Araucaria Forests of Chile

<v Speaker 1>May I have your attention. Please, the situation is dire.
<v Speaker 1>At this time services have been temporarily disabled due to
<v Speaker 1>cost cutting measures. Please remain calm and have a safe day.
<v Speaker 1>Thank you.
<v Speaker 2>I can don't.
<v Speaker 1>We landed at the UH landed at the Houston Airport
<v Speaker 1>yesterday at like six in the morning. It was like five.
<v Speaker 1>It was like five in the morning, and the whole
<v Speaker 1>airport was just waking up. And I made it through
<v Speaker 1>customs with all my shit, you know, I had to
<v Speaker 1>I had to get another I had to pay for
<v Speaker 1>an extra bag because I had a bunch of books.
<v Speaker 1>I bought a bunch of books. You know, I collect
<v Speaker 1>these book you have like a little personal library. You
<v Speaker 1>never know when you're gonna need it, especially for a
<v Speaker 1>botanical literature. You know, you might end up there's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be reference texts you might use, you know, when you
<v Speaker 1>go back to that place. Because I fully intend on
<v Speaker 1>doing this for the rest of my life, you know,
<v Speaker 1>until I run out of steam or die or uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, get some sort of terminal illness, which hopefully
<v Speaker 1>doesn't happen. Knock on, knock on. Fiberboard. I'm cheap Chinese
<v Speaker 1>made fiberboard. Uh and uh maybe with a little bit
<v Speaker 1>of melomanie. And and so I had a who I
<v Speaker 1>was carrying a bunch of bunch of shit, like my
<v Speaker 1>broken luggage too, and uh and so they just it
<v Speaker 1>just kind of spits you out into the terminal e
<v Speaker 1>of the Houston Airport. I had to make a necting flat.
<v Speaker 1>I had like six hours to catch And I've quit coffee,
<v Speaker 1>which is nice, at least for the time being. I
<v Speaker 1>just you know, Yerba mates all they have they don't
<v Speaker 1>do coffee. America is the only place that really does coffee.
<v Speaker 1>Like it's coffee per se, you know. The rest it's
<v Speaker 1>it's all like espressos. I don't like it. And I
<v Speaker 1>was knew I had to quit coffee anyways because I
<v Speaker 1>do it too much. I just overdo it. So I was,
<v Speaker 1>I was, I've been using a mate, you know, with
<v Speaker 1>a little straw, just make a glass jar. I don't
<v Speaker 1>use that stupid gord thing. That's not enough. And and
<v Speaker 1>uh and I make it the night before and cool it.
<v Speaker 1>So that's been nice. I been like, I cool the
<v Speaker 1>mate and then drink it the next day a room
<v Speaker 1>temperature or chillier with the straw. And so I got
<v Speaker 1>spit out into terminally of the Houston Airport and the
<v Speaker 1>whole you know, there wasn't very packed yet, the whole
<v Speaker 1>airport was just waking up. And there's you know, there's
<v Speaker 1>been all this shit in the news. There's been this
<v Speaker 1>ship in the news about you know, Trump's first couple
<v Speaker 1>of days, and it just it just looks bad. You know,
<v Speaker 1>what's happened and Reagan two point zero and it's going
<v Speaker 1>to be a complete assault on everything that I care about,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in terms of you know, wild lands, rampant development, deregulation,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. And it was just, you know, this like
<v Speaker 1>this feeling of darkness. And then even more funny, the
<v Speaker 1>alarm is going off in the Houston Airport the whole time.
<v Speaker 1>This is for like twenty minutes, and this this wing
<v Speaker 1>of the Houston Airport and surely you know, it was
<v Speaker 1>contracted out to some shitbag company that I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>They had an ai female voice, you know, coming out
<v Speaker 1>over the loud speaker. You could barely hear it. The
<v Speaker 1>alarm was loud, but you could barely hear the voice,
<v Speaker 1>and it just said thank you for visiting Houston Airport.
<v Speaker 1>A situation has been triggered, investigate. We are investigating this
<v Speaker 1>situation like some shit like that, like totally just like
<v Speaker 1>don't panic. We're investigating the situation. Everyone's just ignoring it.
<v Speaker 1>And the thing goes on for like twenty or thirty minutes,
<v Speaker 1>and it's you know, the airport feels like a fucking mall.
<v Speaker 1>It feels like a shopping mall. And I'm just hit
<v Speaker 1>with the stark reminder that I'm in one of the
<v Speaker 1>unhappiest First world countries in the world. Like the degree
<v Speaker 1>of human misery that's evident here and just anxiety and
<v Speaker 1>hatred and divisiveness is so it's so pungent. And then
<v Speaker 1>I look and there's you know, it's just people shuffling
<v Speaker 1>about the walking dead, very unhappy people obviously unhappier, stressed,
<v Speaker 1>you know, paying twenty dollars for a cinnabon, trying to
<v Speaker 1>satiate the spiritual pain and alienation while the fire alarm
<v Speaker 1>is intermittently blaring in this AI voice you know, comes
<v Speaker 1>with a loud speaker, you know, to offer this half
<v Speaker 1>assed reassurance and that the situation is being investigated. And
<v Speaker 1>the whole time, I'm thinking, like Jesus Christ, you were
<v Speaker 1>just hanging out with Gad like two days prior. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's as far as you can conceive him or
<v Speaker 1>her or they done, whatever the fuck it is it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I like looking at these beautiful mountains, these
<v Speaker 1>steep slopes of volcanic rock and uh, maybe some intrusive
<v Speaker 1>ignius as well, but the Andes, of course are all
<v Speaker 1>volcanic and uh, you know, these mountains that are just
<v Speaker 1>making their way to the sea, slowly coming down, you know,
<v Speaker 1>against all all the best efforts to maintain the roadway.
<v Speaker 1>But you'd you'd be driving down the road and you'd
<v Speaker 1>see a spot where like the guardrail had been completely
<v Speaker 1>taken out by a giant boulder. There's rock falls everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>They had that large cable netting that just looked like
<v Speaker 1>a sagging bag, you know, like because it was so
<v Speaker 1>filled with rock, talus and rubble. You know, the pielines
<v Speaker 1>that hold it had been drilled into the side of
<v Speaker 1>a mountain, but this sagging bag was just holding this
<v Speaker 1>this It almost looked like liquid, you know, because there
<v Speaker 1>was so much talus and some of the incredible plants there,
<v Speaker 1>like these lineages, you know, and you go high into
<v Speaker 1>the andes you can reach places where there's none of
<v Speaker 1>the pine plantations or the eucalyptus plantations that you know,
<v Speaker 1>horrifically dot so much of Chile south of Santiago. And
<v Speaker 1>I was like, this is so you know, it's just
<v Speaker 1>so fucking mind blowing, like to be hanging out with
<v Speaker 1>like these giant alersee trees, the few that are left
<v Speaker 1>in the Patagonian temperate rainforest, and now you're in the
<v Speaker 1>Houston Airport in this monstrosity, this fucking dystopia. Uh, the
<v Speaker 1>whole situation felt so unreal. I couldn't I couldn't help
<v Speaker 1>but laugh at it. You got, you're gonna have to
<v Speaker 1>have a sense of humor going through all this shit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, less pearl clutching and more sense of dark comedy.
<v Speaker 1>And then I started listening. I put on Dead Kennedy's
<v Speaker 1>The Frankin Christ album because it just was so fitting.
<v Speaker 1>There was a forgueret which song it was, but it's
<v Speaker 1>the one about but you know, Elvis becoming worshiped as
<v Speaker 1>a god and people drinking out of these you know,
<v Speaker 1>plastic Elvis toats. It's like this satirical song about this
<v Speaker 1>dark and dystopic nature of like first world consumerism. It
<v Speaker 1>was fucking hilarious. It was just and it made it that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, hearing that that kind of that's such a
<v Speaker 1>great album to Franken Christ the one with the guys
<v Speaker 1>with the fees's driving around in the little mini cards
<v Speaker 1>with the Feza I think the Shriners on the cover,
<v Speaker 1>the one that got them in trouble with Tipper Gore
<v Speaker 1>for the obscene hr Giger painting that came with the record.
<v Speaker 1>In the eighties, it was like a big deal, like
<v Speaker 1>jellab Afron, you know, and Iced Tea were both remember
<v Speaker 1>they had him on Oprah. You could I think you
<v Speaker 1>can watch the video, like a grainy video of it
<v Speaker 1>on YouTube. But that's what got them in trouble with
<v Speaker 1>the Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC, the Tipper Gore
<v Speaker 1>and all the pro censorship of the late eighties early nineties.
<v Speaker 1>But the whole fucking album is just the gem. It's amazing.
<v Speaker 1>It was. It's too smart for being punk rock, which
<v Speaker 1>is what it is. I wouldn't even call it that.
<v Speaker 1>It's like it's like theatrical. It's like a dystopic musical
<v Speaker 1>theater almost. The lyrics are just yeah, they're their way,
<v Speaker 1>they'd fly over the heads of of most you know,
<v Speaker 1>people that might have gotten into the dead Kennedy's in
<v Speaker 1>the early part of their musical career anyway. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>So I just got back from Chile and I've got
<v Speaker 1>a whole bunch of shit to go through, videos to edit,
<v Speaker 1>rbarium specimens to catalog and of course, remember anytime you're traveling,
<v Speaker 1>as long as the herbarium collections are not of endangered
<v Speaker 1>plants and they're adequately dried and pressed and you can't
<v Speaker 1>be they can't be propagated. They're completely legal, uh, to
<v Speaker 1>take with you as long as you declare them. But
<v Speaker 1>you've got to get You've got to declare them, and
<v Speaker 1>then you've got to be ready to explain to a
<v Speaker 1>customs official, many of whom no offense to them are
<v Speaker 1>not that smart and if probably no idea what inarbarium
<v Speaker 1>is or why you would be pressing these things any
<v Speaker 1>you've got to be able to explain to them where
<v Speaker 1>they're going and they're going to be cataloged and you
<v Speaker 1>know their scientific specimens. They can't be propagated, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>So I've got a bunch of stuff to do, and
<v Speaker 1>then I'm head of the Ecuador in a week getting
<v Speaker 1>flown down there for some sort of it's a tour.
<v Speaker 1>It's a tour that that Alan Rockefeller and Mandy Cork
<v Speaker 1>put together for Mycena, which is like their tour thing.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. They want to drag me along, so
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, you know, I don't know what. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what's about. I just said, yes, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>for work. I'm going down there. But there's so much
<v Speaker 1>to talk about with with Chile and with basically you know.
<v Speaker 1>We landed in Santiago and then drove straight straight towards
<v Speaker 1>Valdivia and Porto mont which are in the southern half
<v Speaker 1>of the country, very high rainfall, upwards of six to
<v Speaker 1>nine feet of rain a year, if not more. Some
<v Speaker 1>areas of that Patagonian temperate rainforest get upwards of twenty
<v Speaker 1>feet of rainy year. These are very wet areas, and
<v Speaker 1>we were going down there because it was We went
<v Speaker 1>down there first just blazing by all this other shit
<v Speaker 1>because it was as hard as it was, because it
<v Speaker 1>was supposed to start raining there in a few days.
<v Speaker 1>This is like peak Chilean summer. It's mid January. Start
<v Speaker 1>ran in there in a few days, and so we
<v Speaker 1>figured we'd catched a few days of sunlight and then
<v Speaker 1>head back north and that that actually, that was a
<v Speaker 1>very good idea. I'm glad we did that. So we
<v Speaker 1>just just fucking blaze as far south as possible because
<v Speaker 1>closer to Santiago. Santiago, of course, being the first major city,
<v Speaker 1>the first major area to be settled in Chile, got
<v Speaker 1>destroyed very quickly. All the beautiful Chilean wine palms, Jubeat chilensis.
