I 10 Ramblings to New Mexico

<v Speaker 1>It's another dark day afternoon, you fucking asshole. Welcome to
<v Speaker 1>the crime pager. Body doesn't podcast. I'm driving, as you
<v Speaker 1>could probably hear from the road noise on here on
<v Speaker 1>Old I ten. We're headed west on I ten. We're
<v Speaker 1>going through West Texas. It's a beautiful land. You can look,
<v Speaker 1>but you can't touch because it's all private. Of course,
<v Speaker 1>anyone that grows up in Texas has no idea how
<v Speaker 1>abnormal that is, or shit the entire eastern half of
<v Speaker 1>the United States. Anyway, I'm going to the New Mexico
<v Speaker 1>Mycological Society COMOS say d nice meet up. It should
<v Speaker 1>be fun. I'm gonna do a presentation Ellen, Ellen, my
<v Speaker 1>friend Allan Rockefeller is gonna be there Mandy as well.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, we'll stay in West Texas tonight. By we,
<v Speaker 1>I mean me and the dogs. I didn't see the
<v Speaker 1>dogs for three goddamn weeks. Javier was watching them. It's
<v Speaker 1>very kind of them. But we're reunited and now we're
<v Speaker 1>just blazing through the ninety eighth degree West Texas sun
<v Speaker 1>to go. We'll stay in West Texas night and then
<v Speaker 1>you have be in New Mexico. New Mexico is always
<v Speaker 1>so nice. It's a wonderful thing about Texas is that
<v Speaker 1>it's so close to New Mexico. And then of course
<v Speaker 1>when you to New Mexico, there's public land everywhere and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of cool shit. I remember spending a few
<v Speaker 1>days in the Capitan Range, in a little bit north
<v Speaker 1>of where I'm going Epithy, Atlanta. Micromeris a little golf
<v Speaker 1>ball cactus grows on the limestone out there. There's a
<v Speaker 1>disjunct population, and I found this nice spot. It was
<v Speaker 1>like the kind of spot where if you're rolling around
<v Speaker 1>in your truck, you got a campushell on it. You
<v Speaker 1>got a fucking mattress back there, you got a cooler
<v Speaker 1>and one of those you know, something to sit on,
<v Speaker 1>a little milk rate or leaving a fucking lawnchair. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you can travel. I even advise traveling with the little desk,
<v Speaker 1>one of those portable aluminum desks. You can get him cheap,
<v Speaker 1>like thirty bucks, and you set up a little you know.
<v Speaker 1>I I camped out there for a while under this
<v Speaker 1>giant oak tree in the south end of the Capitan Range.
<v Speaker 1>It was for like a couple of days. It was
<v Speaker 1>a nice spot that just say that's the thing with
<v Speaker 1>public land. I didn't see anybody. I think I saw
<v Speaker 1>one other guy, you know, the whole two or three
<v Speaker 1>days I was out there. But it's a cool Yes,
<v Speaker 1>there's so much good shit and so much nice stuff
<v Speaker 1>in New Mexico. If you got time to just roll
<v Speaker 1>around and you know you're you're not broke, you got
<v Speaker 1>like enough to just you know, you don't got to
<v Speaker 1>be rich. You know, you're just living in your car.
<v Speaker 1>But that was the thing when I was a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the time I spent learning botany, you know. Between
<v Speaker 1>I would say my first good mushroom trip in the
<v Speaker 1>desert twenty twelve to when I left California twenty twenty,
<v Speaker 1>twenty twenty one, I would just all the whenever I
<v Speaker 1>could get time off from work, I would just fucking
<v Speaker 1>head out for a week and go live in the
<v Speaker 1>Mojave or in Nevada or wherever, you know, northern Arizona,
<v Speaker 1>just driving around, mulling around and blm land. You know,
<v Speaker 1>get a truck, camp orshell, a nasty old filthy fouton
<v Speaker 1>mattress you could throw in the back, brush it off,
<v Speaker 1>and a cooler and a little camping stove like you
<v Speaker 1>get from the Chinese grocers, you know, you know, they
<v Speaker 1>got those little they got them little stoves. It's nice.
<v Speaker 1>They take the buttane so you can make coffee or
<v Speaker 1>a fucking you know, tea and cook occasionally and you
<v Speaker 1>just roll around and it's nice. So just looking at
<v Speaker 1>different stuff and just taking photographs and exploring and learning
<v Speaker 1>about the land that you live on. It was nice.
<v Speaker 1>I did that for years and it was very fulfilling. Shit.
<v Speaker 1>During COVID, me and my daughter's mom were doing that
<v Speaker 1>for like three months straight. It was really nice. But anyway, so,
<v Speaker 1>uh so, yeah, it should be good. And I think
<v Speaker 1>I'm just gonna dig around New Mexico for a week,
<v Speaker 1>maybe check on some plants, revisit some old spots. Uh
<v Speaker 1>And then of course I've got that little you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'll put my post up in a certain spot. I
<v Speaker 1>got some other work. I gotta do herbarium labels to
<v Speaker 1>create emails and shit the respect, you know, just general
<v Speaker 1>shit work, and hopefully get some drawing done as well.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, it'll be nice. So but yeah, cloud Craft
<v Speaker 1>is in the Sacramentos, the Sacramento Mountains, and it's like
<v Speaker 1>with the range runs from like eight ten thousand feet
<v Speaker 1>at the higher elevations, and so that's where we're gonna be.
<v Speaker 1>And I'm so I'm stoked to be in a sky
<v Speaker 1>island again, much cooler temperatures, different casts of plants. Should
<v Speaker 1>be a lot of fungi up there. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know amanitas were, or rather circlecarpas, which is in
<v Speaker 1>the rose family rose Ace, also known as mountain mahogany.
<v Speaker 1>You get circlecarpas in West Texas. They're common throughout the West.
<v Speaker 1>Mountain mahogany is the common name, but of course no
<v Speaker 1>relation to true mahogany, which is in the family Meliace,
<v Speaker 1>same family as that obnoxious China ball, China berry whatever
<v Speaker 1>it is, shit, that invasive tree that's all over Austin.
<v Speaker 1>It's got cool flowers. What is it, Melica Melia, that's
<v Speaker 1>the genus. But I love sewing those things down, really
<v Speaker 1>really horrible invasive in Central Texas. But anyway, that's the
<v Speaker 1>mahogany family, and they're native to Eurasia. I'm sure they're
<v Speaker 1>really cool where they're native. But here there, of course
<v Speaker 1>horticultural atrocity and the noxious invasive but mountain mahogany circle carpus. Ah,
<v Speaker 1>excuse me, you don't mind Circlecarpus is Michael Rizel, Ecto
<v Speaker 1>Michael Rizel, you know, not just arbuscular mind za, but
<v Speaker 1>Ecto micro hyzol with Amanitas and probably a number of
<v Speaker 1>other genera of Ecto micro hyzel mushroom as well. So
<v Speaker 1>it's not just pines and oaks. It's also eucalyptus and
<v Speaker 1>obviously Circocarpus and alders and a few others, and of
<v Speaker 1>course members of the blueberry family Era Casey and especially
<v Speaker 1>Kamara Staphless and our Bautists that are Ecto micro rhyzol. Well,
<v Speaker 1>with the arachoids, it's a little bit more complicated. The
<v Speaker 1>Ecto mico rhisea reportedly behave Endo Michael Risley with them.
<v Speaker 1>They don't just form the heart take net that like
<v Speaker 1>little sheath that goes around the root. They actually penetrate
<v Speaker 1>the root cortex. The fungal hyphae do. But anyway, it's
<v Speaker 1>but they do that with Ecto microhizel species. At least
<v Speaker 1>the are buttoids our Beautis and Camaro Stapfless. We were
<v Speaker 1>in Costa Rica, the higher elevations there are ten thousand,
<v Speaker 1>two hundred feet. Got the fucking Paramo we went to
<v Speaker 1>was in such good condition. It's such a cool habitat.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the sphagnum Magiclana come up there at the
<v Speaker 1>fluffy red sphagnum flushing all those red pigments as a
<v Speaker 1>result of the exposure to you know, harsh uv sunlight.
<v Speaker 1>Since there's you're up at ten thousand foot elevation, I
<v Speaker 1>like thirty three hundred meters, the plants up there, I
<v Speaker 1>just went out that fuck, I just hit a butterfly.
<v Speaker 1>God damn it. I hate it. I fucking hate it anyway,
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, we saw what was it. Lex Sinum
<v Speaker 1>is a genus of ectomycorrhizo mushroom that kind of looks
<v Speaker 1>like a bullied It's got pores on the underside, and
<v Speaker 1>it associates with Camaro Staphalus r. Buttoides, which is a
<v Speaker 1>super common shrub to large tree in Costa Rica. At
<v Speaker 1>the higher elevations, at like nine thousand feet, we were
<v Speaker 1>at temperatures of like sixty degrees the whole time. It
<v Speaker 1>was really pleasant. It's so nice up there. So but
<v Speaker 1>that was a that was a really cool I think
<v Speaker 1>Lexynum montiicola only associates with with with with our buttoids,
<v Speaker 1>while arochoids to it was with Vaccinium consanguinium. There are
<v Speaker 1>so many Vaccinium species up there. I tried reaching out
<v Speaker 1>to this guy that studies them from New York Botanical
<v Speaker 1>Garden that studies the neotropical blueberries, that he didn't get
<v Speaker 1>back to me. I don't know if he's on vacation
<v Speaker 1>or you never know. You know, a lot of a
<v Speaker 1>lot of these, you know, people in a professional stature.
