that. A lot of
<v Speaker 2>what I'm telling is covered in a new book that
<v Speaker 2>I've got coming out through University of Chicago Press. It's
<v Speaker 2>called Oak Origins From Acorns to Species in the Tree
<v Speaker 2>of Life. You can pre order it right now. It's
<v Speaker 2>going to be out in December, and it really goes
<v Speaker 2>through the story of oaks, from the acorns, from that
<v Speaker 2>whole life history thing, natural history stuff that I that's
<v Speaker 2>so exciting, through the tree of life to the genome.
<v Speaker 2>And it's written to be readable. It's written I got
<v Speaker 2>my background in this stuff, not by way of science.
<v Speaker 2>I came in by way of being a naturalist and
<v Speaker 2>teacher and enjoying being outside, and so it's really written
<v Speaker 2>for I think of myself when I was twenty five
<v Speaker 2>and I didn't know anything about evolutionary biology. So I
<v Speaker 2>think these stories that we talked about are all covered
<v Speaker 2>in that book.
<v Speaker 1>You're man, h That's what I got from this podcast.
<v Speaker 1>You're a man of the people. You're you're an educator.
<v Speaker 1>You're not you know, you're not just some elitist academic.
<v Speaker 1>You're I mean, you could fit in with those crowds,
<v Speaker 1>but you're very good at communicating teaching. I learned so
<v Speaker 1>much in this and I already knew a lot. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>this is like I didn't you know, it's you're teaching
<v Speaker 1>me a lot.
<v Speaker 2>So and Joey, it's a. It's it's super it's a
<v Speaker 2>it's a great honor to be to be asked to
<v Speaker 2>speak with you today and speak.
<v Speaker 3>With your your group. So this is thank you, thank you.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just some who wiggled my way into this little.
<v Speaker 2>Way.
<v Speaker 1>But all right, man, well I'm serious though. We're going
<v Speaker 1>to do a part two. I'll email you about it later.
<v Speaker 1>I'll get the link for your book. I'll put that
<v Speaker 1>in the description and uh we'll talk about Mexico and
<v Speaker 1>the future evokes next podcast. Thank you so much for
<v Speaker 1>coming on.
<v Speaker 2>Thank you to all right.
<v Speaker 1>You have a good day, Andrew. Everybody, I take care
<v Speaker 1>of go Buck. Somebody