<v Speaker 1>That's what the Nacho was telling me that there was
<v Speaker 1>he I guess he found out old map from sixteen
<v Speaker 1>hundred when the Spanish first got there, and the map
<v Speaker 1>shows this drawing. You know, it's like a look like
<v Speaker 1>a like the it looks like the first Zelda game
<v Speaker 1>from the eighties. It's drawn like that, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>the map from the fucking uh yeah, everybody played Nintendo,
<v Speaker 1>didn't you? Maybe not? Now? Would you? Would your parents
<v Speaker 1>give you a slinky fucking glue to sniff? I don't
<v Speaker 1>know anyway, So it was a drawing that looked like
<v Speaker 1>that and showed these huge Jubeia chilensis Chilean wine palms there,
<v Speaker 1>which is our fucking enigmatic, uh, emblematic excuse me, emblematic
<v Speaker 1>trees of the region. They're gorgeous. They got a couple
<v Speaker 1>of uc b that's the first time I saw it.
<v Speaker 1>You see Botanic Gardens in Berkeley. They have a great
<v Speaker 1>Chilean collection. Actually a bunch of these plants. You'll you know,
<v Speaker 1>you'll know already if you go there. Kuilaja Sapan area,
<v Speaker 1>which is like the equivalent of the coast live oak.
<v Speaker 1>It's in the order for Bailey's. It's in the family
<v Speaker 1>Kila Hasey produces these beautiful fruits, these five carpoled fruits
<v Speaker 1>that have a bunch of tiny winged seeds inside. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, Santiago area was destroyed first to build
<v Speaker 1>a city. I guess there's a burgeoning native plant awareness there,
<v Speaker 1>which is cool. Met up with my friend Michel, who
<v Speaker 1>does Outlast Nativa, which is a cool He's got an
<v Speaker 1>Instagram page. He makes these guides for native plants there.
<v Speaker 1>And the last day I went to UH on Michel's suggestion,
<v Speaker 1>actually went to UH Libro Verde, which is a cool
<v Speaker 1>little bookstore, and and then there was another bookstore too.
<v Speaker 1>There's actually a bunch of shit in Libro Verde had
<v Speaker 1>a whole bunch of fucking books, great books, like more
<v Speaker 1>so than I saw in Brazil. Like Brazil, it seems,
<v Speaker 1>and I talked about this in the podcast with Nico
<v Speaker 1>very Brazil seems behind Chile in terms of the amount
<v Speaker 1>of popular consciousness that makes room for plants. You know
<v Speaker 1>that for native plants, you know, it's still stuck on it,
<v Speaker 1>like horticultural atrocity ship. The way that that all First
<v Speaker 1>World countries are kind of viewing plants for the first
<v Speaker 1>for the last you know, one hundred years, is like
<v Speaker 1>this this archaic uh, you know, ideas of beauty or crops,
<v Speaker 1>you know, anthropocentric uses that are totally disconnected from ecology
<v Speaker 1>evolution in place, right, like the fucking the European garden style.
<v Speaker 1>Everywhere I go in the world that ship, the same
<v Speaker 1>shit gets planted, the same garbage. But but Chile there's
<v Speaker 1>like a growing awareness for these native plants. And you
<v Speaker 1>see it in other places too, like New Zealand, where
<v Speaker 1>they've got you know, native plants of a place in
<v Speaker 1>the popular culture. There's art about them, and they're on
<v Speaker 1>the currency maybe whatever the fuck. So uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you want to spend too much time in Santiago. The
<v Speaker 1>thing that was nice about Santiago and we did. I
<v Speaker 1>filmed some you know in vas. I think one of
<v Speaker 1>my little you know, urban botany exploration things like I
<v Speaker 1>did on the train tracks in Oakland. The fucking La
<v Speaker 1>River wherever I did that. The last last day, me,
<v Speaker 1>Matt and Nacho went down into the river. You can
<v Speaker 1>climb down into the Mapocho River, and which is like
<v Speaker 1>the equivalent to the La River, but there's more water
<v Speaker 1>in it, and it's fed by glaciers and ice and
<v Speaker 1>snowmelt and a much higher mountain range that is right
<v Speaker 1>outside the city, you know, the Andes. And that river
<v Speaker 1>was flowing and it was filled with pink silt and
<v Speaker 1>pink sediment. I mean, it just looked like it was
<v Speaker 1>filled with volcanic sentment. Then looked like it was filled
<v Speaker 1>with human shit, which was nice, but it was certainly
<v Speaker 1>cluttered with It's a concreted up, you know river that
<v Speaker 1>runs through downtown Santiago, and there's graffiti all over the walls,
<v Speaker 1>and it's really nice. It's like, if you're a teenager,
<v Speaker 1>that's a great spot to hang out. Also if you're
<v Speaker 1>a bummy, that's a great spot to hang out. Some
<v Speaker 1>guy came out. He was living in a little shack
<v Speaker 1>and when we were climbing out of it, via this
<v Speaker 1>this sketchy pair of pants that's some like pair of
<v Speaker 1>jeans that someone had made a makeshift rope out of
<v Speaker 1>and dangled from the from the metal railing. As we
<v Speaker 1>were claiming out, this bummy came out and he was
<v Speaker 1>like holding a shank like a screwdriver. But he wasn't
<v Speaker 1>threatening at all. I think he just you know, know,
<v Speaker 1>he was just protecting himself. But certainly, you know, it
<v Speaker 1>was it gets a little weird there. You know, there's
<v Speaker 1>a fuck fucking decent amount of homelessness there too, nothing
<v Speaker 1>like the United States, but there's certainly, you know, people
<v Speaker 1>sleeping on the streets, human shit, et cetera. Just the
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's the kind of you know, inequality and uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, people falling through the nets you'd expect in
<v Speaker 1>any first world capitalist city. But the thing that was
<v Speaker 1>nice about Chile, all of Chile, was there were no billboards.
<v Speaker 1>Supposedly they're legal, but I didn't see any. And you
<v Speaker 1>don't realize how nice it feels, you know, until you
<v Speaker 1>haven't seen you know, shit eating grins of personal injury
<v Speaker 1>attorneys or stock photos of you know, the stock photos
<v Speaker 1>of smiling assholes that's used in selling consumer products, and
<v Speaker 1>all the garbage, the fucking bright colors, the the plastic signs,
<v Speaker 1>like there was none of that. There's no billboards in Chile.
<v Speaker 1>The billboards add such a dystopic effect. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what it is.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>It's like you go to Monterrey, Mexico, the billboards are
<v Speaker 1>fucking terrible, like horrible, and it's like all these like glitzy, pasty,
<v Speaker 1>too much makeup, smiling shit eating faces. It just feels
<v Speaker 1>like every nineteen eighties dystopic sci fi movie, like Total
<v Speaker 1>Recall and fucking Blade Runner, all this bleak shit. It's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so you feel like those those kinds of movies. Whoever
<v Speaker 1>did the set design for those you got to give
<v Speaker 1>a shadow because they really nailed it. What it's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be like, you know, the most bottom of the brain stem,
<v Speaker 1>primal ape hoarding, greedy, materialistic impulses will be first in
<v Speaker 1>front and center, first and foremost in the coming dystopia,
<v Speaker 1>especially now that we're going through with Reagan two point zero.
<v Speaker 1>It's you know, it's it's so fucking funny how this happened.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's extremely dark too, but it's uh again.
<v Speaker 1>I can't help but partially blame the American left, the
<v Speaker 1>identitarians for what happened, you know, the academic left, the not,
<v Speaker 1>the not, the the work actual working class left, if
<v Speaker 1>there even is one anymore. It feels like the working
<v Speaker 1>class has mostly been captured by the right. This all
<v Speaker 1>I say about political shit. I'm not gonna I'm not
<v Speaker 1>gonna delve deeper. I know it's fucking irrelevant, and I
<v Speaker 1>know there's not many, but there might be a handful
<v Speaker 1>of conservative listeners. I don't want to piss them off
<v Speaker 1>too much, because at the end of the day, I
<v Speaker 1>don't give a fuck with someone believes or what they're
<v Speaker 1>what they're you know, they're with their m always as
<v Speaker 1>long as I don't have to hear about it, and
<v Speaker 1>we can agree to disagree and just focus on plants
<v Speaker 1>and science and fun shit whatever. But I will say this,
<v Speaker 1>having lived in an area in the Bay Area where
<v Speaker 1>the quote academic left, you know again, as opposed to
<v Speaker 1>the working classlet was largely in charge. I saw how divisive, mean,
<v Speaker 1>and frankly mentally fucking ill it can be when they're
<v Speaker 1>in charge. They literally drove people to the other side
<v Speaker 1>through constant lecturing, shaming, shit talking, you know, trying to
<v Speaker 1>reinforce ideologies through fear of ostracization and social shaming. Which
<v Speaker 1>is what that which is what they did, not all
<v Speaker 1>of them. There's a very general statement, so take it
<v Speaker 1>with a grain of salt. But it's not an effective tool.
<v Speaker 1>Shaming people into agreeing with you is not an effective tool,
<v Speaker 1>and just being a dick and professionally online is not
<v Speaker 1>an effective tool. It's sloppy, it's lazy, and it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of productive, and not to mention, you know, these bozos
<v Speaker 1>are all constantly fighting with each other anyway, and trying
<v Speaker 1>to cancel each other and get other people to dislike
<v Speaker 1>each other. You know, half of them spend more time
<v Speaker 1>attacking each other than they do the other side. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>this is what the left became the last ten or
<v Speaker 1>fifteen years. And so what happens, what is this? Trump
<v Speaker 1>is a fucking natural result of this, and they're still
<v Speaker 1>not going to get it. I don't have any faith
<v Speaker 1>that people are gonna come around and chill out and
<v Speaker 1>not get it. But like the amount of left became
<v Speaker 1>the party of the fucking school marm, of the tight
<v Speaker 1>ass of the people that tone police and condescent to people.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the left used to be the party of
<v Speaker 1>people that didn't give a fuck and were rowdy and
<v Speaker 1>had fun and whatever, and that they they're not anymore.
<v Speaker 1>They're like the stiff, poudy faced, fucking mean generally from
<v Speaker 1>a wealthy background. Generally not always, but generally it's you
<v Speaker 1>gotta have that tone of elitism there to pull this shit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and just just really fucking you know, god like,
<v Speaker 1>just trying too hard, you know, and they're clueless, they
<v Speaker 1>don't get it. But now they're not, you know, now
<v Speaker 1>that the fucking right has been able to brand itself
<v Speaker 1>is the party of rebellion. I don't know how. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know how, you know, because everything they do is
<v Speaker 1>rooted in nineteen fifties, you know, archaic cultural bullshit, and
<v Speaker 1>their sense of humor is so fucking whack. But somehow
<v Speaker 1>they've been able to do it. They did, and the
<v Speaker 1>left enabled it, the modern American left. The left isn't
<v Speaker 1>like this in other places, and so this is what
<v Speaker 1>we get. And the modern American left isn't gonna get
<v Speaker 1>it either, they're not. They're not gonna change, they're not
<v Speaker 1>gonna come around. You know. I remember listening to people
<v Speaker 1>on some program. I think it was Pod Save America.
<v Speaker 1>I tuned in for a minute and they were like,
<v Speaker 1>we need a leftist Joe Rogan. I like, no, you're
<v Speaker 1>not gonna get one, because whoever, no one, no one
<v Speaker 1>could be like that. You know, you would never have
<v Speaker 1>a leftist Trump and that because they'd be afraid of
<v Speaker 1>getting canceled. That's what you need. You're right, you do,
<v Speaker 1>but you're never gonna get one because they afraid of
<v Speaker 1>getting canceled or saying the wrong thing, or being criticized
<v Speaker 1>to death or put through the fucking filter or nitpicked.
<v Speaker 1>Because that's what the modern American left us. Where did
<v Speaker 1>it come from? I don't know, but it seems to
<v Speaker 1>be last fifteen years. This is I don't know, is
<v Speaker 1>it the college kids take it over? College kids kind
<v Speaker 1>of live in a bubble. No offense to them, they
<v Speaker 1>live in a bubble. You get this way when you
<v Speaker 1>live in a bubble, When you live in an echo chamber,
<v Speaker 1>when you don't have to go wait for the fucking
<v Speaker 1>Western Avenue bus at two am, have a bad trip,
<v Speaker 1>eat some shit, you know, get punched in the face
<v Speaker 1>for mouth and off to somebody like happened to me
<v Speaker 1>when I was a kid, you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>I just I'm not going to get into it much longer.