<v Speaker 1>They a lot of a lot of them, like coming
<v Speaker 1>on the podcast. They know what crime PAS is. They're
<v Speaker 1>not too vibed out by, you know, than others. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>they are members of the square community. Maybe it vibes
<v Speaker 1>them out. Maybe they don't know me, they want to
<v Speaker 1>lose the prestige. Maybe you know I said that offendom.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but I reached out, or maybe you
<v Speaker 1>just didn't get the fucking email. But I would love
<v Speaker 1>to have someone knowledgeable about neotropical blueberry, neotropical eraic Casey
<v Speaker 1>diversity come on the podcast and talking because it's such
<v Speaker 1>a huge group and so many of them are epiphytes,
<v Speaker 1>uh and and just fucking wild. There's so much diversity
<v Speaker 1>down there. It's and it. They're also cool, you know,
<v Speaker 1>from the woody ligno tuber thing that they do, forming
<v Speaker 1>that little storage mechanism, that little you know, swollen woody
<v Speaker 1>knob to to I mean, the epiphytic habit, especially to
<v Speaker 1>the hummingbird pollination syndromes, to the dispersal methods obviously a
<v Speaker 1>lot of bird dispersal there. It's just a it's a
<v Speaker 1>really cool group of plants. And then I'd like to
<v Speaker 1>get someone to talk about the Apacrits too, a Packridity,
<v Speaker 1>the apacrid subfamily, which of course you get in uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, Australia, New Zealand. That's a fucking another insane group,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and they've got they've got the parallel of
<v Speaker 1>a nation. They look like mono cos the draco phylums.
<v Speaker 1>If you don't know about a Packrit's, you should go
<v Speaker 1>read up on them. E. P. A, C R. I. D.
<v Speaker 1>At Pacrid deity. They used to be their own family
<v Speaker 1>at Packard a see. But if they're it's very obvious
<v Speaker 1>they're blueberries when you look at the flowers, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>they look like fifty million years removed from the rest
<v Speaker 1>of the family, which is how a lot of shit
<v Speaker 1>in Australia and New Guinea and New Zealand and New Caledonia,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. Looks it's such mind blowing flora down there.
<v Speaker 1>A friend of mine's going to New Guinea in November.
<v Speaker 1>I guess he's getting and you got invited to speak
<v Speaker 1>about bromeliads. He's a bremeliad guy and he's going. He's
<v Speaker 1>but he's gonna go to New Guinea too. New Guinea
<v Speaker 1>seems fucking nuts. I would love to go to New Guinea,
<v Speaker 1>but it's you know, it could be a real hot place,
<v Speaker 1>figuratively speaking, not just you know, they've got sixteen thousand
<v Speaker 1>foot tall mountains there. You have that much elevation at
<v Speaker 1>that much low latitude, you know it's gonna be hyper diverse.
<v Speaker 1>But I just dropped my little fucking macha container. I
<v Speaker 1>hate this fucking bride. You know that, I really do.
<v Speaker 1>It's just fucking mind numbing and it's bad for you too.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta go. I'm gonna go do kettlebell swings in
<v Speaker 1>the park when I get back in West Texas, go
<v Speaker 1>run the fucking track or something. Louie is a little fat.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta go. She gotta get some exercise too. I
<v Speaker 1>missed her so much. You know, Jack just turned sixteen
<v Speaker 1>last May. He's still kicking, doesn't show any sign of
<v Speaker 1>slowing down, despite being deaf and having to peel a lot,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and being maybe a little bit senile. But anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but I'd love to get someone to talk about neotropical
<v Speaker 1>blueberries area Casey. So if you know anybody and you
<v Speaker 1>know they're a little loose, they like to, you know,
<v Speaker 1>talk about plants and let other people know about him
<v Speaker 1>point in my direction. But I tried to get the
<v Speaker 1>mustard guy, doctor al Shabaz too, really lovely man, very
<v Speaker 1>kind man, but he was he was not up for
<v Speaker 1>a podcast. I guess he just wasn't. He's having some
<v Speaker 1>health issues or something. I don't know, but he's still
<v Speaker 1>anytime I need help with brassa casey IDs, especially some
<v Speaker 1>of the rare ones like thelipodiopsis or any of those.
<v Speaker 1>You know, he's a response immediately. So it seems like
<v Speaker 1>a wonderful man regardless right now. Age Well, anyway, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so I'm I'm we were we were. I'm always excited
<v Speaker 1>whenever I meet a new mushroom to learn a psychology. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And then you know, try and see how that fits
<v Speaker 1>into the things that I spend most of my time
<v Speaker 1>studying and looking at with his plants, and so the
<v Speaker 1>Michael Riisell relationships are always he's always pretty exciting to
<v Speaker 1>learn about, like learning that Ornithostaphlos, which is you know,
<v Speaker 1>related to madrones and kamaro Staphalis. It's a blueberry, you know.
<v Speaker 1>It's Sarah Casey, our rb tite, the subfamily that's its
<v Speaker 1>own clade, was Mike riisall with I think four or
<v Speaker 1>five different species that we saw on in Baja California
<v Speaker 1>and the maritime chaparral right there. And another thing I
<v Speaker 1>want I should mention this before. This is totally unrelated
<v Speaker 1>to anything I was talking about before, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>me and my friend James Peace started a nursery. Well
<v Speaker 1>he's got a nursery going on. He got shit canned
<v Speaker 1>from the nursery he used to work at because they
<v Speaker 1>want to grow bougain v's and create myrtles and all
<v Speaker 1>the horticultural garbage that you know needs to be on
<v Speaker 1>life support on irrigation in Texas, and they were. They
<v Speaker 1>were actually throwing out native plants that he grew, like shit.
<v Speaker 1>I gave him like rare stuff. Fucking assholes, like they
<v Speaker 1>threw out a bunch of Prunus Texina, that delicious native apricot.
<v Speaker 1>They you know, the old the owner passed away. She
<v Speaker 1>was a really lovely woman. You know, other people took
<v Speaker 1>over that. There's just a job of them. They don't
<v Speaker 1>give a shit shit hand him through out a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of stuff. And now they got boogain V's it's just
<v Speaker 1>you know, a boring run of the mill nursery anyway.
<v Speaker 1>But he inherited this other greenhouse and so we're growing
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of stuff. But he's got he also inherited
<v Speaker 1>all this stuff in the greenhouse as well, which is
<v Speaker 1>a lot of tropicals. And you know, I joke. You know,
<v Speaker 1>all you need to do is find like a food
<v Speaker 1>court and a couple dozen different malls across the United States.
<v Speaker 1>You could probably unload all this stuff there. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's I mean, there's some interesting stuff he's got, like
<v Speaker 1>variegative vanillas and hoyas, which are that succulent milkweed vine.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool genus, not native the New New World at all,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, still still interesting interesting house plants. I
<v Speaker 1>have a hooya that I've been unable to kill for
<v Speaker 1>the last twelve years. It was above my kitchen in Oakland.
<v Speaker 1>Now I got it outside in South Texas. I've given
<v Speaker 1>cuttings to a million different people, and but yeah, Hoya
<v Speaker 1>is a big genus. Anyway, He's got a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>stuff and thurium's aeroids all that stuff. But it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>this is like a very niche crowd that we want
<v Speaker 1>to buy this stuff, and so we've got to clear
<v Speaker 1>these tables off so we can grow more of the
<v Speaker 1>native stuff in there. So if you know anyone you know,
<v Speaker 1>get at me or or I would suppose contact him.
<v Speaker 1>His His instagram is Peace Plants p E A s
<v Speaker 1>E P l A n T s uh and just
<v Speaker 1>message him and see if you can come by. He's
<v Speaker 1>in Sageen, Texas. I'm sure if you want to buy
<v Speaker 1>a shit ton of stuff, he could drive a box
<v Speaker 1>truck or something up to you. But that's really I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, it's a lot of shit to get
<v Speaker 1>rid of. Man, he's got ulfias, those desert orchids, all this.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, some of it's kind of cool, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a very niche It's like very like I mean,
<v Speaker 1>if there was like another conservatory in the Midwest that
<v Speaker 1>needed some stuff, that'd be a great spot to get
<v Speaker 1>it to. But anyway, yeah, it's a lot to take
<v Speaker 1>care of at the moment. But uh, other than that,
<v Speaker 1>we're growing a bunch of rare native plants. We got
<v Speaker 1>po Maria ostro texana, that cool weird legume that looks
<v Speaker 1>like an orchid, the pea flower that looks like an
<v Speaker 1>orchid flower, very glandular and sticky. From South Texas. Got
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of Senegalias you know, Guahio nurse plant for payote,
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of interesting stuff that not many people are growing.