<v Speaker 1>But I just I'm just sitting back and watching. It's
<v Speaker 1>like that George Carlin shit when he's like that that
<v Speaker 1>statement he said during his last few years before he croaked.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, I'm just here for the show now, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and I have no faith. It's like, anyway, all right, well,
<v Speaker 1>we're not going to get into it too much. I'll
<v Speaker 1>let that go. But uh, it is gonna be really bad.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's gonna get bad. So you're gonna have
<v Speaker 1>to just find a way to cope, find a sense
<v Speaker 1>of humor, and stay offline unless you're researching stuff or
<v Speaker 1>trying to learn something, you know, go outside and focus
<v Speaker 1>on the fucking plants and the life forms. That's the
<v Speaker 1>antidote to all this shit, all this dark shit and
<v Speaker 1>the divisiveness and the infighting. But it was very nice
<v Speaker 1>to be out of it for two weeks. I will
<v Speaker 1>say that perfect welcome home. I wouldn't have had it
<v Speaker 1>any other way. Perfect welcome home. Though, coming home to
<v Speaker 1>the Euston Airport it was like a work of art.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking alarm in the background, the twenty dollars centabuns,
<v Speaker 1>the garbage food, the diabetic, angry, populous, pre diabetic. I
<v Speaker 1>don't want to assume anybody's medical status. They certainly looked
<v Speaker 1>unhealthy in every way physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. That's
<v Speaker 1>us though, that's America right now. It doesn't matter what
<v Speaker 1>the political party you vote for or don't vote for,
<v Speaker 1>or whether you think you're an intersectional radical, or whether
<v Speaker 1>you think you're fucking you know, standing up against the
<v Speaker 1>woke mob. What you're all it's all part of the
<v Speaker 1>same disease. You're all a victim of the algorithm, and
<v Speaker 1>you're all very very unwell. So uh but I wasn't it.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't have to look at billboards for two weeks.
<v Speaker 1>It was fucking great that. Really the billboards really are
<v Speaker 1>like the turn on top of the ship heap is
<v Speaker 1>figuratively speaking, and not having to see them was so lovely. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>what was my favorite habitat down there that I got
<v Speaker 1>to see? I would have to see. I would have
<v Speaker 1>to say it was not well Buddha. How do you
<v Speaker 1>pronounce this? Not well, Buddha, Not well, Buddha, parka Nacio
<v Speaker 1>Now now well, Buddha. The Coastal Era carrier force in Chile,
<v Speaker 1>fucking incredible. That was my favorite spot by far. You
<v Speaker 1>had to drive through mile after mile, kaliometer after kilometer
<v Speaker 1>of pine and eucalyptus plantation to get there, all garbage
<v Speaker 1>that was incentivized by, of course, a nineteen seventy four
<v Speaker 1>law put in place by hashtag that asshole Pinochet, that
<v Speaker 1>pig dictator Pinochet, who killed thousands, who the United States
<v Speaker 1>helped install after they'd been trying to get rid of
<v Speaker 1>the democratically elected socialist Allende through nineteen seventy to nineteen
<v Speaker 1>seventy three. I think was finally when the coup happened.
<v Speaker 1>So there's some very interesting history podcasts about that. Pinochet
<v Speaker 1>was in power till nineteen ninety, never spent the day
<v Speaker 1>in jail. Hopefully someone goes and takes a shit on
<v Speaker 1>his grave, certainly worth doing. If you could send me
<v Speaker 1>a photo of a turd on a grave, preferably not
<v Speaker 1>up close. I don't want to see your shit, But
<v Speaker 1>if you could send me a picture of a turd
<v Speaker 1>from far back on his grave, or just dogshit. I'll
<v Speaker 1>send you some stickers. But anyway, now a Buddha is
<v Speaker 1>this incredible. I don't know how big it is. It
<v Speaker 1>didn't seem that big. It's oh, it's here right here.
<v Speaker 1>It's consisted of six thousand. It consists of six eight
<v Speaker 1>hundred and thirty two hect there. It's about twenty four
<v Speaker 1>square miles. Yeah, that's not big, and it's surrounded by
<v Speaker 1>pine plantation. But it was probably one of the most
<v Speaker 1>incredible places I'd been to, and if only for it
<v Speaker 1>was a really it wasn't a thick forest that was
<v Speaker 1>relatively open the way that the light came through. It
<v Speaker 1>was a beautiful day when we were there. It wasn't raining.
<v Speaker 1>We'd been at the montane population of Ericaria aericana and
<v Speaker 1>beautiful Jurassic trees the day before, and it was it
<v Speaker 1>was missing and fogging, and it's all very volcanic there.
<v Speaker 1>I think the substrate here at now Buddha was looked
<v Speaker 1>to be metamorphic. There's like a big rocky outcrop looks
<v Speaker 1>like a not a glade. It looks like more of
<v Speaker 1>like a granitic knob, metamorphous granitic knob you can walk
<v Speaker 1>out on and overlooks these forests that were surely much
<v Speaker 1>much more extensive prior to being destroyed for pine plantations.
<v Speaker 1>But the fucking they were just incredible. And some of
<v Speaker 1>the I saw in eric Carria that was eight feet
<v Speaker 1>wide at the base and eric Carria Erkana. Some of
<v Speaker 1>these things can live for fifteen hundred years. If you're
<v Speaker 1>not familiar with the tree, I suggest you look them
<v Speaker 1>up A R A U C A R I A.
<v Speaker 1>They look like mushrooms. When they're fully grown, they have
<v Speaker 1>you know, they when they're fully grown, they lack branching
<v Speaker 1>on the bottom ninety percent of the tree and just
<v Speaker 1>to retain the branches up top. Eric Carria, but williid
<v Speaker 1>does the same thing, which is in Queensland, Australia, eric
<v Speaker 1>Carria and Gustafolia, which seems to take better to cultivation,
<v Speaker 1>and it is from Brazil. Eric Carria and Gustafoia does
<v Speaker 1>the same thing that mushroom look, and they're they're old.
<v Speaker 1>These trees are revered too. You go through a couple
<v Speaker 1>of Mapouche towns, which is the one of the indigenous
<v Speaker 1>tribes down there. You go through these Mapouche. Try these
<v Speaker 1>Mapouche towns and the tree is everywhere. There's like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>sculptures of it, and the little all the little tourist
<v Speaker 1>shops and shit have Eric Carrier aer Kanda, you know,
<v Speaker 1>emblems and logos and ship really cool. I guess there's
<v Speaker 1>a flora of of the region two that one of
<v Speaker 1>the universities put out. I would have loved to buy it.
<v Speaker 1>I wasn't able to find it. Melipuco is near Congio
<v Speaker 1>National Park, which is in the UH Parknasil Congile, which
<v Speaker 1>is like the er Carria population in the mountains, which
<v Speaker 1>I guess was glaciated, and the Eric Carry is there,
<v Speaker 1>you know, recolonized that after the glaciers took off. But
<v Speaker 1>to the west across the valley. You know, think of
<v Speaker 1>Chile like California. It's this long strip. You got the
<v Speaker 1>coastal mountains, you got a valley in between, and then
<v Speaker 1>you got the and these or of Sierra Nevada equivalent
<v Speaker 1>California to the east, but you get this valley in between.
<v Speaker 1>So now now Albuddha is UH is the coastal the
<v Speaker 1>more like the coastal mountains still mountains, elevation there was
<v Speaker 1>like forty five hundred maybe five thousand feet in places,
<v Speaker 1>But that's the coastal range. Now a Buddha and then
<v Speaker 1>Kungio is further inland, and that's basically on volcanics, like
<v Speaker 1>very new volcanics, like nine thousand year old volcanics. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you see these these expanses of pummice. There was an
<v Speaker 1>area where it was just all fucking pummice beneath them,
<v Speaker 1>beneath these these trees and some of this, you know,
<v Speaker 1>these volcanics hadn't even been colonized by pioneer species of
<v Speaker 1>plants yet. There was a species of bacars that was everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>But and that was in Geo, in the volcanic area
<v Speaker 1>that was supposedly glaciated, and then where the erak carrias
<v Speaker 1>had to recolonize after the glaciers habsided. But now well Buddha,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, both places are amazing, But now well Buddha
<v Speaker 1>was this open canopy. There was na tho vegas there,
<v Speaker 1>There was a budleya globosa, this shrub BUDLEYA tons of
<v Speaker 1>mutissias there. It sounded like there were probably cicadas up
<v Speaker 1>in the trees. It was the na Tho vegas are everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>so you know, the southern beaches order Fagali, the same
<v Speaker 1>order as oaks, but they're in Nato Fagaesi. This is
<v Speaker 1>another Gondwanan plant family. This was a theme that we
<v Speaker 1>kept seeing everywhere was Gondwana relics of Gondwana. You know,
<v Speaker 1>plants genera, lineages, genera and families that you get in
<v Speaker 1>the southern hemisphere, in both southern Australasia, Australia and New Zealand,
<v Speaker 1>maybe New Caledonia, as well as in South America, far
<v Speaker 1>South America. And surely they all these things were growing
<v Speaker 1>on Antarctica before it started to freeze over thirty million
<v Speaker 1>years ago. And I think when did Antarctica fully freeze over,
<v Speaker 1>I think last five million years. I think there's not
<v Speaker 1>though vegas, pollen, microfossils up until two or three million
<v Speaker 1>years ago when it finally fucking iced over. But I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure it was a shitty and cold place to live
<v Speaker 1>for you know, ten to twenty million years before that.
<v Speaker 1>But these forests that at Nawa Buddha were just fucking incredible.
<v Speaker 1>I can't believe there's only twenty four square miles preserved.
<v Speaker 1>The rest is all just destroyed for shitty pine plantation,
<v Speaker 1>shitty radiot of pine and eucalyptus Eucalyptus globulus, which I mean,
<v Speaker 1>what do you do with that that shitty would eucalyptus
<v Speaker 1>is pine. You can build some track housing out of it.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it'll last a few decades, forty fifty years at most.
<v Speaker 1>You treat it with some some anti fungal, you pressure
<v Speaker 1>treat it, maybe it'll last a little bit longer. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. But you generally built shitty lumber. There's all
<v Speaker 1>the shitty home depot lumber, you know, like that. I
<v Speaker 1>wonder how much of the lumber that's building America's tract
<v Speaker 1>housing and cul de sac communities, you know, for for
<v Speaker 1>our unhappy populace. I wonder how much comes from Chile.
<v Speaker 1>But there's so much pine plantations down there. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there's it's a surplus. There's far more than the market
<v Speaker 1>would demand. But uh, anyway, but this now, well, Buddha
<v Speaker 1>was just fucking something else.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>It was incredible. It was such a rich forest, it
<v Speaker 1>was it felt so good to be there. The whole
<v Speaker 1>thing was alive. I'm sure on mushrooms it would feel incredible.
<v Speaker 1>There's beard liking draped on everything. The beard like in
<v Speaker 1>itself made the whole experience feel psychedelic. It wasn't a
<v Speaker 1>very dark forest. It was very open and lit up.
<v Speaker 1>Just the fucking gorgeous living piece of the fabric of
<v Speaker 1>the world. You know, it should be a fucking World
<v Speaker 1>Heritage Site if it's not already. And what was what
<v Speaker 1>I thought was really cool was that the the Eric
<v Speaker 1>Carrier there are so fucking big. I mean, they're just
<v Speaker 1>like these totem poles. The one that we saw it
<v Speaker 1>was a male because they're they're dioecious.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>The one that the largest one we saw, they got
<v Speaker 1>it staked out. You know, there's like a it's a
<v Speaker 1>they call it the Millinario. They got it staked out.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And it's just like this eight foot wide totem pole
<v Speaker 1>looks like all elephant foot like at the at the
<v Speaker 1>base like the you know, like that wrinkly sagging bark
<v Speaker 1>really fun to drop. But and it's got really thick
<v Speaker 1>bark too. All these trees, these old bastards have really
<v Speaker 1>thick bark, like five inches like five inch plates. They
<v Speaker 1>look like tortoise shell plastrons. They're just these fucking huge plates,
<v Speaker 1>which I guess is for fire resistance. I thought it
<v Speaker 1>was just for cold because it's hard to imagine those
<v Speaker 1>forest burning, but apparently they do, or they did. But
<v Speaker 1>it's like this. You're at the base of this thing.