<v Speaker 1>So there's a you know, we always need more native
<v Speaker 1>plant nurseries and wherever you live, no matter what part
<v Speaker 1>of the country, you should start growing shit too, just
<v Speaker 1>just for shits and giggles, you know. And uh, backyard
<v Speaker 1>growers especially are like the backbone. California's got a lot
<v Speaker 1>of I mean, it's still not enough, but they've got
<v Speaker 1>more native plant nurseries than most. It's where the native
<v Speaker 1>plant movement I feel like is strongest and where it's
<v Speaker 1>been going the most, you know, for the longest. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, Texas and southeast and east coast wherever there's
<v Speaker 1>still still a lot of need for more more native
<v Speaker 1>plant sources. But god, it just trives it. It tries
<v Speaker 1>me nuts, man, especially where I live. It's like it's
<v Speaker 1>it's such pure indoctrination to just want to cut everything
<v Speaker 1>down and mow it. I fucking don't understand. So I
<v Speaker 1>don't understand. Like you know, other places out west, maybe
<v Speaker 1>in the mountains, maybe wherever they they generally have an
<v Speaker 1>understanding that having plants on the landscape is good and
<v Speaker 1>they're nice. But like Texas is so good at disrespecting
<v Speaker 1>it's flora, you know, and just just getting horny for
<v Speaker 1>cutting shit down, clearing it. Like there's no even if
<v Speaker 1>you hate plants, and I say this all the time,
<v Speaker 1>forgive me if this is you know, if this is
<v Speaker 1>over overkill here, but like, even if you hate plants,
<v Speaker 1>the pragmatic fact that having plant cover on the landscape
<v Speaker 1>makes it twenty or thirty degrees cooler, Like, wouldn't that
<v Speaker 1>be enough that it mitigates flooding you're providing you know,
<v Speaker 1>it makes the soil more absorptive. It's like creating more
<v Speaker 1>pores in the sponge so that it can soak up
<v Speaker 1>more water for flooding. You know, lawn doesn't do any
<v Speaker 1>of that shit. Kyle in Native Habitat Project just did
<v Speaker 1>another clip where he takes a you know, what are
<v Speaker 1>those COVID thermometers they use at the airport, you know
<v Speaker 1>they're used to and he puts it on asphalt. It's
<v Speaker 1>one hundred and thirty degrees. Puts it on concrete, it's
<v Speaker 1>like one hundred and twenty degrees. Puts it on lawn.
<v Speaker 1>Lawn was like the same temperature, only marginally cooler than concrete.
<v Speaker 1>I assume as falls the hottest because it's darker. Concrete
<v Speaker 1>it's generally a lighter color, doesn't get as hot. But
<v Speaker 1>the lawn was almost as hot as the fucking concrete.
<v Speaker 1>It's just the heat island, you know, And of course
<v Speaker 1>it is. There's no you know, there's barely any leaf
<v Speaker 1>cover maybe an inch or two preventing the sun from
<v Speaker 1>heating up the ground. It's it's fucking nuts. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the how unpragmatic mode turf grass is. Now, if you're
<v Speaker 1>playing bouchy ball or doing a picnic in the park,
<v Speaker 1>I get it. But if you're just you know, you're
<v Speaker 1>just some parts like like to do a movie night thing.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you have, like a free movie night. You
<v Speaker 1>roll out a fucking blanket and sit out there, eat
<v Speaker 1>a bucket of chicken and snort cocaine with your I'm
<v Speaker 1>just kidding around. I don't know why I picked fried
<v Speaker 1>chicken and cocaine. But any well, you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>You go sit out there and uh, you know, to
<v Speaker 1>get some dried mango and green tea, watch a fucking
<v Speaker 1>movie whatever they do movie nights in the park anywhere
<v Speaker 1>in Texas. It doesn't seem like a great Texas thing.
<v Speaker 1>It's god damn liverro We don't do that shit out her.
<v Speaker 1>We sit in our cars and slowly give ourselves metabolic
<v Speaker 1>diseases from not moving and eating greasy shit. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's you know, Lan's got a place you
<v Speaker 1>want to kick a soccer ball around or some shit,
<v Speaker 1>But it's so fucking hot. That's what's so funny to
<v Speaker 1>me too. Like again, another thing I say all the
<v Speaker 1>fucking time, people like, well, I got you know where
<v Speaker 1>our kid's supposed to play? What kid? If you got
<v Speaker 1>a loan that's one hundred and twenty degrees, you're sitting
<v Speaker 1>out there in the fucking sun. What kid, he's gonna
<v Speaker 1>like playing? I never like doing that. Go, yeah, I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna go stand out in the middle of his field
<v Speaker 1>of moe turf grass where it's one hundred and twenty
<v Speaker 1>degrees and sweat my ass off. And no. Man, we
<v Speaker 1>used to like to go by the creeks and the
<v Speaker 1>bushes and the alleys and stuff to hide on her.
<v Speaker 1>That was the fun stuff. But you know, kids don't
<v Speaker 1>really go outside anymore these days anyways. Everyone is just
<v Speaker 1>staring at a phone all the time. I think the
<v Speaker 1>Internet shutting down for a day or two would be
<v Speaker 1>hilarious and good for good for all of us. It's it,
<v Speaker 1>really is. You's got to put that shit down, not
<v Speaker 1>fucking stare at it sometimes, you know, uh, figure out
<v Speaker 1>something to do, you know, look up shit on I Naturalist,
<v Speaker 1>read about random stuff on Wikipedia, think about the world
<v Speaker 1>around you, Think up questions to ask you know, at
<v Speaker 1>least you could use you know, just get off social media.
<v Speaker 1>Think of questions you want to ask the internet. You
<v Speaker 1>want to ask the oracle anyway. But they love clear
<v Speaker 1>and brush in Texas, they really do. They clear everything,
<v Speaker 1>cut it down and don't let it be messy. You know,
<v Speaker 1>don't let the plant covers messy. What a fucking twisted,
<v Speaker 1>twisted way to think about things. So anyway, I'm gonna be.
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to Minnesota in September. I'm getting paid to
<v Speaker 1>go talk to some college class. I can't believe to
<v Speaker 1>have me up there at college. They're gonna have me
<v Speaker 1>at some university talk about a bunch of stuff on
<v Speaker 1>a prairie's a prairie ecology. And so I'm going up
<v Speaker 1>there in somewhere like northwest of Minneapolis mid September to
<v Speaker 1>pay me. I gotta drive my ass up there. That
<v Speaker 1>should be a long drive. And then what else did
<v Speaker 1>you have? We got this Ecuador trip in November. I
<v Speaker 1>think October. I'm open. Maybe I'll just try to relax
<v Speaker 1>if I can do that. You know, do a bong rip.
<v Speaker 1>When's the last time you did a bong rip. I
<v Speaker 1>haven't done a bong rip in five years. Probably. I
<v Speaker 1>don't like the pot, but every once in a while
<v Speaker 1>it's nice. It's nice for trying to relax and calm
<v Speaker 1>yourself down. I just went to go check on sorel
<v Speaker 1>famnists Scoparius. It smells so good. It's in the amorphy tribe,
<v Speaker 1>and I guess they just split up the genus sorel damn,
<v Speaker 1>that's knots. There's a soorl famnists and sorodendron, And I
<v Speaker 1>guess it was polyphyletic. I guess when they looked at it,
<v Speaker 1>so I think it was written who wrote a column
<v Speaker 1>be in her Mexican bonders. There's a paper on it.
<v Speaker 1>It's open source, you get downloaded, but you know they're
<v Speaker 1>doing this whole dn They look at the DNA, they
<v Speaker 1>find out that it's you know, it's not as simple
<v Speaker 1>as morphology. The relationships are as simple as morphology would
<v Speaker 1>have you believe. But uh, you know, we're just outside
<v Speaker 1>of El Pasa right now, driving along beautiful I ten.
<v Speaker 1>I just saw the most the most lovely and just
<v Speaker 1>baking in the sun. I can only imagine how it
<v Speaker 1>smelled inside one liter bottle of urine that presumably had
<v Speaker 1>been you know, discarded by one of the many truckers
<v Speaker 1>on I ten, one of the bleakest freeways. It's like
<v Speaker 1>the Texas equivalent between Fort Worth and I'll pass. So
<v Speaker 1>I ten and what is it? I twenty are like
<v Speaker 1>the most bleak section of freeway after I five in
<v Speaker 1>central California. It's just, I mean, really, you just you
<v Speaker 1>want an Americana experience. You want a good exp you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you're from Europe or Australia or saying you really
<v Speaker 1>want you really want a rough idea, not rough, very
<v Speaker 1>very succinct, very articulate idea of what America is. Like.
<v Speaker 1>Go hang out on an I five corridor, like around
<v Speaker 1>the Bakersfield Fresno area, or I ten and I twenty
<v Speaker 1>anywhere west of Fort Worth in Dallas, which are both shitholes.
<v Speaker 1>No offense to anybody that has to live there. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's it's really the best way to get an idea
<v Speaker 1>of what American you're I'm sitting there looking at that swollen,
<v Speaker 1>ready to burst piss bottle, and I just said to myself,
<v Speaker 1>I said, Wow, this is really the American experience right here.
<v Speaker 1>You know, this is like statue of liberty to my
<v Speaker 1>you know what it must have looked like the statue
<v Speaker 1>of liberty to my great grandparents when they were coming
<v Speaker 1>over here from Italy back in the twenties or fucking tens,
<v Speaker 1>whenever the hell it was. You know, you see that piss,
<v Speaker 1>You're like wow, I bet it smells wonderful, all that
<v Speaker 1>mountain dew and high fruit, those corn syrup flushed through
<v Speaker 1>some three hundred pound man's and testines or kidneys or
<v Speaker 1>whatever the for kidneys I mean, you know what I mean?
<v Speaker 1>Sorry anyway, but Sorol Faminists scoparius, which is such a
<v Speaker 1>fucking gorgeous native like humanist shrub, a relative of Dahlia
<v Speaker 1>d A l e a with the glands too. It's
<v Speaker 1>got the same glance. And it was flushing big big
<v Speaker 1>indigo flowers. When was it like a month or two
<v Speaker 1>of go when they come out here? I can't fucking
<v Speaker 1>remember I go, I go down pass so far too much.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it was in May, maybe it's two months ago,
<v Speaker 1>but I was hoping to get seeds. There's no seeds.
<v Speaker 1>Paddy Manning grow it. Not many other people, but it
<v Speaker 1>should be more common. Imagine if you went to like,
<v Speaker 1>you know again, like a depressing strip mall or you
<v Speaker 1>know any of these like shopping you know what I mean,
<v Speaker 1>shopping thoroughfare. Uh, you know, an a'l passo or something.
<v Speaker 1>But instead of all this hideous home depot garden section ship,
<v Speaker 1>they had Soro Feminist School Paris and that be nice.
<v Speaker 1>God damn, maybe one day, but uh, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>not gonna change everything, but it'll make the turns of
<v Speaker 1>life easier to swallow and maybe create some more life
<v Speaker 1>in that in the these very arid, hot regions. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it's ninety five degrees fahrenheit out, I'm blazing down. I ten. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>look at Warez looks lovely. El Paso. Really he's got
<v Speaker 1>a rough. They got a cool museum and like they're
<v Speaker 1>near to college. They got like a nice native plant
<v Speaker 1>garden with some rarities too. But I'm friends with one
<v Speaker 1>of the dudes that's that works there. It's the at
<v Speaker 1>the college and what is a uto passo? But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they got a nice day a plant card.
<v Speaker 1>But aside from that, and the museum is cool. But
<v Speaker 1>aside from there's not a lot going on in a
<v Speaker 1>Passo except that Italian restaurant I went to when they
<v Speaker 1>filmed that wired uh plant Wired Plant Talk interview that
<v Speaker 1>I did. When was it there? Was twenty twenty two?
<v Speaker 1>Got it fit? That was three years ago. So Isacoma
<v Speaker 1>plura flora? That was cool to see. Isacoma is a
<v Speaker 1>composite genus? Very waxy leaves, and a lot of them
<v Speaker 1>are very tolerant of hot, dry conditions. We get Isacoma,
<v Speaker 1>Cornopofolio in South Texas Isacoma and z ci West. I
<v Speaker 1>think there's a few in Mexico, you know. Exploring plant diversity,
<v Speaker 1>the ast racy with the biogeographic with a biogeographical lens,
<v Speaker 1>where is this genus distributed comostly? These nice I found out?
<v Speaker 1>I guess I should have known this, or I should
<v Speaker 1>have figured But the family ast racy comprises like ten
<v Speaker 1>of the total population in existence of flowering plants, which
<v Speaker 1>is nuts, So orchids must be ten percent too, So
<v Speaker 1>twenty percent of angiosperms are astraraci or orchids. Well that's
<v Speaker 1>not correct, not by biomass, but by species. You know,
<v Speaker 1>if you're counting the total species in existence, I should
<v Speaker 1>have been more articulate there. Oh, what of that putting
<v Speaker 1>up here? It looks like a nice, bleak concrete data
<v Speaker 1>center or some sort of fucking warehouse. It looks like
<v Speaker 1>a goddamn external hard drive. How about that? Anyway, two
<v Speaker 1>hours to go to beautiful Alamo Gordo, and then we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna be up in the mountains fittally fucking around at
<v Speaker 1>eight thousand feet. I just talked to Alan. Him and
<v Speaker 1>Mandy are on their way to it. They're driving out here,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they're going going their long haul in it.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, I forgot what I forgot what a shit
<v Speaker 1>old El Paso is. And I only mean that in
<v Speaker 1>this sense. I mean, like any city in Texas is
<v Speaker 1>a shittle. It's just built for cars. You can't fucking
<v Speaker 1>walk anywhere, you know, It's it's dangerous. Anyone who's seen
<v Speaker 1>on a sidewalk walking is presumed to be poor or
<v Speaker 1>homeless or otherwise just unable to afford a car. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there's an old guy asking for spare change here on
<v Speaker 1>the Median Strip. He's got a you know, there's two
<v Speaker 1>of them. They got matching shirts. They got vests and
<v Speaker 1>matching shirts that say God Loves sinners. The religious shit
<v Speaker 1>in this day really does get to be a lot.
<v Speaker 1>And of course I don't mind if people are religious,
<v Speaker 1>but of course so many religious people, you know, don't
<v Speaker 1>actually follow the parts about you know, the parts of
<v Speaker 1>the religion about being kind and taking care of the
<v Speaker 1>poor and shit like that. They're just really and they're
<v Speaker 1>really horny for the culture worse stuff. It's all just
<v Speaker 1>in doctrination, but it gets to be a fucking lot
<v Speaker 1>where I live. Yeah, I was in my neighborhood the
<v Speaker 1>other day. They went on a ten mile bike rad.
<v Speaker 1>I've been biking around, which is fucking nice. Gotta get
<v Speaker 1>some cardio without pounding the knees, you know. And so
<v Speaker 1>and I used to bike a lot. I would like
<v Speaker 1>smoke weed, bike from Chicago to Milwaukee, smoke a dube
<v Speaker 1>and then just bike for eight hours because weed makes
<v Speaker 1>repetitive exercise easier. This is I must have been like
<v Speaker 1>twenty two or something, but I was really in the
<v Speaker 1>bike in a lot and uh, but it's terrifying to
<v Speaker 1>do it in Texas because the drivers are horrible. All
<v Speaker 1>the trucks are oversized. And now especially since you know
<v Speaker 1>half half the idiots that comprise the majority of the
<v Speaker 1>American populace, they're on their phone all the time. Got
<v Speaker 1>Jack's mouth is powerful. I'm sorry, he's you know, he's
<v Speaker 1>he's panting. He's doing his nervous panting in the back
<v Speaker 1>and the fumes are coming out. But anyway, but I
<v Speaker 1>was in my neighborhood and I live in you know,
<v Speaker 1>a poor Hispanic neighborhood, generally poor working classes Panic neighborhood.
<v Speaker 1>And I saw some white girls driving around. You never
<v Speaker 1>see white girls in my neighborhood. So I saw these
<v Speaker 1>Caucasian women, these Caucasian young ladies, driving around in a
<v Speaker 1>fucking I don't know, some sort of sporty small soccer momsuv.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, I knew they weren't from it that
<v Speaker 1>I knew they were. They were fucking Mormons or Jehovah's
<v Speaker 1>witnesses or you know, one of the cults, all the
<v Speaker 1>different you know, cults, the sects of Christianity come to
<v Speaker 1>my neighborhood to prey on the poor people there, because
<v Speaker 1>that's what they do. You know, you got to get
<v Speaker 1>them in the door, you know, offer them salvation. If
<v Speaker 1>they're not that well educated, they're really easy to fall
<v Speaker 1>for it, you know. And I think that just the
<v Speaker 1>whole missionary thing's part of the Mormon experience that sat
<v Speaker 1>You know, I've met a lot of lovely Mormons, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and I've got a lot of gay friends that grew
<v Speaker 1>up in Utah. They grew up Mormon, and they're all
<v Speaker 1>bubbly and always nice. But there's a you know, a
<v Speaker 1>high propensity of homosexuals in the Mormon could, but at
<v Speaker 1>least they come out, which is you know, and I'm
<v Speaker 1>only saying that because I just noticed. That's that's the thing.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it's the repression or what, but
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they of course leave the church later on,
<v Speaker 1>but uh, you know, bubbly blonde, very kind. Uh anyway, man,
<v Speaker 1>how many? My friend Vanessa, my friend Joe? Who else?
<v Speaker 1>I haven't seen Joe in forever. He was a wonderful man.
<v Speaker 1>He was making fun of me for one. We went
<v Speaker 1>on a road trip together for a few days, and
<v Speaker 1>he was making fun of me for one to go
<v Speaker 1>to all these geologic sites in northern Youthah. He said,
<v Speaker 1>he said that he felt like, you know, a kid
<v Speaker 1>who's dead was making you know, dragging their asses to
<v Speaker 1>rock and roll Hall of Fame or something. I think
<v Speaker 1>it's the way he put it, which was actually pretty funny.
<v Speaker 1>Where the fuck did he go? Anyway? Yeah, but he's
<v Speaker 1>you know, he's gay, he's gay as hell. He was
<v Speaker 1>brought up Mormon. But but I met his family. They're
<v Speaker 1>very nice people, and they didn't they you know, they
<v Speaker 1>didn't They never disposed of him for being something that
<v Speaker 1>their religion supposed to prohibits. I don't fucking I don't
<v Speaker 1>never got that part. But anyway, but you know, but
<v Speaker 1>not knocking Mormons, but I'm just saying I knew what
<v Speaker 1>they were doing there. You know, they're salespeople, so you know,
<v Speaker 1>and that kind of it just gets annoying. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>I guess it's better than nothing kind of is it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, you know, if you got to offer
<v Speaker 1>people hopes somehow, but but it's still depressing and it's
<v Speaker 1>predatory and anyway, so I figured I would just go
<v Speaker 1>off to them and ask them some questions. I thought
<v Speaker 1>this would be funny. They approached me. I had some
<v Speaker 1>guys on bikes approached me a month or two ago,
<v Speaker 1>and I said, fuck no. They said, can we have
<v Speaker 1>a word with you for a minute. I said fuck no,
<v Speaker 1>and they said wow, And I said, all right. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I just said said, that's that's absolutely right, Yes, Wow
<v Speaker 1>is right. Fuck no, stay away from me. But then
<v Speaker 1>this time, you know, these these were like nice young ladies.
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't be rude to them. So I said, I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna go back and uh and and try to indoctrinate them.
<v Speaker 1>And that's what I did. So I just you know,
<v Speaker 1>started talking to them about the geologic time scale, uh,
<v Speaker 1>the evolution of life, great oxygenation event, evolution of land plants.
<v Speaker 1>How that that fills the void of of an origin story.
<v Speaker 1>Understanding evolution and natural selection fills the void of an
<v Speaker 1>origin story that we all seem to need as people.
<v Speaker 1>And it makes a lot more sense, and it's a
<v Speaker 1>lot more quantifiable and measurable than some of the stories
<v Speaker 1>that religion tells us, which of course are I believe
<v Speaker 1>are just supposed to be metaphors anyways, not taken literally.
<v Speaker 1>But but it was, you know, it was fun to do.