<v Speaker 1>It's eight feet across, it's got to be one thousand,
<v Speaker 1>maybe fifteen hundred years old. And then it's just a
<v Speaker 1>otem pole that just shoots up for one hundred and
<v Speaker 1>twenty feet one hundred and fifty feet maybe was it
<v Speaker 1>fifty meters forty meters and then all the leaves are
<v Speaker 1>at the top. Those those you know, whorls of very
<v Speaker 1>thick plastic like sharp green leaves are just world that
<v Speaker 1>are just world around. The stem are all the way
<v Speaker 1>at the top, you know, and the branches of course
<v Speaker 1>are produced in these worlds too. We could see old
<v Speaker 1>dead logs at the basis, some of these that had
<v Speaker 1>the world branching. All the bark was gone. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>just incredible fucking place. Man. Like, you're in a place
<v Speaker 1>like that and you just want to take it all in,
<v Speaker 1>you know. That's what I try to do. I want
<v Speaker 1>to take it all in. So I have an anecdote
<v Speaker 1>when I'm in a place like the fucking Houston Airport.
<v Speaker 1>Listening to the fire alarm at five in the morning,
<v Speaker 1>I'm watching people stuff their faces with twenty dollars cinnabuns
<v Speaker 1>to ease the pain of existence in that kind of world,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like, you know, you're in places like that
<v Speaker 1>so you can hold onto it, you know, and remember
<v Speaker 1>that those places exist. Well, you're also you know, trying
<v Speaker 1>to deal with the death cult. But but the the understory,
<v Speaker 1>the not the Vegas were all on the understory, Like
<v Speaker 1>the southern beaches were all on the understory, and it
<v Speaker 1>was like that in Congillo too. But we did see
<v Speaker 1>a massive uh pretty sure it was not the vegas DMBII.
<v Speaker 1>There was not the vegas. There's like four not the
<v Speaker 1>vegas species. In every somewhat intact force that you go
<v Speaker 1>to in Chile, they'll be maybe a pina. Maybe one
<v Speaker 1>of the coolest ones was Pumilio, which doesn't get that tall,
<v Speaker 1>but it's really beautiful leaves. Uh yeah, a glocca was
<v Speaker 1>another one, Obliqua. It was not the Vegas. Obliqua was
<v Speaker 1>the one that was in the eric eric Carria forest.
<v Speaker 1>But they're forming this understory. They're all cover everything's covered
<v Speaker 1>in this usnea beard like in the bark of the
<v Speaker 1>eric Carria is everything. The fucking birds sound incredible. It's
<v Speaker 1>just the whole like, the whole experience auditory, The whole
<v Speaker 1>sensory experience of that forest was incredible. Azara Microphila was
<v Speaker 1>another one. That's a Ozara a z a r A
<v Speaker 1>is a genus in the willow family Sla case. I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure the soil community was fucking incredible. There was duff
<v Speaker 1>all over the ground. Maytinis boaria was there as well.
<v Speaker 1>Meetinis boaria. I think that's the one. Matinis is in
<v Speaker 1>the genus celestrace. We get one in South Texas as well.
<v Speaker 1>It's a dwarf one that likes brackish near shore environments.
<v Speaker 1>But I think Matinus booria is supposedly an antidote against
<v Speaker 1>Lithrea costico, which is a poison oak relative. But instead
<v Speaker 1>of producing you rush you all, it produces a compound
<v Speaker 1>called litriol. I think uh or lithral lithriol. I forget
<v Speaker 1>I read a paper on it. But Maytinis is supposedly
<v Speaker 1>an antidote for the dermatitis caused by lithrea, and lithrea
<v Speaker 1>is like poison oak. It doesn't affect that everybody, but
<v Speaker 1>it affects a lot of people. But Lithrea was actually
<v Speaker 1>one of the cool volunteer pioneer species that we see
<v Speaker 1>saw growing along the the river, the Mapocho River, you know,
<v Speaker 1>which is in downtown Santiago. Like all of Santiago, is
<v Speaker 1>mostly invasives, but there's a couple like Vicelia constricta and
<v Speaker 1>that Metinis that are able to eke it out, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to just volunteer, but it's largely invasives. I saw a
<v Speaker 1>cool fidal lacca I think it was fidal Laca dioeca,
<v Speaker 1>which is a tree sized pokeweed. It's fucking crazy. It's
<v Speaker 1>from Argentina. It's not native to Chile, but they planted
<v Speaker 1>there is a street tree that was pretty cool to see.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's got poke weed fruits and flowers. It
<v Speaker 1>looks like a poke weed, except it's a fucking tree.
<v Speaker 1>Looks like a strangler fig to it. It's one of
<v Speaker 1>those they apparently grow very fast and they get those
<v Speaker 1>very ornate bases like the abase of one looked like
<v Speaker 1>an octopus. It just had these crazy flared buttress roots
<v Speaker 1>that spread out all over there. The shitty piss dampled concrete.
<v Speaker 1>But then then the next day, this is the next
<v Speaker 1>day after the river, I'm taking a break here. I'm
<v Speaker 1>talking about the coastal erik Carria Forest. I shouldn't say
<v Speaker 1>coastal because it's a coastal mountain range. The eric Carrier
<v Speaker 1>Forest is not coastal, But that was by far my
<v Speaker 1>favorite place to be there was There was does Mari
<v Speaker 1>metabolis in that forest as well, which is a cool
<v Speaker 1>tropical missiletoe with those hummingbird pollinated flowers related to tristrix.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, the last day we were there, and before
<v Speaker 1>we flew out we had to catch a flight later
<v Speaker 1>that night, we drove out to the hills outside the
<v Speaker 1>mountains outside of Santiago. Just keep going east from Santiago
<v Speaker 1>onto the hills, drive past a bunch of garbage, bunch
<v Speaker 1>of you know, through a rich neighborhood. I fucking this,
<v Speaker 1>Like rich lady was coming down and her Mercedes or
<v Speaker 1>whatever almost hit me. We were parked on the side
<v Speaker 1>of the road taking photos of Trichosiris chiloensis and spinal leva,
<v Speaker 1>which is a mutisseoid composite that forms this kind of
<v Speaker 1>small tree, beautiful white undersize of the leaves looks fucking wild,
<v Speaker 1>and this rich lady rolls up on me and just
<v Speaker 1>like really aggressively, and I'm like, I didn't have time
<v Speaker 1>to get out of the road. You know, I could
<v Speaker 1>tell she was kind of irritated. I was in her
<v Speaker 1>way and we were parked on this narrow road on
<v Speaker 1>this sketchy mountain side, and so we're like face to face,
<v Speaker 1>like she rolls up and I'm like, could you just wait?
<v Speaker 1>And the lady spoke full English too, and she's you know,
<v Speaker 1>of course got the full fucking like passive aggressive. I
<v Speaker 1>just date a turd face and I wasn't being aggressed.
<v Speaker 1>She spoke like perfect English, but with like a fucking
<v Speaker 1>europe like British or Dutch accident. Oh god, she was awful.
<v Speaker 1>I was just like, I wasn't being a grid I
<v Speaker 1>was like, lady, you like rolled up on me. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't even have time. I was going to move the
<v Speaker 1>car for you so you could get by. You didn't
<v Speaker 1>have to almost hit the guardrail or whatever. It was funny,
<v Speaker 1>and she just kind of put the fucking look on
<v Speaker 1>her face. I was like, oh my god, you are
<v Speaker 1>like you belong in like a wealthy neighborhood in southern
<v Speaker 1>California saying the exact same thing to me, you know,
<v Speaker 1>something belittling and mean. But the last day we went
<v Speaker 1>there and that was cool. The elevations, like I think
<v Speaker 1>it was like five thousand feet. The anties are so
<v Speaker 1>steep because they're relatively new. It's like last twenty million years.
<v Speaker 1>They've been uplifted due to the Nasca plate diving beneath
<v Speaker 1>the continent, you know, ramming into the South American continent,
<v Speaker 1>also subducting beneath. The same thing that causes the volcanism
<v Speaker 1>also causes the uplift from that continental collision or excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>oceanic plate, the continental collision boundary kind of, I don't
<v Speaker 1>plate collision battery. But they're very steep. They're constantly fucking
<v Speaker 1>falling apart. I mean, it's like an incredibly steep mountain range.
<v Speaker 1>Nothing analogous in California except maybe Cone Peaked down in
<v Speaker 1>Big Sir, maybe some places in the Sierra Nevada where
<v Speaker 1>it's exceptionally steep. But the plant community there was cool.
<v Speaker 1>Was Vicelia Constricta. It was We saw gog Nadia folio Losa,
<v Speaker 1>another cool composite from gognatioidi another you know, distinct flower
<v Speaker 1>morphology florith morphology to the flowers that are in the
<v Speaker 1>capitulum the flower head of this member of Astaasi, and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of them are I think almost all of
<v Speaker 1>them are woody shrubs gock natti oidi. There was Trichocyrius chiluansis,
<v Speaker 1>which now that cactus nerds insisted should be called luco
<v Speaker 1>steel I haven't read the paper yet with tristrex all
<v Speaker 1>over it. There was poorly area there, which is basically
<v Speaker 1>a Chilean guyacon. It's in guyacum angusta folium, which we
<v Speaker 1>get here in Texas, which is Zygopalasi to Kreas family.
<v Speaker 1>There was uh uh, I think there was Kaleia up there, Dyscaria,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a handful of Lithrea costica, a handful of basically,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah, Kaganekia, which is another All these sclerophyll you
<v Speaker 1>know generally waxy leaves or mildly hersuit leaves of a
<v Speaker 1>Mediterranean climate. You know evergreen, you know, the kid climbed
<v Speaker 1>California has many analogs to this, like foothills of of Montane, California.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool to see. There was a there's a part
<v Speaker 1>in a Jessica Gorovitch's Ecologia Plants book. I think it
<v Speaker 1>was that one. Maybe it's Raven's textbook Biology of Plants,
<v Speaker 1>where there's you know, they've got all the Mediterranean regions
<v Speaker 1>and analogs, like the different species but fulfilling the same
<v Speaker 1>ecological role and also displaying the same morphollow g two,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and as an adaptation to this to the
<v Speaker 1>Mediterranean the constraints the ecological and climatic constraints of a
<v Speaker 1>Mediterranean climate. But yeah, also in that habitat was a
<v Speaker 1>Desmia confusa. Edesmia is in Fabaesi. It's another big genus,
<v Speaker 1>lots of really sticky glandular members, a lot of sticky
<v Speaker 1>glandular species in that genus. And uh, but Confusa is
<v Speaker 1>basically a shrub with photosynthetic stems. They've all got the
<v Speaker 1>typical you know, it's it's subfamily Phaboid, so it's got
<v Speaker 1>you know, pea flowers, but they've got all the Adesmias
<v Speaker 1>have are generally pretty sticky, and they've got these fruits
<v Speaker 1>that it looks like a bean but it breaks up
<v Speaker 1>into segments, really beautiful fruits, really cool and in this
<v Speaker 1>aidesmia like so many they were incredibly hairy, like it
<v Speaker 1>looked like it had like the fucking fruit the bean
<v Speaker 1>fruit was wearing a tupe, like ridiculously hairy. That was
<v Speaker 1>up there Malae Serbia, which is a genus in passive
<v Speaker 1>Flora ace, which is pretty diverse in South America. Beautiful flowers. Again,
<v Speaker 1>very glandular, extremely glandular. Everything down there is it got sticky.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna touch it, you're gonna get You're gonna touch
<v Speaker 1>the leaves, you're gonna get oily hands. It was I
<v Speaker 1>think it was Mala Serbia linear a folia. I was
<v Speaker 1>really stoked to see the spinal leva though, because that
<v Speaker 1>is a cool it's a fucking cool genus of asta Ace.