<v Speaker 1>And also you know, I knew it wasn't gonna work
<v Speaker 1>on them, of course, but it would get them to
<v Speaker 1>it would drive them away. And so within two minutes
<v Speaker 1>they were they were checking out of the conversation. I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna do that more. It's similar to what what I
<v Speaker 1>do with cops too, Like if they stop me, I
<v Speaker 1>just keep talking, Just start keep talking about plants. I
<v Speaker 1>learned that from Allen. You would talk about mushrooms. Just
<v Speaker 1>start telling them about different plants and blah blah blah
<v Speaker 1>and native plants, how things evolve, biogeography, families and genus,
<v Speaker 1>you know, families and genera that are native to certain
<v Speaker 1>regions of the world, and you know, ecological strategies based
<v Speaker 1>on whatever set of conditions a plant may have evolved. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that kind of thing, and I think it's uh, it
<v Speaker 1>does drive them away, but that's kind of what you want.
<v Speaker 1>And then you know, if it doesn't drive them away,
<v Speaker 1>then they're genuinely interested, then maybe you've you know, maybe
<v Speaker 1>you've just indoctrinated someone else into the cult of the
<v Speaker 1>living world. The thing that always drives me nuts about
<v Speaker 1>the religious fault though, is that, you know, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know why some of them takes so much issue with evolution.
<v Speaker 1>Still that just seems fucking that just seems lazy minded,
<v Speaker 1>because your religion doesn't tell you that you can't believe
<v Speaker 1>in natural selection and evolution and things that are solidly
<v Speaker 1>quantifiable things that we've seen in real time, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And it's like if you were back in when was
<v Speaker 1>Galileo sixteen hundreds, when was he doing his thing looking
<v Speaker 1>at through his tubes, that'd be like if you were
<v Speaker 1>if you thought that, like believing in the existence of
<v Speaker 1>the solar system and that Earth wasn't at the center
<v Speaker 1>of it. If you thought that that was was was heresy.
<v Speaker 1>Holy Dick, I can't wait to be in New Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>We're almost there. We're near to we're near to border.
<v Speaker 1>Jack finally calmed down. No maybe not no, No, he's
<v Speaker 1>still he's still panting, nervous. It's like a nervous panting.
<v Speaker 1>You know what. He was a puppy sixteen years ago
<v Speaker 1>when I first got him. He used to just puke
<v Speaker 1>all over the back seat of my little Honda Civic.
<v Speaker 1>I had a ready Honda Civic and he was you know,
<v Speaker 1>he would he would barf all the time. So I
<v Speaker 1>just would lay sheets down and then when we'd go places,
<v Speaker 1>he just yeah, he got carsick. He didn't like driving
<v Speaker 1>in the car. There's a lot of hideous development going
<v Speaker 1>on in El Paso, just like just like most of
<v Speaker 1>Texas doesn't seem very well thought out. New town homes
<v Speaker 1>in a barren in a barren, rocky wasteland on the
<v Speaker 1>outskirts of al Paso. Oh, what is this? This is
<v Speaker 1>Baker as Sarahthroides forgot, that's dominant here. You know, al
<v Speaker 1>Paso's got some nice stuff. We're at elevation four thousand feet,
<v Speaker 1>so it's hot as balls, but the air is dry
<v Speaker 1>and it cools off. It's still not as hot as
<v Speaker 1>where I live, as in South Texas, but it's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be chilly up at the nine thousand foot elevation and
<v Speaker 1>his Sacramentos. But yet next time, some you know, some
<v Speaker 1>religious nutter. And again, not all religious people are nutters.
<v Speaker 1>Some are very kind and and wonderful, you know, especially
<v Speaker 1>if they're you know, gay Mormons. But but next time
<v Speaker 1>some religious mat or whether it's you know, anybody who's orthodox,
<v Speaker 1>I feel like, next time they come at you with
<v Speaker 1>some anti evolution shit and they don't understand, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they say it's uh. Which again this is really I
<v Speaker 1>feel like, only if you're in the southeast or in
<v Speaker 1>Texas are you gonna encounter this level of shit for
<v Speaker 1>brinth But should you, should it happen, just ask them,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if they can explain what haployd and diployd
<v Speaker 1>mean and how it's you know, so much of the
<v Speaker 1>things that back up evolution or the basis for modern medicine,
<v Speaker 1>especially you know, cancer research, that it's elementary genetics, things
<v Speaker 1>like that, and UH and see what happens. That's the
<v Speaker 1>thing about you know, with humanity, it's it's a small
<v Speaker 1>minority of people that you know, are smart enough to
<v Speaker 1>make room for technological advancement. Then the rest of the
<v Speaker 1>population benefits without really understanding how it works. This is
<v Speaker 1>something you know, and if they understood how it works,
<v Speaker 1>it would better all of society. This is something Carl
<v Speaker 1>Sagan brought up all the time, but it just it
<v Speaker 1>escapes people. And I think we're only getting dumber, especially
<v Speaker 1>now that we have AI and and smartphones all the time.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, these things do the thinking for us without
<v Speaker 1>without us having to really comprehend any of the knowledge
<v Speaker 1>that we can ask the oracle that is the internet.
<v Speaker 1>You know, people you could just dictation, especially holy shit,
<v Speaker 1>what's going on with kids? And AI too. You don't actually,
<v Speaker 1>you don't actually have to think about problems anymore. You
<v Speaker 1>just have to be smart enough to look shit up
<v Speaker 1>online and then remember it, memorize it for a test,
<v Speaker 1>and then you get the degree. And then you know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how we where are we headed? Oh
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna be gnarly, just increasingly dumber populace, But maybe not.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know who knows. Oh nice, thunder start off
<v Speaker 1>in a distance. Oh that's nice. We're driving by Fort
<v Speaker 1>Bliss right now. You know, it's all dunes out here.
<v Speaker 1>It's this red sandy. It's a very large patch from
<v Speaker 1>here to fucking Carlsbad southeast to the oil fields of
<v Speaker 1>Midland and the I mean, you want to talk truck
<v Speaker 1>or piss bottles and bleakness. That's spoy Midland Odessa area anyway.
<v Speaker 1>But it's all this red sand. And then there's just
<v Speaker 1>and there's you know, little patches of miskuit. The misky's
<v Speaker 1>here top out of two or three feet tall instead
<v Speaker 1>of thirty feet tall. But there's just this giant wall
<v Speaker 1>of dust and rain. And to my east it's fucking
<v Speaker 1>it's massive. I could barely see the mountains in the distance.
<v Speaker 1>I'm so excited to be in New Mexico. How nice
<v Speaker 1>doesn't feel anywhere near as bleak as Texas or off limits.
<v Speaker 1>So we're up here now you could probably tell there's
<v Speaker 1>no road noise left. But we're up here. And now
<v Speaker 1>we're like eighty five hundred feet more storm clouds in
<v Speaker 1>the distance. Man, These these clouds, these masses of water
<v Speaker 1>vapor rising into the sky. Oh they're so lovely to see.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, we're eighty five hundred feet doug Fur Forest,
<v Speaker 1>Gamble Oak Forest just outside of Alamogordo, beautiful Alamogordo, New Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>And I already found a bunch of cool stuff. Found
<v Speaker 1>a gymnapolis ludiefolius someone had found, which has silosin in it,
<v Speaker 1>which is what psilocybin polymerizes into. But it's got trace amounts,
<v Speaker 1>so it's technically an illegal mushroom. But there were only
<v Speaker 1>trace amounts that. There's Allen fucking around on the I
<v Speaker 1>should go go get him. But but yeah, Ryby's where
<v Speaker 1>we're at. Now, there's Ryby's. There's doug Fur. A lot
<v Speaker 1>of the doug Furs are dropping needles, which is concerning.
<v Speaker 1>There's like not just needles, but entire branches like it
<v Speaker 1>looks like it might be insect I guess it could
<v Speaker 1>be hailed too, but it's really kind of extensive. But
<v Speaker 1>the trees look healthy. Otherwise they're not. There's no orange
<v Speaker 1>and needles at the top. It looks maybe, yeah, maybe
<v Speaker 1>it was a insects removing it. What else we saw
<v Speaker 1>we saw? Uh no, no micro rhyzl stuff. Yeah, oh no,
<v Speaker 1>we saw an iosby, which is micro rhyzol, but uh,
<v Speaker 1>nothing else. Here's here's an We're gonna go see how
<v Speaker 1>to own else about the tricholo my own.
<v Speaker 2>This is a Tricholoma aurantium. Really cool tricholoma. Look at
<v Speaker 2>that snake skin pattern on the stem.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what the ship? That's crazy. It looks like fading paint,
<v Speaker 1>like dripping fading paint almost.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, And if you taste it, you'll be really
<v Speaker 2>sad that you did, because it's very better.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, And this is this is probably not edible, but no,
<v Speaker 1>there's no reason to try because it tastes like hell anyway, exactly. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and this is michael rhizol. We got what how big
<v Speaker 1>is that cap? That's probably five inches across and the
<v Speaker 1>little ones maybe two inches?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, pretty big, stocky trichyloma.
<v Speaker 1>And so this is there's staying with the doug Verson
<v Speaker 1>Quircus gambelia here, and there's and then abs AB's as well.
<v Speaker 1>Aby's kind of color. Yeah, these are big. How do
<v Speaker 1>these smell? They stink or what the oh? Yeah they do?
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow? Yeah that color so tricholoma orantium you said,
<v Speaker 1>are they yellow color? Orange orangish yellow, and then what's
<v Speaker 1>that greening? It's just rotten or what?
<v Speaker 2>No, they do that they have green color sometimes.
<v Speaker 1>And kind of like this revolute margin a little bit
<v Speaker 1>fold it over. Do they mature? Does that end when
<v Speaker 1>they mature? Oh? This guy's still in the ground. Huh uh?
<v Speaker 1>Always wonder how extensive the myceelium is underground?
<v Speaker 2>Have you tasted it yet?
<v Speaker 3>No?
<v Speaker 1>I got it like putting it in my mouth. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>look at that. That's crazy. It looks like what paint
<v Speaker 1>does on a wall if there's a fire indoors or something.
<v Speaker 1>That's kind of what it looks like. So are these
<v Speaker 1>these are dropping spores right now? Probably? Huh oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>tell have nice white prints. If I were to take
<v Speaker 1>a hand lens up to them, what it could would
<v Speaker 1>I be able to see them? Or is it a
<v Speaker 1>little bit?
<v Speaker 2>We stacked one hundred spores and they'd be one millimeter,
<v Speaker 2>so they're a little too small for HandLens.
<v Speaker 1>And it's a little yellow one. Okay, tell tell me
<v Speaker 1>about this one. This is this is Hygrophers.
<v Speaker 2>Crysodon, a little yellow ones macarizol, And like everything in Higraphrius,
<v Speaker 2>it's edible. Usually they're a little bigger than that.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, we got a revision. What do you call this? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>look coming right off the stick. Trauma, Watch out for
<v Speaker 1>the dog shit zipto. What is it?
<v Speaker 2>Cypto trauma?
<v Speaker 1>Cipto trauma. Yeah, look at it? How would you? It's
<v Speaker 1>got like a convex cap. Yeah, really pretty. But then
<v Speaker 1>there's stipe textures. Fucking the texture. You pay a lot
<v Speaker 1>of attention to texture when you're looking at mushrooms. Huh. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's not just colors and shapes, but texture of stipe,
<v Speaker 1>texture of cap. What was what was the thing with
<v Speaker 1>the really nice what was it that I showed you?
<v Speaker 1>It was like a pink and had a crazy texture
<v Speaker 1>to the cap. Castania what was it? Folliota castannia no lepiota.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, but that's just a separate lepiota is. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was nice. So, you know, I just put the
<v Speaker 1>phone down for a minute. We just found like Goosta
<v Speaker 1>comporter eye, which is an apa ced carrot family. It's
<v Speaker 1>also known as Osha, which you know, back when I
<v Speaker 1>used to know people that were into herbalism, not so
<v Speaker 1>much anymore. It's a little hippie dippy for me. I
<v Speaker 1>mean whatever. It's fine, whatever you're into. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's not always the most practical. I think there's like
<v Speaker 1>a little bit of cosplaying alchemists in there sometimes just
<v Speaker 1>saying sometimes right, no shade to anybody. But it's a
<v Speaker 1>cool plant, and it's somewhat rare, kind of looks kind
<v Speaker 1>of like a Queen Anne's lace look to it, but
<v Speaker 1>there's no hairs on it. And reportedly it's really hard
<v Speaker 1>to grow. You know, we're up here at eighty five
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet is you could probably tell because I'm a
<v Speaker 1>little fucking winded too. But it gets up like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>three feet tall. It was growing in the shade of
<v Speaker 1>some gambles oaks which were maybe fifteen feet tall. It
<v Speaker 1>was grown with acer Grande and tatum this little maple
<v Speaker 1>up here. But I haven't seen it. I've only seen
<v Speaker 1>it in a few places in the West. I've seen
<v Speaker 1>there's another, like there's a couple like eustacumb species in California,
<v Speaker 1>remember like Gustacombe gray was one I would encounter. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, you go to these high elevations in the
<v Speaker 1>montane West and you find all these cool carrots simopterus
<v Speaker 1>like goose to coumbhit. There's a bunch more drawn a blank,
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, I hadn't seen it in a while. Like
<v Speaker 1>gets poached a lot too, because it's an herbal remedy.
<v Speaker 1>So you know, if you've convinced yourself that you are
<v Speaker 1>sick or otherwise need some sort of medicine, you get
<v Speaker 1>the play alchemists make a potion out of it. The
<v Speaker 1>roots smell really good, but of course when you take
<v Speaker 1>the roots, you kill the plant. And has anyone ever
<v Speaker 1>successfully grown Oh shit, I don't think so. Anyway. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>it's a little it's getting a little hot, just a
<v Speaker 1>little bumy. But there's a thunderstorm on the horizon. So
<v Speaker 1>but that was great to see. It was cool to
<v Speaker 1>see like goose to come. And we saw some more
<v Speaker 1>tricolomas as well. Always like noting the micro rhizal affiliates.
<v Speaker 1>And I just when I was laying down taking a
<v Speaker 1>picture of what was it a I figured some sort
<v Speaker 1>of shelf mushroom. I got up and noticed all these
<v Speaker 1>things crawling on me, which I was, you know, I shit,
<v Speaker 1>damn near gasped in horror. I thought it was seed ticks,
<v Speaker 1>but it turned out, damon tye, I sent them a photo.
<v Speaker 1>He thinks it's just in stars of batbed bugs. So
<v Speaker 1>still a bloodsucking parasite. But you know, at least it's
<v Speaker 1>not a tick. So get some fucking ivermectin. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta take the IV. Gotta have some ivermectin on
<v Speaker 1>hand for dealing with parasites. You know, Oh they got
<v Speaker 1>a little they got a little sign, they got a
<v Speaker 1>little label. But you know, you get to take some ivermectin.
<v Speaker 1>Then you get to joke about taking fucking ivermectin too,
<v Speaker 1>which is which is funny. Albendasoul and ivermectin. Always whenever
<v Speaker 1>you leave the country, go pick up two of those
<v Speaker 1>two sets. Look up the adequate dosers. Pick up two
<v Speaker 1>sets and just have them on hand. You know they're
<v Speaker 1>they're de wormers and for parasites, and the ivermectin is
<v Speaker 1>good for the ticks and the chiggers as well. Ah,
<v Speaker 1>I'm back in a hotel now, and you know, Jack,
<v Speaker 1>he pete on a floor right by the door. You know,
<v Speaker 1>he's he's sixteen years old, and he's a floor piss
<v Speaker 1>her in his old age, which if that's the only
<v Speaker 1>you know, if that and aimlessly wandering around and having
<v Speaker 1>the issue with silver alert every once in a while,
<v Speaker 1>if those are the only cons to his you know,
<v Speaker 1>him being old as hell, it's not that bad. But
<v Speaker 1>uh yeah, I just you know, it's okay. You just
<v Speaker 1>clean it up, Just get the kids, get the hotel
<v Speaker 1>towels and throw them on the floor and then put
<v Speaker 1>them in the bath. That you just you just want
<v Speaker 1>to hide the piss from the cleaning lady. Otherwise she's
<v Speaker 1>got to report it and then you get charged, as
<v Speaker 1>I learned when you know, my daughter pissed the bed
<v Speaker 1>we were sleeping in at the hotel. We got forced
<v Speaker 1>to stay up by United Airlines after they canceled oura
<v Speaker 1>our flight out of Houston, so we got stuck in
<v Speaker 1>a in a what was it? What was was a
<v Speaker 1>Marriott They put us in, like the Marriott, one of
<v Speaker 1>those rich hotels that doesn't give the free breakfast. None
<v Speaker 1>of the rich hotels give the free breakfast. So that
<v Speaker 1>means you got to just steal more towels to make
<v Speaker 1>up for it. But if you ever have a chance
<v Speaker 1>to go out and vandalize the Marriotte Hotel u uh
<v Speaker 1>near George Bush International Airport in Houston, please do it.
<v Speaker 1>I would recommend some sort of well what I would do,
<v Speaker 1>And I'm not telling you to do this. I'm just
<v Speaker 1>saying because they charged us. You know, she was my
<v Speaker 1>daughter was on cancer manage at the time. She peed
<v Speaker 1>the bed. I didn't. I made the mistake of not
<v Speaker 1>and it was only a little bit of piss. She
<v Speaker 1>had a diaper around, but she still a little bit
<v Speaker 1>of piss, and so I just i'd made the mistake
<v Speaker 1>of not cleaning it up that in there, and they
<v Speaker 1>charged us five hundred bucks. So it was fucking brutal.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, this is what you would do, This is
<v Speaker 1>what I would do. You get you get some etch
<v Speaker 1>bath from the And again I'm not encouraging anyone to
<v Speaker 1>vandalize anything unless you really got a hankering for it,
<v Speaker 1>which this is a really shit bag hotel too, which
<v Speaker 1>run by terrible people. You know, you get some of
<v Speaker 1>that etch bath, you mix it up, throw it on
<v Speaker 1>their windows, right, you can cause a few hundred, if
<v Speaker 1>not thousands of dollars worth of damage. Now this is
<v Speaker 1>not again, I'm not a I'm not telling you to
<v Speaker 1>do this. I'm just saying, if this were a parallel
<v Speaker 1>dimension and you wanted to do it, that would be.
<v Speaker 1>That would be a way to do it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to just really quick vantage you can just walk by
<v Speaker 1>and just just you know, just splatter it anyway getting distracted.
<v Speaker 1>So I remectin. We always telling you to take ivermectin
<v Speaker 1>for the ticks and chiggers. You can do that if
<v Speaker 1>you've got a bad infestation of like seed ticks, I
<v Speaker 1>would recommend, But otherwise, you know, you don't do it
<v Speaker 1>as just the preventative. But I remect it's not that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, iromectans not that toxic. And it's actually kind
<v Speaker 1>of sad. It saddens me that it got such a
<v Speaker 1>bad rap because all those morons were using it during COVID,
<v Speaker 1>because it's actually a pretty wonderful drug. And this story
<v Speaker 1>of how it was discovered is pretty amazing. Some guy
<v Speaker 1>in Japan was doing soil samples scanning for microbes. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, the microbial diversity in soil, especially among bacteria,
<v Speaker 1>is impossibly diverse and just massive. I mean, there are
<v Speaker 1>so many species and he happened to find this one species.