<v Speaker 1>And again it's like those hypo luca. It's not the
<v Speaker 1>species name. What was the species name on a spinal leva?
<v Speaker 1>Let me look it up really quick. I forget, let's
<v Speaker 1>see this really quick. Cold on God, there's so much
<v Speaker 1>great shit. Uh, spinal Leva elicifolia. Yeah. Oh, there was
<v Speaker 1>ariocice up there as well. I think it was grandiflora
<v Speaker 1>or Curvis spina. I don't know, but that's just the
<v Speaker 1>little little you know, globe shaped cact This gets the
<v Speaker 1>size of a football at most, probably less than that.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, the spinal eva was wow because that was
<v Speaker 1>the one. I hadn't seen it. It's I got these
<v Speaker 1>tiny flowers with what is it? Is that mutissia I
<v Speaker 1>think it's a mutissioidy as well. But it's got those
<v Speaker 1>recurved lobes to the Yeah, it's Tribna Sauvier. It's a
<v Speaker 1>really cool one. It's got those recurved lobes to the floor.
<v Speaker 1>It's but man, yeah, like right right there. It was
<v Speaker 1>cool because you could see what probably grew a lot
<v Speaker 1>of that ship probably grew in Santiago before it got destroyed.
<v Speaker 1>And understanding what occurs in these places is key to
<v Speaker 1>understanding what uh you know, before before it was developed
<v Speaker 1>and you know, the human modern human civilization was barfed
<v Speaker 1>all over it. Understanding what was in these places is
<v Speaker 1>essential to understanding how to restore parts of it, or
<v Speaker 1>especially from any kind of native plant movements perspective. With
<v Speaker 1>the plant there instead, there was puya everywhere too, Puya alpestras,
<v Speaker 1>which if you don't know about puya ALPESTRASI man I
<v Speaker 1>gotta you know you gotta really come correct on that,
<v Speaker 1>because that's a fucking incredible plant, massive spiny bremeliad that
<v Speaker 1>forms these huge colonies and gets incredible flowers, you know,
<v Speaker 1>bright sapphire metallic flowers, and can form colonies like eight
<v Speaker 1>to ten feet across, you know, three to four meters across.
<v Speaker 1>All right, So we're gonna we're gonna move back to Uh.
<v Speaker 1>There was a brief stop with Santiago. East of the mountains.
<v Speaker 1>East of Santiago is the habitat there. We're gonna take
<v Speaker 1>a brief ad break and then come back to uh.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna return to the lower the higher latitudes, excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>down by the eric Carria forest. You go, okay, So
<v Speaker 1>we're back. The latitude at Santiago is thirty three degrees
<v Speaker 1>south and the latitude of the eric Carria forest is
<v Speaker 1>a thirty seven degrees south roughly. And another plant that
<v Speaker 1>I saw down there in America Caria forces and in
<v Speaker 1>Nawa Buddha was was Loasa. I think it was a
<v Speaker 1>lot loasa, a canthifolia, which Jesus Christ the Loasa namesake
<v Speaker 1>of the family Lois Sace to velcro lef family of
<v Speaker 1>which in North America we mostly get the Menzilia and Nii.
<v Speaker 1>Menzilia is everywhere, but the you go down to South
<v Speaker 1>America and you start getting some of the Loasa's god
<v Speaker 1>there's like six or seven genera. The subfamily I think
<v Speaker 1>it's Lois Soudi is the subfamily. There's subfamily uh delineations
<v Speaker 1>for Lois sat they're not on Ininet. Anyway, you get
<v Speaker 1>a couple of these general Loasa Pinasa bloomin Bakia that's
<v Speaker 1>his stinger, Kayafra that's his stinger too. I haven't looked
<v Speaker 1>at a phylogeny of Lois Sace, but most of the
<v Speaker 1>stinging ones are in South America. In Texas we get
<v Speaker 1>Sevalia sinuata, which is a stinging one, beautiful flowers that
<v Speaker 1>I assume is probably somewhat related, somewhat close to the
<v Speaker 1>Loasas and the Chiopherus, but either way, these things have
<v Speaker 1>those keeled petals. Loasa has this for sure. Bluemenbaki I
<v Speaker 1>believe as well, and they have stigmo nastic statements, which
<v Speaker 1>means the stamens move, you know, which will happen through
<v Speaker 1>a prickly pear flower too. That genus Soapuncha has flowers
<v Speaker 1>with thigmo nastic statements stamens that move towards the center
<v Speaker 1>upon being triggered. What's interesting about Loasa is that I
<v Speaker 1>think they do it over. They do it over a
<v Speaker 1>number of days, and it takes I think, I think
<v Speaker 1>a few minutes to do it. It's not instant. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, anytime that one of these staminodes, which many
<v Speaker 1>members of lois Ac have as well, and their flowers
<v Speaker 1>basically fertile, are non fertile statements stamens that don't produce
<v Speaker 1>pollen in their anthers. Anytime these staminodes are triggered, and
<v Speaker 1>there's nectar at the base of some of these, At
<v Speaker 1>least in this Loasa there was. You could see it.
<v Speaker 1>You could see the glistening materially at the base of
<v Speaker 1>his staminode. Anytime that staminoda has touched the stamen moves
<v Speaker 1>towards the center. It takes a while, but it moves
<v Speaker 1>towards the center and it replenishes the pond. There was
<v Speaker 1>an interesting article in The New York Times about this
<v Speaker 1>from twenty nineteen. Yeah, the article if you're interested in
<v Speaker 1>reading it. If you can, you can go to archive
<v Speaker 1>dot pH. That's a website and then type in the
<v Speaker 1>link to the page and see an old one. But
<v Speaker 1>it's called watch a flower that seems to remember when
<v Speaker 1>pollinators will come calling. This is about a Peruvian genus.
<v Speaker 1>This is about a Nasa Poisoniana, but it looks almost
<v Speaker 1>identical to a Loasa flower, and it's closely related and
<v Speaker 1>it does the same thing, and they're both in subfamily Loa.
<v Speaker 1>Soity it's by Kara gi Emo the fuck just just
<v Speaker 1>look up Loasa pollination New York Times and it it's
<v Speaker 1>really interesting because it's it takes three or four minutes
<v Speaker 1>for this statement to move, but in this way, it's
<v Speaker 1>it to move to the center of the flower. But
<v Speaker 1>in this way it's constantly replenishing the pollen source. Thus,
<v Speaker 1>you know, instead of just wasting all the stamens on
<v Speaker 1>one bee, you know, it's it's they're keeping them, it's
<v Speaker 1>keeping them cupped and protected in these keeled pedals. They've
<v Speaker 1>got a little cup at the end.
<v Speaker 2>And uh.
<v Speaker 1>And then as it needs to be replenished in the flower,
<v Speaker 1>then the stamens move forward. Enormous adaptive benefit and being
<v Speaker 1>able to do that, and it's of course triggered by
<v Speaker 1>you know, a bee a pollinator rubbing around in the
<v Speaker 1>center of the flower. But a great number of these,
<v Speaker 1>uh members of lois soity do that. It's wild, man,
<v Speaker 1>It's it's so fucking cool to see and Loasa can't.
<v Speaker 1>The folia was probably a three to four foot tall herb.
<v Speaker 1>It felt maybe there's probably perennial roots down there, uh,
<v Speaker 1>but it was. It stood tall. It was in the
<v Speaker 1>shady forest of Natho Vegas, somewhat shady, wasn't super dark,
<v Speaker 1>not though Vegas and Erikarria forest, and it was readily abundant.
<v Speaker 1>It was everywhere. And then the fucking stinging to it,
<v Speaker 1>like those sting you, and it kind of itches afterwards.
<v Speaker 1>It's got those stinging hairs, those stinging tricombes. But in
<v Speaker 1>that in that whole subfamily, we saw Laasa Blumenbakia preate, Prietia, panassa,
<v Speaker 1>penitifida grauslater rita. The Loasa cantafolia had UV reflective pollen too,
<v Speaker 1>which was really cool. It fluoresced under UV light. Cei
<v Speaker 1>Scyphantis s see why Elegance had that too. These are
<v Speaker 1>ornate fucking flowers.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I can't like describe the morphology of these. It's so cool,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, and that's the way I look at all
<v Speaker 1>flowers is not from oh it's pretty, it's a beautiful flower,
<v Speaker 1>but rather from the mechanics and the complexity of flower morphology.
<v Speaker 1>It's fucking mind. Every flower is like a puzzle, you know,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's a Chlorea orchid that was a genus of
<v Speaker 1>orchid that we saw down there, again, very species rich.
<v Speaker 1>I don't believe Chlorea offers any reward to pollinators. I
<v Speaker 1>think it's sexual deception and it is somewhat closely related,
<v Speaker 1>probably via that Gondwanen distribution again to many of the
<v Speaker 1>orchid Doughty subfamily, that is, the terrestrial orchids in Australia,
<v Speaker 1>which of course have some fucking wild you know, the
<v Speaker 1>flying duck orchid, the hammer orchid, these orchids that do
<v Speaker 1>they take sexual deception through a whole other level by
<v Speaker 1>turning their labellum into mimics of female thinned wasps. Crazy shit.
<v Speaker 1>If you don't know, I mean, any anybody who's you know,
<v Speaker 1>dabbled in weird flowers or has an interest in plants
<v Speaker 1>there has seen a fucking of it Attinborough documentary. You know,
<v Speaker 1>probably knows about this. Edinburgh did do it. I believe
<v Speaker 1>he did do a piece on the flying duck orchid,
<v Speaker 1>the one that's the got the trigger, the hammer mechanism.
<v Speaker 1>There's quite a few in Australia that do that. But
<v Speaker 1>they mimic female wasps in shape with their labellum, and
<v Speaker 1>then they also actually produce the pheromones, the chemical signatures
<v Speaker 1>of these fucking wasps, which is wild man, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>you know anyway. Chlorea, I don't know, I don't. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know much about Cloria, which is the Chilean member
<v Speaker 1>of that subfamily book. The Cloreas do a sexual deception
<v Speaker 1>as well. They're not offering any reward, they're just duping insects.
<v Speaker 1>One of the species of Chlorea that we saw I
<v Speaker 1>noticed that had cali those little studs on the labellum,
<v Speaker 1>which is that's an indicator to me, okay, this thing
<v Speaker 1>is is tricking insects, you know, because those those calai,
<v Speaker 1>those studs especially seem they're darker color. They certainly you know,
<v Speaker 1>in all the not all, but a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>the Australian orchidody have that as well, like some of
<v Speaker 1>the Thelomitras and et cetera. They produce these I'm sorry,
<v Speaker 1>not Thelomitra. Thelomitra doesn't produce a notable labellum. Thelomitra's whole
<v Speaker 1>other they're fucking dope orchids. But they do it. They
<v Speaker 1>do it differently. Thinking of the genus Caledina produces those
<v Speaker 1>studs on the labellum, those calais they're called many many
<v Speaker 1>species of Caledina do and have that hinged labellum as well,
<v Speaker 1>and the Chlorea had that same thing. So these, yeah, definitely,
<v Speaker 1>you see that. That's a good indication. This thing is
<v Speaker 1>duping insects via deceit It's got this deceitful pollination strategies.
<v Speaker 1>And then on the other side of this valley, it's
<v Speaker 1>roughly the same latitude of thirty seven degrees latitude south
<v Speaker 1>in the montane eric Carria forest, the Andean eraic cort
<v Speaker 1>eric Carria forced by Melpuco Melipuco. Fuck, sorry if I'm
<v Speaker 1>mispronouncing that town. Wonderful little town right outside Kungeo National Park,
<v Speaker 1>that was where there was you know, eric carry is
<v Speaker 1>growing on these extremely steep slopes covered in fog. Wonderful
<v Speaker 1>day to be there. It was super misty. It pissed
<v Speaker 1>on us. It rained the whole day, and that was
<v Speaker 1>a fucking treat as well. It's all again the substrates,
<v Speaker 1>all pummics. It's super crunchy. Easily you could destroy a
<v Speaker 1>pair of boots there. But some of the same species,
<v Speaker 1>except I don't believe now a Buddha had Austrosedrius, which
<v Speaker 1>is looks like a Chilean incense cedar. If you're familiar
<v Speaker 1>with the incense cedars Calosedrius. The currents of California, Idaho, Washington, Oregon,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera has similar shaped cones to beautiful fucking trees
<v Speaker 1>get like, you know, seventy eighty feet tall, what is it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, almost thirty meters tall, and they grow in
<v Speaker 1>on these you know, steep rocky slopes or out of
<v Speaker 1>pure pummits like they were growing in Kongeo Premnopotus Andina
<v Speaker 1>was there as well, which is a potocarp that I
<v Speaker 1>think might produce edible not fruits. They look like it's
<v Speaker 1>like a it looks like a u. It looks like
<v Speaker 1>a torrea, which again to make an analogy to California,
<v Speaker 1>like the Torrea Californica. You would see it's got it's
<v Speaker 1>got a similar shaped cone. It's not a fruit, it's
<v Speaker 1>a cone. It looks like it'd be a droop or something,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a cone, and it's a similar size. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>Promnopotus and dina is a strictly Andean species. I believe.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think it grows. I keep miss I kept
<v Speaker 1>mistake in Saxagothia conspicua, which is a really cool looking
<v Speaker 1>potal carp that can get fucking massive in the Alersee
<v Speaker 1>forest down south in the Patagonian temperate rainforest, I kept
<v Speaker 1>thinking that was prenopotes before I had seen promnopoties, because
<v Speaker 1>you know some of those Saxagothias I'm used to seeing.
<v Speaker 1>Sathagothia conspicua in arboretums in botanic gardens is a small
<v Speaker 1>tree to ten or fifteen feet tall. I had no
<v Speaker 1>awareness that it could reach heights of like one hundred feet,
<v Speaker 1>you know, fucking seven feet across at the base. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know it was it could be turned into this massive,
<v Speaker 1>long lived potocarp. Saxa Gothia, of course, doesn't even look
<v Speaker 1>like a potocarp. You know, potocarps normally have that epimadium
<v Speaker 1>and the bait berry, and they're the bird to sper
<v Speaker 1>Saxagothia produces what looks like a cone. It's all those
<v Speaker 1>inflated bracts, those inflated scale leaves. It kind of looks
<v Speaker 1>like a like a mini cone, and so you almost
<v Speaker 1>it'd be easy to mistake for not being a potocarp
<v Speaker 1>The bark looks very potocarpaceous though, looks like the bark
<v Speaker 1>of some of the other poto carps Potocarpaci of course,
<v Speaker 1>So that hemisphere conifer family they expect that early Jurassic,
<v Speaker 1>maybe Triassic. You get a few members in Mexico and
<v Speaker 1>it gets you into the North hemisphere a little bit,
<v Speaker 1>but it's mostly Southern hemisphere family, the critiums, the removes
<v Speaker 1>of New Zealand, the many fucking the strawberry pine, which
<v Speaker 1>of course is not a pine. It's just in Australia,
<v Speaker 1>in Tasmania, it's this creeping, really cool conifer that produces
<v Speaker 1>these epimdia, these swelling you know, swelling ovules because it's
<v Speaker 1>still a gymnal swim, still a nakead see that look
<v Speaker 1>like strawberries. You know, in Australia they use the word
<v Speaker 1>pine like Americans use the word cedar. There's no true
<v Speaker 1>cedars in North America, but everybody in the US calls
<v Speaker 1>you know, many of our conifers sears western cedar. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know thuya arbor, Thuyia occidentalis, they call arbavity or cedar.
<v Speaker 1>Every fucking juniper they see gets called the cedar. It's
<v Speaker 1>the same thing in Australia with the pines. There's no
<v Speaker 1>pines in the Southern hemisphere except they barely make it
<v Speaker 1>into the Southern Hemisphere except for one species. I think
<v Speaker 1>it's Pineus marquci and it makes it just over the
<v Speaker 1>equator in Indonesia. But in Australia, everything that's a conifer
<v Speaker 1>is called a pine. You know, the King Billy pine,
<v Speaker 1>the fucking the strawberry pine. Whatever. And it was in
<v Speaker 1>Congillo too that I saw solid Digo chillensis. There's a
<v Speaker 1>golden rod that's native to Chile. Apparently it made it
<v Speaker 1>down there at some point via bird migration. Lots of
<v Speaker 1>plants did this. If you look at a migration map again,
<v Speaker 1>you'll see And I realized this, I mean I kind
<v Speaker 1>of already knew it, but I realized that when I
<v Speaker 1>looked at up a migration map of migration pathways of birds,
<v Speaker 1>and saw that almost none of them go across the Atlantic.
<v Speaker 1>Certainly they don't at the lower or mid latitudes, and
<v Speaker 1>they're all primarily north to south. And so you got
<v Speaker 1>a lot of birds migrating from western North Americas following
<v Speaker 1>the coast, headed south to Chile, and apparently one of
<v Speaker 1>them brought a golden rod down there at some point
<v Speaker 1>in the last I don't know, uh fucking however, many
<v Speaker 1>millions of years, ten twenty million years. So it's a
<v Speaker 1>great place Chile was. It was great to see the
<v Speaker 1>biog geography of a lot of plants. You had lots
<v Speaker 1>of plants that came from you know, a Gondwanen distribution
<v Speaker 1>or illustrated showed that members of Proteace, a lot of
<v Speaker 1>the orchids, a lot of the conifers. Of course, Fitzroya
<v Speaker 1>Cooper Sodi's closest relative or that and Pilgero dendron. I
<v Speaker 1>think I think their closest relative is Diselma archery, which
<v Speaker 1>is in Tasmania. Another really cool member of the cypress
<v Speaker 1>and redwood family from Tasmania that grows in alpine Tasmania,
<v Speaker 1>which is not very high. It's like three thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>You're already so high latitude you don't need to get
<v Speaker 1>much elevation to become alpine. But anyway, yeah, the prote ace,
<v Speaker 1>I haven't even gotten too yet. And both coxinem Coxinium.
<v Speaker 1>Holy shit, the firewheel, the Chilean firewheel tree. The Lomesia
<v Speaker 1>Lameysia farruginea hersuda or Thenada ohrides is another genus that
<v Speaker 1>we saw, just fucking wild shit man, all prote ac,
<v Speaker 1>all Gondwanan relics, you know, uh, a illustration of the
<v Speaker 1>plant distribution via tectonic breakup in long amounts of time.
<v Speaker 1>So there was the Gondwanan relics, or the distributions that
<v Speaker 1>occurred as a result of bird migration. We saw Facilia's
<v Speaker 1>down there, We saw the saladago. I mean, there were
<v Speaker 1>so many more genera that you know, you also get
<v Speaker 1>in California and the American West that were also done.
<v Speaker 1>They had different species down here in Chile. This is
<v Speaker 1>a reoccurring thing, you know, Okay, I know how this
<v Speaker 1>got here. This is probably via birds because this the
<v Speaker 1>rest of this lineage is in North America and western
<v Speaker 1>North America. You know, where you could see this now,
<v Speaker 1>this guy here. The rest of this lineage is in
<v Speaker 1>fucking Australia, and you know, relatives of this were probably
<v Speaker 1>growing on Antarctica, you know, thirty forty million years ago,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. Cicernkium, which is iridacey is another one. There
<v Speaker 1>were plenty of Cicernkium members down there. There was eryth Ranth,
<v Speaker 1>the monkey flowers, huge genus erythrant and the Placus family
<v Speaker 1>is freimacy in the lamy Aleis order, the order of stages.
<v Speaker 1>Tons of diversity in western North America, especially California, and
<v Speaker 1>there's also tons of diversity in Erythranth, not the placius.
<v Speaker 1>In Chile, we kept seeing aerthranth Lutia. We saw smaller ones.
<v Speaker 1>We saw aerythranth niandina and our another red one that
<v Speaker 1>begins with the sea, which were fucking incredible because erythranth
<v Speaker 1>Lutia is just the yellow monkey flower, and there's you know,
<v Speaker 1>probably a million different ecotypes and possibly subspecies or lookalike species.
<v Speaker 1>But nian Dina is a is like a pink, pink
<v Speaker 1>and white speckled, you know, huge flower grows in wetter areas.
<v Speaker 1>I think it used to be offered in cultivation in
<v Speaker 1>the Bay Area. I think Annie's annuals used to sell that.
<v Speaker 1>And then aarth ranth was a cufea I think it
<v Speaker 1>was aerthranth cufea, aeryth ranth cupri excuse me, which is
<v Speaker 1>a bright red one. Was abundant in certain habitats too,
<v Speaker 1>like higher elevation volcanic soil habitats growing in creeks and shit,
<v Speaker 1>there was epilobium down there too. There was an onnathro
<v Speaker 1>which I couldn't tell if it was native or not.
<v Speaker 1>It looked native. You can generally tell what's native or
<v Speaker 1>invasive or get hints at it by seeing where it's
<v Speaker 1>growing and how it's behaving in an ecosystem. If it's
<v Speaker 1>near a road and it's forming monocultures, unchecked monoculture is
<v Speaker 1>probably invasive. If it's in a somewhat remote area and
<v Speaker 1>there's always there's always exceptions to this, and it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's not many, it's there's only it's scattered. It seems
<v Speaker 1>relatively kept in check. It's not taken off forming monocultures.
<v Speaker 1>It's probably a native. And we saw a couple of
<v Speaker 1>nathra that were like that. As well Epilobium definitely a
<v Speaker 1>native Epilobium, which is same family owner Gracie so at
<v Speaker 1>a lot of really cool to see all these all
<v Speaker 1>these different patterns of distribution and see you know, then
<v Speaker 1>think about, well, how many fucking millions of years has
<v Speaker 1>it been here, you know, and and what is it?
<v Speaker 1>What what cut branches on this phylogeny once existed that
<v Speaker 1>are now extinct? You know, what? What was there? How
<v Speaker 1>big was it? Like I think about that with the
<v Speaker 1>Fitzroya for us? You know what was fitz What were
<v Speaker 1>the intermediate forms of Fitzroya or any closely related members
<v Speaker 1>of this lineage that existed in this habitat in the
<v Speaker 1>last fifty or sixty million years? And how unchanged is
<v Speaker 1>Fitzroya compared with other species. There's a there's fossil Fitzroya,
<v Speaker 1>which is the Alerte tree, which I haven't even talked
<v Speaker 1>about this fucking habitat yet. It's so fucking cool. There's
<v Speaker 1>fossil fits if it's royal, A cute of folia from Tasmania,
<v Speaker 1>from Oligasine Tasmania, which is what was at thirty two
<v Speaker 1>million years I think is when the fossils were dated,
<v Speaker 1>so this thing was everywhere, and surely there's fossils on
<v Speaker 1>Antarctica beneath however, many fucking kilometers of ice. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the got to see Antarctica. That's another thing. If you know,
<v Speaker 1>I go to the Silurian when people ask me what
<v Speaker 1>time Perio would you go to to go fucking botanizer survey,
<v Speaker 1>go to Silurian, Devonian and then uh, and then certainly
<v Speaker 1>like Antarctica during the ECNE, I'm so curious what was
<v Speaker 1>growing there. It must have been fucking incredible forests down
<v Speaker 1>there of wild and just wild shit stuff that you know,
<v Speaker 1>you would probably be able to tell what it was
<v Speaker 1>or what it was related to, because there's modern day
<v Speaker 1>members that exist in both Far South America and Australasia.
<v Speaker 1>Osma Riza, which is apac is another Amphi tropical distribution,
<v Speaker 1>you know, both similar latitudes on opposite sides of the equator.
<v Speaker 1>Another thing that was and it's got those barbed fruits too,
<v Speaker 1>so that was probably brought down by birds in the
<v Speaker 1>last twenty million years. Riby's same thing, Riby's magellanicum, Riby's cuchulatum.
<v Speaker 1>There's like five different ribi's species that we kept seeing.
<v Speaker 1>The gooseberries ribies, of course, is super diverse in Western
<v Speaker 1>North America, though there is I think there's a species.