<v Speaker 1>What was it it was? I think it was streptomyces.
<v Speaker 1>Avermectin is the precursor to ivermectin. But you know it
<v Speaker 1>basically gave the blueprints to scientists for this compound and
<v Speaker 1>they can then synthesize ivermectin. But uh, avermectin was a
<v Speaker 1>compound produced by this bacteria probably is protection against nematodes.
<v Speaker 1>And so he found this one specific species out of
<v Speaker 1>after scanning thousands, he found it from like a golf
<v Speaker 1>course in Japan. Fucking wild. He found this one species
<v Speaker 1>and then he they were able to culture it successfully
<v Speaker 1>and in the lab it did well, and so it
<v Speaker 1>produced avermectin and they that's how that was the discovery
<v Speaker 1>of this. But this was a game changing compound because
<v Speaker 1>it could cure all these weird, fucked up you know,
<v Speaker 1>diseases that you get in the tropics that are caused
<v Speaker 1>by protis and amibas and different invertebrates. So so so
<v Speaker 1>it was a wonderful I mean it was. It was
<v Speaker 1>like penicillin. It was as important it did for protus
<v Speaker 1>what penicillin did for bacteria. Excuse me, not not Protozola
<v Speaker 1>parasitic worms. I'm confusing the two, you know, I I'm
<v Speaker 1>messing up the taxonomy of different lineages of various eukaryotes.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, nematodes. Nematodes and worms were the main and
<v Speaker 1>and insects and invertebrates are arthropods. So but this is
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's a it's a it's a groundbreaking medicine.
<v Speaker 1>But what are the different phyla that nematodes in flatworms? Okay,
<v Speaker 1>philum nematoda that clade, and uh philum Plata hell menthes,
<v Speaker 1>plati hell minthis the flatworms and thorny headed worms philum acanthocephala.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus Christ who studies these things. Oh, and subgrew too
<v Speaker 1>of Plata hawmant These the tapeworms class Cistoda, and there's
<v Speaker 1>many different u Jesus Christ. Liver flukes, blood flukes, pork tapeworm,
<v Speaker 1>heightatid disease. Uh what else, intestinal roundworm? Oh yeah, river blindness,
<v Speaker 1>that was a big one in Senegal lymphatic philariasis. These
<v Speaker 1>are all diseases caused by different worms. So these you
<v Speaker 1>know this, I really need to read up on some
<v Speaker 1>of his taxonomy because I am not I'm pretty clueless
<v Speaker 1>when it comes to some of this stuff. And you know,
<v Speaker 1>being that they caused so many different human diseases, it
<v Speaker 1>would be good to be aware of them. But again,
<v Speaker 1>these are not protozoa. These are not it's a whole
<v Speaker 1>different I think protozoa is. It's I mean, listen to
<v Speaker 1>the you know, if you're interested in any of this,
<v Speaker 1>listen to the podcast I did with my friend Julia.
<v Speaker 1>It was what did Julia doctor Julia van End What
<v Speaker 1>was the name of that. It was like a year ago,
<v Speaker 1>but it was a really fascinating podcast. She's a microbiologist.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so don't knock. I've remeact it. And it's
<v Speaker 1>good to have some on hand, especially if you're visiting
<v Speaker 1>the tropics. Anyway, we had a really nice day yesterday.
<v Speaker 1>We did a little We did that mushroom hunt which
<v Speaker 1>you just listened to part of it, and there was
<v Speaker 1>osha nearby, which was cool to see that again high
<v Speaker 1>elevation medicinal apac. And then after that there was a
<v Speaker 1>plant I wanted to see called paridally, which got split
<v Speaker 1>up into the genus paridally Lafamia Laphamia l A. P
<v Speaker 1>h A M I A. You know what. I read
<v Speaker 1>the paper that did this that split these up. A
<v Speaker 1>while ago. My friend Isaac was studying this and I
<v Speaker 1>was actually traveling around with him in twenty nineteen through
<v Speaker 1>Sonora and various sky islands in the American Southwest when
<v Speaker 1>he was out there sampling and collecting and sampling different
<v Speaker 1>paridley species. But it's a really cool I wanted to
<v Speaker 1>see U. Paridalis Storophila, which is the New Mexico rock daisy.
<v Speaker 1>And this is a really cool group of plants because
<v Speaker 1>they've had an adaptive radiation throughout the American Southwest, you know,
<v Speaker 1>basically speciating on sky islands, so they would get you know,
<v Speaker 1>the idea of what this is called this typical You know,
<v Speaker 1>you've got a larger population that then gets split up
<v Speaker 1>into different groups and isolated, much like happened with the
<v Speaker 1>California cypresses. The genus has sparaciprus, so you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's a classic case of just good old allopatric a speciation.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, if you can think of it, the
<v Speaker 1>way I always thought of it, like with the cypresses,
<v Speaker 1>was imagine you have in this I guess this works
<v Speaker 1>for the rock daisies too, but you got imagine there's
<v Speaker 1>like a big valley and a river runs through it,
<v Speaker 1>and then some ship for brain humans roll roll up.
<v Speaker 1>You know, after millions of years of this valley, this
<v Speaker 1>this plant one splant plant species growing in this big
<v Speaker 1>broad valley that's bordered on all sides by mountains. And
<v Speaker 1>they decide they're gonna damn the river and basically flood
<v Speaker 1>the valley. But in this valley there's these little hills
<v Speaker 1>and the tops of the hills would be above the
<v Speaker 1>water level of the reservoir that then fills the valley.
<v Speaker 1>Once that valley, that dam is put up. And so
<v Speaker 1>this plant species that grows all throughout this valley, but
<v Speaker 1>it also grows on tops of these hills, and they're
<v Speaker 1>all exchanging genes. Well, this doesn't work so well. Imagine
<v Speaker 1>the hills are farther, much farther apart, and when they
<v Speaker 1>can't exchange polland the plants can't exchange pollen when they're
<v Speaker 1>on these hills. Anyway, to point this, the valley gets flooded,
<v Speaker 1>the population in the lowlands gets in the lower areas
<v Speaker 1>gets wiped out by the inundation, and then now you've
<v Speaker 1>just got these isolated hills that can no longer. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the gene flow is restricted. There's no pollen flow between
<v Speaker 1>between these plants anymore. The pollen vector, whether it's insect
<v Speaker 1>or wind, can't go between the hills. And so now
<v Speaker 1>you've got these basically islands in this reservoir, each with
<v Speaker 1>its own, its own population of what started as a
<v Speaker 1>single species. And then as time goes on, since you
<v Speaker 1>know these plants, these populations are restricted from each other,
<v Speaker 1>they're no longer sharing genes. They start the speciating according
<v Speaker 1>to the different climates and environments on each island. Now
<v Speaker 1>remember this is an analogy, so it's got to be.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't it doesn't work so well. But that's basically
<v Speaker 1>what happened with the Sky Islands in the Southwest is
<v Speaker 1>the climate changed and you had, you know, whatever conditions
<v Speaker 1>existed five hundred thousand, one million years ago that were
<v Speaker 1>somewhat uniform in the lower elevations, probably much more music
<v Speaker 1>and more more pleasant for plant life, easier for plants
<v Speaker 1>to grow in that it starts drying and the lowlands
<v Speaker 1>dry up become deserts. The plants, of course are able
<v Speaker 1>to move over time just by seed dispersal, gradually up
<v Speaker 1>to more beneficial growing conditions and higher elevations, but they're
<v Speaker 1>also becoming isolated. So this one population is now broken
<v Speaker 1>up into twenty or thirty different populations subpopulations that then
<v Speaker 1>become their new species. And so that's what happened, not
<v Speaker 1>only with the California cypresses Haspero cyprus. There's like ten
<v Speaker 1>species in California. A lot of them are fucking cool
<v Speaker 1>and really really beautiful plants, but they're restricted to certain
<v Speaker 1>soil types like gabbro or serpentine or whatever. That's also
<v Speaker 1>what happened with the peridles, the rock daisies. And to
<v Speaker 1>make this plant lineage, which is just again a little
<v Speaker 1>fucking daisy looking thing, to make it even cooler is
<v Speaker 1>that they only grow these ones, at least this clade,
<v Speaker 1>they only grow out of cracks and rock walls, So
<v Speaker 1>they're cosmo fights. A cosmo fight is a plant that
<v Speaker 1>grows out of a crack in a rock wall. Now,
<v Speaker 1>I wonder if you got, like a plant that grows
<v Speaker 1>out of concrete retaining walls in cities, is that still
<v Speaker 1>technically a cosmo fight, A ruteral cosmo fight, probably I
<v Speaker 1>would call it that. But anyway, traveling around with Isaac
<v Speaker 1>in twenty nineteen when he was doing his PhD, and
<v Speaker 1>this is what got me interested in this lineage in
<v Speaker 1>this clade, and so I learned there was a new
<v Speaker 1>Mexico one that I hadn't seen yet, so I wanted
<v Speaker 1>to go see it. My fucking camera died too, My
<v Speaker 1>nice camera for taking nice pictures died when I got there.
<v Speaker 1>The battery, I didn't have any extra batteries in the battery.
<v Speaker 1>Shit the bed. But it was a short hike down.
<v Speaker 1>We were like six thousand foot elevations, so it's transitioned
<v Speaker 1>from Chihuahua desert to the higher elevation dug fir forests
<v Speaker 1>in the Sacramento Mountains. But it was a was always intermediate,
<v Speaker 1>so you're getting some of the stuff from up above.