<v Speaker 1>I remember seeing a cool species up on top of
<v Speaker 1>a mountain in the Wivalon, which is just you know,
<v Speaker 1>if stones throw away from me here in South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>But they definitely don't like it super hot. They like
<v Speaker 1>it the Mediterranean climate. They don't like it super hot
<v Speaker 1>and humid like a Mediterranean climate or higher elevation. But god, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the Congio National Park in these montane eracarria forces, these
<v Speaker 1>volcanic eracarria forces, was fucking wild man, because again it
<v Speaker 1>was it became a dominant tree. At the higher elevations.
<v Speaker 1>You hike up this what's basically a mini volcano, it's
<v Speaker 1>a crater. You hike up this this trail and the
<v Speaker 1>substrates sell pumis, and you're going through Natho Vegas and
<v Speaker 1>most of them don't get that big. These southern beaches
<v Speaker 1>don't get too big. And then there's a massive not
<v Speaker 1>though Vegas Dambii that we encountered and that was a
<v Speaker 1>fucking wonderful experience. And then there's chiskea everywhere too, And
<v Speaker 1>the higher you get and you start to get out
<v Speaker 1>of the noatho vegas zone, then the eraic carriers appear
<v Speaker 1>and there's just these monolithic beasts, these beautiful trees, and
<v Speaker 1>there's recruitment too, there's younger ones, and then the understory
<v Speaker 1>is mostly Chiskea, which is a New World bamboo genus.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't realize just how ubiquitous the genus Chiskeaya is.
<v Speaker 1>We saw it everywhere, was everywhere, and some of these
<v Speaker 1>things can take twenty or thirty years to flower, and
<v Speaker 1>then I think that when they once they flower, they die,
<v Speaker 1>like the whole colony dies, and it's sending up multiple
<v Speaker 1>new shoots of bambo I'd love to I'd love to
<v Speaker 1>get a Chiskeya research around a podcast and talk to
<v Speaker 1>them about it, because I'm sure you know bam bamboo soidi,
<v Speaker 1>the bamboo subfamily of the grass family originated in Southeast
<v Speaker 1>Asia or in Asia and the New World bamboos, which
<v Speaker 1>I think is three different clades. I'm not sure how
<v Speaker 1>many genera. You know, Giant cane, which we get in
<v Speaker 1>North in the United States, is a is technically a bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>It's in the bamboo Soidi subfamily, but it's part of
<v Speaker 1>this clade. But the Chiskeya are massive, they're they're so
<v Speaker 1>ecologically dombina, and I think most of the diversity in
<v Speaker 1>Chiskeaa evolved in the last eight to eleven million years,
<v Speaker 1>and then molecular clock dating pointed at roughly a twenty
<v Speaker 1>two million year old dispersal event of those that clade
<v Speaker 1>of New World bamboos to the Americas to the Neotropics
<v Speaker 1>in South America especially, which is where they're they're dominant.
<v Speaker 1>But hell at Chiskea is the point. There was fucking
<v Speaker 1>Chiskeaia everywhere. And again it was super foggy. These giant
<v Speaker 1>eraic carriers start appearing. And then you get out to
<v Speaker 1>this like overlook and you're looking out over this You
<v Speaker 1>couldn't see too far because it was we were basically
<v Speaker 1>in a cloud. It was raining that day. But you're
<v Speaker 1>looking out over this lake and there's these monstrous Eracaria trees.
<v Speaker 1>There's back risks, there was a there was a Fragaria there,
<v Speaker 1>there was a native strawberry Fragaria chillensis. Probably another you know,
<v Speaker 1>bird dispersed uh bird dispersal. But that was growing on these,
<v Speaker 1>so we gotta wear like five thousand feet elevation here.
<v Speaker 1>And there was Chlorea picky chin I think there. I
<v Speaker 1>think we even saw hydrangs through atafolia, which is the
<v Speaker 1>only species of Hydrangea I believe in uh in uh Chile,
<v Speaker 1>and it's a climber. It's got opposite leaves. They were
<v Speaker 1>all post flower when I saw it, so I didn't
<v Speaker 1>see any any flowers, but it's ubiquitous. Hydrangeous serratipholis ubiquitous
<v Speaker 1>grows in the you know, you'll see it in the
<v Speaker 1>in the temperate rainforest a little bit. You'll see it
<v Speaker 1>in the fucking you know, lower latitude areas and the
<v Speaker 1>montane with the sclerophyll forest, and it was here in
<v Speaker 1>the Ericarria forest as well. Backris saw a ship ton
<v Speaker 1>of backris Bacris linearis I think was the one. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, it's so hard to say. I gotta get
<v Speaker 1>gustavohyding to go through these ideas and research it. There
<v Speaker 1>was Aristotelia chillensis, which produces edible fruit. It's called the
<v Speaker 1>Chilean wineberry.
<v Speaker 2>That was.
<v Speaker 1>That's another very common plant as well, and fucking delicious.
<v Speaker 1>It's an Lao Carpesi, which is order oxalid dais oxalid dailies,
<v Speaker 1>and it's almost it looks, you know, in leaf, it
<v Speaker 1>almost looks like it would be rosece, like it would
<v Speaker 1>be a prunus or something. But it's got kind of
<v Speaker 1>opposite leaves, kind of almost world leaves in some places.
<v Speaker 1>And that's the big throw off. Okay, this is not
<v Speaker 1>rose si, this is not a rose, but it's got
<v Speaker 1>that dentate margin on the leaf, kind of a one
<v Speaker 1>inch long pink petiole. And then the fucking berries are
<v Speaker 1>delicious and edible. Another cool genus that we saw was
<v Speaker 1>Archidaceophylum diacanthoides, which is basically a tree that's in the
<v Speaker 1>sunflower family Astoraci, but the barnadiesioid subfamily named after Barnadisia,
<v Speaker 1>which is the most basal subfamily of Astoraci, that lacks
<v Speaker 1>this like twenty one thousand base pair inversion in the DNA.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's in the chloroplast DNA that the entire
<v Speaker 1>rest of the species and Asteraci haven't. But the barnetiesioids
<v Speaker 1>look weird as hell already. I mean, they're, you know,
<v Speaker 1>very often they're spiny, chucky Raga Barnadisia dasiphylum. They're entirely
<v Speaker 1>new world. They have spines, they're armed, they've obviously evolved
<v Speaker 1>with their bivery, and they've got a specific type of
<v Speaker 1>tricombe as well, and often showy flowers, often hummingbird pollinated flowers.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think archidasa phylum has hummingbird pollinated flowers. But
<v Speaker 1>the species we were saying, it's still a tree that
<v Speaker 1>can get like two foot diameter breast height, you know,
<v Speaker 1>more than half a meter diameter breast type be sixty
<v Speaker 1>feet tall, twenty meters tall. Archidasaphylum diacanthoides was the one
<v Speaker 1>that we kept encountering, a very common one, alternate leaves,
<v Speaker 1>they're folded, they got a little point at the end,
<v Speaker 1>and the new growth is spiny. But there's an endangered species,
<v Speaker 1>Archidasaphylum excelsum, which is probably only endangered because it was
<v Speaker 1>a coastal species that occurred closer to Santiago, so all
<v Speaker 1>the fucking habitat, you know, got mrked one hundred two
<v Speaker 1>hundred years ago, and it's still extant. I think there's
<v Speaker 1>like eight populations, but it's it's almost critically endangered, highly
<v Speaker 1>protected I don't know if I think I think it's
<v Speaker 1>been hard to grow. I think it is not. I
<v Speaker 1>think there's not been a lot of success growing them
<v Speaker 1>because it's the seeds aren't often fertile.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>But god, I would have loved to see that tree.
<v Speaker 1>What a fucking cool one. Go more Tega is another
<v Speaker 1>cool tree I would have liked to see, But we
<v Speaker 1>didn't make it to the preserve where it grows. I
<v Speaker 1>guess it grows in this little preserve with this rare
<v Speaker 1>not though Vegas, not the Vegas Alissandriae or Alissandria, I think,
<v Speaker 1>which is entirely surrounded by pine plantations and garbage like
<v Speaker 1>pine forest. The funny thing about these pine forests too is,
<v Speaker 1>and this is what Nico talked about in the I
<v Speaker 1>think it was Nico told me about it. Maybe Nacho
<v Speaker 1>did too, but that these these pine plantations, like you,
<v Speaker 1>basically people don't want to live around them because it's
<v Speaker 1>such a fucking tinder box. They go up in flames
<v Speaker 1>so readily, actually in a Mediterranean climate where it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>rain during the summer and then if you get a
<v Speaker 1>big wind, and so people don't want to live around them. Understandably,
<v Speaker 1>so because it's just like living in a fucking bomb,
<v Speaker 1>So it renders the land unusable for all. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>selling this shitty, low quality lumber for the timber companies,
<v Speaker 1>and I think it's still incentivized. It's like seventy five
<v Speaker 1>percent government subsidy to plant these shitty useless pine plantations
<v Speaker 1>that destroy forests and you know, take space away from
<v Speaker 1>fucking wreck to soil, takes space away from native plants.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, they got to repeal it. I think they
<v Speaker 1>tried too. There was a ballot initiative maybe in twenty
<v Speaker 1>twenty three to repeal the forest law that subsidizes pine plantations,
<v Speaker 1>but it didn't make it through, so hopefully they'll try again.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, yeah, so anyway, at this Congio National Park, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there was Promopotis and Dina Austro sedars to lensus rybis
<v Speaker 1>and then you could see them on the cliffs from
<v Speaker 1>far away, these massive era Carria forests which were just
<v Speaker 1>fucking unreal, just intoxicating. Diascoria was another one that we saw,
<v Speaker 1>Diascoria bryan a folia, a vine with these tiny tiny flowers.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>Diascorial's order of monocots. Uh diascoriacei, which I don't have much.
<v Speaker 1>What do we got, what do we got in the
<v Speaker 1>what do we got in North America? Dioscoria? I think
<v Speaker 1>there's only two or three that I've seen the y
<v Speaker 1>the yam family, diascoriac there's actually, I think correct that
<v Speaker 1>there's quite a few. There's almost ten, some of which
<v Speaker 1>are invasive. I remember seeing Diascoria of Alosa. I forget
<v Speaker 1>where where the fuck was that was that? In the
<v Speaker 1>south somewhere there's Diascoria bulbifra pentophile of florid Dana. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>they're they're monocuts, you know, are vining monocots. Looks like
<v Speaker 1>almost like a kinder smile ax, a plant that I
<v Speaker 1>found exceptionally cool. Which there's another California member in the
<v Speaker 1>genus again. This ampatropical distribution was a dino Collon chilentz.
<v Speaker 1>It's this small herbaceous plant. It's a roset of leaves
<v Speaker 1>and then sends up escape. The leaves have a white
<v Speaker 1>abb acxial service. They got a white underside, which is
<v Speaker 1>quite beautiful, but you know, and they're covered in like
<v Speaker 1>an indumental little felt but the flowers are fucking wild.
<v Speaker 1>Especially considering that it's asta racy. They look like they
<v Speaker 1>look like nothing else. They look they're not showy, but
<v Speaker 1>they've got this marginal ring of akenes, you know, so
<v Speaker 1>the marginal florets in the capitula, the marginal flowers in
<v Speaker 1>the flower head, if you can even call it a
<v Speaker 1>flower head. It seems to like be lacking an involucar,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a ring of fieries altogether. They're probably there.
<v Speaker 1>They're just very vestigial, but it's got the These akenes
<v Speaker 1>are sticky and they'll stick to your pants. It's probably
<v Speaker 1>how I got done or got stuck in the plumage
<v Speaker 1>of a bird, or got taken up to California, maybe
<v Speaker 1>vice versa. Because it's mutissioid. It's the mutissioid subfamily for
<v Speaker 1>the namesake genus Muticia, which is most of Mutissioite is
<v Speaker 1>South American, and they're they're a fucking dope lineage of
<v Speaker 1>aster raceda. They look really weird. They got instead of
<v Speaker 1>having five lobed flora corollas, they've got two or three lobes,
<v Speaker 1>and they're bilaterally symmetrical and tend to have these like
<v Speaker 1>cool record like trixists in accordia are a mutissioid if
<v Speaker 1>you know those genera at all in Texas, California, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>But Adino Colon has you know, staminate male floor. It's
<v Speaker 1>in the center. They've just got the anther tube and
<v Speaker 1>then a little you know style that pokes out. But
<v Speaker 1>I don't even think it forks because they're they're male only.
<v Speaker 1>And then the ring it doesn't look like it would
<v Speaker 1>be astracy at all. It looks like it would be
<v Speaker 1>apac or something. It's a really weird, uh, influorescent shape.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't look like the standard ASTERRAI see flower head.
<v Speaker 1>The male floorits are tiny. They've got like this little
<v Speaker 1>white corolla and then the female florets are intensely glandular,
<v Speaker 1>you know, probably four times the size of the male florets,
<v Speaker 1>and just forming this little wagon wheel ring of a
<v Speaker 1>keynes around the center of the male floor its. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's again, really fucking cool. When you think about that
<v Speaker 1>it's an aster, You're like, what the fuck man, how
<v Speaker 1>did this happen? Oh, it does have fileries, very small,
<v Speaker 1>vestigial looking fileries. I have no idea what pollinates is
<v Speaker 1>if it's wind pollinated or what, probably small flies. But
<v Speaker 1>speaking of wind pollination, and I don't think this is
<v Speaker 1>wind pollinated, but I certainly did when I first encountered it.
<v Speaker 1>The genus Mesodendron from Meso dendracy, which is in Order Santalles.
<v Speaker 1>So it's a parasite. It's a it's a photosynthetic parasite.
<v Speaker 1>It's a hemiparasite. And you'll see them on nathol vegas
<v Speaker 1>all the time. But they're fucking weird as hell, and
<v Speaker 1>they're dioecious, and the male and female plants look very,
<v Speaker 1>very different. The females have these I guess they have
<v Speaker 1>wind dispersed fruits, but they have these little tassels that
<v Speaker 1>almost look like box cellder flowers. If you've ever seen
<v Speaker 1>the flowers on box cell, They're they're pendent, they're dangly,
<v Speaker 1>as you would expect the wind pollinated plant to be.
<v Speaker 1>But I guess in this case these tassels are for
<v Speaker 1>wind dispersal, and supposedly the flowers offer nectar. But I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I remember hitting a male in fluorescence and pollen coming
<v Speaker 1>off of it. It might have just been road dust,
<v Speaker 1>but that would be a lot of road dust, and
<v Speaker 1>it didn't really look like it. I'm wondering if there
<v Speaker 1>are any wind pollinated members of Mesodendron, But this is
<v Speaker 1>another genius with a lot of species in it, and
<v Speaker 1>they're all parasites, I think, mostly on not tho vegas.
<v Speaker 1>But it was cool because I've been seeing that family
<v Speaker 1>in the order Santaleles and the angiosperm phylogeny and had
<v Speaker 1>not encountered it until I saw it there, and the
<v Speaker 1>fact they're dioecious, and the male plant that looks so
<v Speaker 1>different from the female plants. They've got green stems, but
<v Speaker 1>they're there. They've got a juicy hostorial connection to their
<v Speaker 1>host plants, the natho vegas that they grow on. The
<v Speaker 1>first one we encountered, we saw outside of a Pilgero
<v Speaker 1>dendron bog Pilgero dendron, another antarctic conifer. Anyway, So the
<v Speaker 1>first at Kongio, we hiked up this mountain through this
<v Speaker 1>forest of erikarias and it was fucking intoxicating and wonderful.
<v Speaker 1>And then afterwards it it stopped raining. We drove out
<v Speaker 1>to this kind of volcanic flat that was entirely pumpused.
<v Speaker 1>It was these undulating hills of a recent volcanic flow
<v Speaker 1>dominated by Ricarria aericana, and it was had a small
<v Speaker 1>understory I think was not the Vegas pumilio, which doesn't
<v Speaker 1>get that big eight to ten feet. This is kind
<v Speaker 1>of a short not the Vegas. Everything is still covered
<v Speaker 1>in Usnia Barbada, that drape lichen, that draped lichen, the
<v Speaker 1>beautiful fucking green defining psychedelic dec core of these these forests,
<v Speaker 1>these this living fabric and so uh covering the the
<v Speaker 1>pummice though the substrate was a really cool moss in
<v Speaker 1>the genus Racometrium. I don't know what it was, but
<v Speaker 1>it's one of those mosses that you know, it's I
<v Speaker 1>think most of what we saw was alive because it
<v Speaker 1>was wet, But in some areas it looks like someone
<v Speaker 1>throughout an old, filthy shag carpeting and it's, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like you'd see in like a garbage pile somewhere. You know,
<v Speaker 1>if you've ever been through parts of Appalachia or northern
<v Speaker 1>California where you see some illegal dumping piles full of
<v Speaker 1>household goods, especially, you know, like someone renovated their trailers,
<v Speaker 1>some shit throughout a bunch of fucking I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but it looks like, uh, it looks like a like
<v Speaker 1>a used carpet that's been thrown out all over the
<v Speaker 1>land here. But it's this really cool moss and it's dominant.
<v Speaker 1>It's obviously getting by just fine growing in the wet
<v Speaker 1>pummice here, you know, five thousand feet elevation in this
<v Speaker 1>open habitat, I mean, this is an open habitat, this
<v Speaker 1>Ericrria and not though Vegas Familia forest is open. It's
<v Speaker 1>not shady. It's very open. It's like my favorite kind
<v Speaker 1>of habitat. I don't like shit when it's super dark
<v Speaker 1>and shady, like the Redwood forest. I like it when
<v Speaker 1>it's kind of open. There's more lighting, it doesn't feel
<v Speaker 1>as like confining or dark, and there's more generally more
<v Speaker 1>diversity too. I remember there being a lot of diversity here,
<v Speaker 1>but there was this matted back ris everywhere as well.
<v Speaker 1>There was a lot of their fucking backrist was everywhere
<v Speaker 1>we went, man, I mean it's South America. Back rist
<v Speaker 1>is huge.
<v Speaker 2>There.
<v Speaker 1>There was anemone coming up too. I think it was
<v Speaker 1>done already. That's one of the first generally one of
<v Speaker 1>the first to bloom anemone multi feta, which is vernunculesi.
<v Speaker 1>There was saw a couple of Parizias purple flowered, generally
<v Speaker 1>purple or white flowered Mutissio composite. There was Calorizia print
<v Speaker 1>anthoides as well Mutissia the currants, orange flowers, Mutissius spinosa.
<v Speaker 1>The Mutissius are so fucking cool because they're like these vining,
<v Speaker 1>generally vining, coreaceous, holly like leaves, plastic feeling holly like leaves,
<v Speaker 1>often armed at least in leaf they've got, you know,
<v Speaker 1>not may may not have spines, but the leaves have
<v Speaker 1>very sharp teeth on them. There was a cool Euphorbia
<v Speaker 1>two I remember seeing, and Desmia Ribi's cuculatum just a
<v Speaker 1>fucking rich habit that tons of gul THEORYA Gultheria in
<v Speaker 1>the blueberry family. Rak Case was everywhere. We saw like
<v Speaker 1>probably seven or eight different kinds. Easy to see how
<v Speaker 1>that would be a bird dispersed genus. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>the only non epacrid of the Pacrid subfamily member of
<v Speaker 1>eric Case that's in uh. It's in Australia as well
<v Speaker 1>as Gultherius so Gultheria got around in the last thirty
<v Speaker 1>million years, easily got around. There's tons of gul Theia everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>What was the gulf, There was a Gultheria was at
<v Speaker 1>mersin Noidies. I saw at LOSAs Zuofras at Michiakon, Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>basically growing on like sulfuric soil, like really acidic volcanic soil.
<v Speaker 1>And it was the only plant growing in extremely close
<v Speaker 1>proximity to these fumaroles and hot springs in this geothermal
<v Speaker 1>area at the Losa Zoofras and beautiful Michia Khan And
<v Speaker 1>of course, I mean it wasn't the season, it was summer.
<v Speaker 1>But we saw a couple species of Citeria fungus too,
<v Speaker 1>that that edible, apricot looking fungus that creates little knots,
<v Speaker 1>little swellings, little gulls on the Notatho vegas trees. Cytheria
<v Speaker 1>is a fungus Cytheria excuse me c y t ta
<v Speaker 1>Ria that I also encountered in uh Tasmania and New
<v Speaker 1>Zealand because Noto Vegas is there as well. So Siitaria
<v Speaker 1>has been associated with not the vegas since the breakup
<v Speaker 1>of Gondwana. Quite likely, and there was probably tons of
<v Speaker 1>Cytaria fungus whose only known host plant is not the
<v Speaker 1>fagus species and the genus not the Vegas on Antarctica
<v Speaker 1>as well, and it's it looks like a little orange
<v Speaker 1>ball that's got these holes in it. There's these these
<v Speaker 1>these uh kind of kind of like like a round
<v Speaker 1>piece of Swiss cheese. Really interesting though. I found an
<v Speaker 1>old one. It was Citeria harry odii.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>You know, there's a multiple different species of Cytaria as well,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, they create these these knots, these galls in
<v Speaker 1>the wood, and you could the mushrooms weren't out, but
<v Speaker 1>we kept seeing the Citaria galls in the wood. Of
<v Speaker 1>all the Noto Vegas species that we encounter, which was
<v Speaker 1>probably six or seven. Anyway, I got got so much
<v Speaker 1>more to talk about, but I'm gonna cut it close,
<v Speaker 1>and just was second part where I'll cover some of
<v Speaker 1>the closer foothill forests near Santiago. Indian foothill forests near Santiago,
<v Speaker 1>like where you see Gevwena avilana, which is prote ace.
<v Speaker 1>It's also called what is it Chilean hazel nut or
<v Speaker 1>Chilean something nut, I don't know it's edible. It's in
<v Speaker 1>the Macadamia tribe of prote ace. We'll get into the
<v Speaker 1>Alercee forests, including this really cool tarantula that grows down there,
<v Speaker 1>the Osla tarantula, which grows this is like fucking forty
<v Speaker 1>two degrees latitude south and these these somewhat chilly and
<v Speaker 1>very wet forests and these bogs. This this rare and
<v Speaker 1>endangered orange tarantula lives fucking wild. And then we'll get
<v Speaker 1>into some of the Andean stuff, including including the rosolate
<v Speaker 1>forum that so many different species converge upon, especially at
<v Speaker 1>high elevations in the dry andes where this, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like the rosolate violets like it's it's so wild to
<v Speaker 1>see this same forum appearing as a result of convergent
<v Speaker 1>evolution of selection by the environment in these habitats, by
<v Speaker 1>unrelated plant families. I mean, there's a member of solin
<v Speaker 1>Ac in the genus Comberra that does it too wild shit,
<v Speaker 1>such a wild form. You know, basically, take an elongated stem,
<v Speaker 1>put it an avice, squish it down to two inches tall,
<v Speaker 1>make the inner nodes between the nodes very very short
<v Speaker 1>to non existent, and you just give it this short
<v Speaker 1>squat rosolate form with these world leaves, because it grows
<v Speaker 1>in very cold, dry, windy places. Well, actually not, it
<v Speaker 1>gets hot there in the summer. It's fucking hot. They're
<v Speaker 1>growing on pumice, but they're probably buried under snow for
<v Speaker 1>length of the year as well. We'll talk about that,
<v Speaker 1>and it probably, I don't know, hopefully be two hours,
<v Speaker 1>three hours. I can't imagine it'll be any shorter. There's
<v Speaker 1>tons of shit to talk about, tons of plant diversity
<v Speaker 1>to cover in, a ton of cool ecological and evolution
<v Speaker 1>very phenomenon to explain, ponder about, and get into. So
<v Speaker 1>I'll cut it there for now, have a good rest
<v Speaker 1>of your day, go fuck yourself. By next podcast, it
<v Speaker 1>will be two hours and cover these three very distinct
<v Speaker 1>and cool habitats and biomes and all the cool species within.
<v Speaker 1>That's all I got