<v Speaker 1>You could tell it's the climate's getting a little bit
<v Speaker 1>more conducive to plant life. It's not just creoso bush,
<v Speaker 1>scrub and misk like it is at four thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, but we're not right. We're not quite at
<v Speaker 1>the dug fur force yet, which meant a lot of
<v Speaker 1>them looked like shit. There was a lot of branch
<v Speaker 1>die back, I guess from a tussock moth, which is
<v Speaker 1>I think it native. I think that the dug fer
<v Speaker 1>tussick month is native. But I know I had seen
<v Speaker 1>a paper where they were not a paper, a news
<v Speaker 1>report where the tussock moth was causing branches to just
<v Speaker 1>ebb size from planted dug furs in Santa Fe. Have
<v Speaker 1>you ever been to Santa Fe before? Has anyone ever
<v Speaker 1>been banned from Santa Fe before? It seems like a
<v Speaker 1>really easy town to get banned from. Uh, it's like
<v Speaker 1>the Berkeley of New Mexico. Is that is that right?
<v Speaker 1>Or what about tows you anyway? Uh? The point is
<v Speaker 1>we were. We went on this nice little hike going
<v Speaker 1>down and it's all limestone affiliates. There was Sydney at
<v Speaker 1>Tenuifolio there, which is Chihuahua desert daisy bush basically asta racy,
<v Speaker 1>great in a native plant garden. I got a bunch
<v Speaker 1>in my yard. They do great, happy as a pig,
<v Speaker 1>and shit in full sun. As long as you water them.
<v Speaker 1>Every once in a while they take take off and
<v Speaker 1>they can turn into like a five foot easily hedgeable
<v Speaker 1>bush with daisies that come off of it, very waxy leaves,
<v Speaker 1>pleasant smells and leaves too. Skeleton leaf GoldenEye is the
<v Speaker 1>common name. I don't know where the fuck that name
<v Speaker 1>came from, but that was there. There was Coberlinius spinosa,
<v Speaker 1>which of course is a monotypic family. It's the only
<v Speaker 1>species in the family uh photosynthetic stems. You know, the
<v Speaker 1>taper into sharp spines looks like it looks like a
<v Speaker 1>crucifixion bush. Which there's like, you know, two other two
<v Speaker 1>or three other plant species that do that, Castilla and
<v Speaker 1>morai Castillas duertie and uh Kenosia halakanta. But oh and
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of Dasilirium wheeler right too, which is a
<v Speaker 1>beautiful So it's the blue sodol I want to get
<v Speaker 1>seeds of that. That's Ailirium. Sodos are easy to grow.
<v Speaker 1>They just take a while. And I feel like, you know, well,
<v Speaker 1>the seeds won't germinate unless they're at seventy degrees fahrenheit
<v Speaker 1>or less. They don't like a lot of heat. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it's exactly seventy degrees fair hut,
<v Speaker 1>but you just you don't want these things to be hot.
<v Speaker 1>You don't want it hot in the you know, when
<v Speaker 1>you're trying to germinate these things, you don't want it
<v Speaker 1>ninety degrees fahrenheit. So what is it in Celsius it's
<v Speaker 1>what's the equation. It's fahrenheit degrees divided by two minus
<v Speaker 1>what is it thirty? Oh my bad, it's it's it's
<v Speaker 1>subtract thirty from the fahrenheit temperature, then divide by two.
<v Speaker 1>So when you're doing fahrenheit the celsius, subtract thirty from
<v Speaker 1>the fahrenheit temperature, so it would be ninety minus thirty.
<v Speaker 1>It's sixty divided by two. It's thirty degrees celsius rough estimate,
<v Speaker 1>and then celsius the fahrenheit is just the exact reverse that.
<v Speaker 1>Multiply by two, then add thirty, So like you know,
<v Speaker 1>twenty degrees celsius times two'd be forty forty plus thirty
<v Speaker 1>seventy degrees fahrenheit, which actual is like sixty eight degrees fahrenheit.
<v Speaker 1>But that's that's a good conversion. Now I just need
<v Speaker 1>a proper one for meters to feet because it's not
<v Speaker 1>always so easy as divide by three anyway. But so yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so that's the Lariu wheel. I was there Cobralinius spinosa
<v Speaker 1>condalia worn nakii, which is ramnasy. It's also got spines
<v Speaker 1>that just taper it the sharp points very reduced leaves,
<v Speaker 1>linear leaves, and tiny fucking flowers that look like sion.
<v Speaker 1>Note this's flowers or is the zeiphis flowers you know,
<v Speaker 1>is the snapomorphies of ramnacy or just even the gestalt
<v Speaker 1>of ramnacy in dry areas. Ramnacy the Buckdorne family of course,
<v Speaker 1>very diverse in dry areas. That was down there, and
<v Speaker 1>then well really surprised me when you get so I
<v Speaker 1>knew this thing grew out of rock. I knew this
<v Speaker 1>peridley species. Now at Lefami it grew out of rock.
<v Speaker 1>And so I was looking for the rock out crops
<v Speaker 1>which were down at the base of the canyon where
<v Speaker 1>the river has cut through, and so anyway, so we
<v Speaker 1>kept walking and then sure enough we hit the rock
<v Speaker 1>out crop like right there. Boom was First off, I
<v Speaker 1>saw this fucking salvia species that I prior to this
<v Speaker 1>I had only read about. I'd never seen it. Salvia pinguefolia,
<v Speaker 1>which is a bush sage. Smells incredible. It's got purple flowers,
<v Speaker 1>and it's growing. It only grows in habitat out of
<v Speaker 1>pure fucking limestone. So it's a it's a it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of like Salvia funaria in the Majave Desert, but it's
<v Speaker 1>not as white and wooly. I mean, Salvia funerea is
<v Speaker 1>an extreme, you know, because that's the driest desert in
<v Speaker 1>North America, the Mojave Desert. It grows in Death Valley.
<v Speaker 1>But this thing, it was still covered in pubescents. It
<v Speaker 1>had some hair, but it was the leaves, aren't you know.
<v Speaker 1>They don't look like a cotton swab like Salvia funerea does. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I was, I was so fucking stoked to see this species.
<v Speaker 1>And I guess it's pretty rare. It only grows in
<v Speaker 1>southeastern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and then supposedly in West Texas,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but probably on some rich pricks land who
<v Speaker 1>won't give you access, you know, like so much. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's the Texas conundrum. I'm really getting fucking tired of
<v Speaker 1>that state. I love it. There's things I love about it, certainly,
<v Speaker 1>not the culture, but you know, I like the plants
<v Speaker 1>and the geology, some of the some of the other
<v Speaker 1>shit out there anyway, So so that was really exciting
<v Speaker 1>to see. And then there was a seedum. Of course,
<v Speaker 1>you always find the cool shit on the rocky outcrops, right,
<v Speaker 1>because it's you're going to find stuff that can grow
<v Speaker 1>or that can't tolerate other conditions, it would get smothered.
<v Speaker 1>And then of course you're gonna find you know, they
<v Speaker 1>can the stuff you find on rocky outcrops doesn't have
<v Speaker 1>any competition because a lot of shit can't grow out
<v Speaker 1>of pure rock without any soil. It's just so you've
<v Speaker 1>got to have drought tolerance. So you've got to be
<v Speaker 1>able to grow send your roots into the cracks in
<v Speaker 1>a rock wall or whatever. And so that's where the
<v Speaker 1>salvia was growing. That's where this seedum was growing. Seedums
<v Speaker 1>of course have you know succulent storage mechan and they
<v Speaker 1>could just little fleshy, crassillaceous bastards. And there was a
<v Speaker 1>cool gallium, I think it was gallium righty eye, which
<v Speaker 1>is you know, bedstraw ruby ac the coffee family, but
<v Speaker 1>this one had tiny red flowers. To see a gallium
<v Speaker 1>with red flowers, And then the fuck else was there
<v Speaker 1>and then there was a kind of serious thing. It
<v Speaker 1>was just Coccinius, one of like the five different subspecies.
<v Speaker 1>And then sure enough there was the perridally just growing
<v Speaker 1>on this this limestone cliff thirty feet above. You know,
<v Speaker 1>definitely got to be sure not to fall and break
<v Speaker 1>your ass. It's a sketchy it's this sketchy fall, but
<v Speaker 1>it was, you know, another variation on the theme. I've
<v Speaker 1>seen so many different prittley species in New Mexico, maybe
<v Speaker 1>four or five. And then there's a shif ton in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas, a bunch you can't access because they're on
<v Speaker 1>private land. They could go at any moment, you know,
<v Speaker 1>if the land and donor sides to get rid of
<v Speaker 1>them for whatever reason. But oh god, there was ah.
<v Speaker 1>And then on the gypsum there were these gypsum exposures too.
<v Speaker 1>You could see White Sands National Monument from the top
<v Speaker 1>of the mountain range. Like when I was in the
<v Speaker 1>dug Fur Force. You can look out and see this
<v Speaker 1>vast expanse of white dunes, gyps some sand dunes from
<v Speaker 1>the top of this mountain range. It was fucking wild.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't realize, I mean, I didn't realize we were
<v Speaker 1>that close, I guess. But but where we were the
<v Speaker 1>spot we were hiking at six thousand feet lower down
<v Speaker 1>where the peridally was, there were there were these exposures
<v Speaker 1>of gypsum and they just they erode so differently. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they're they're much more soluble in water, so they look
<v Speaker 1>like eroding sand castles, like you'd be walking up this
<v Speaker 1>limestone hill and then there's a gypsum exposure which has
<v Speaker 1>a different color and texture, and the soil just suddenly
<v Speaker 1>looks like this barren, eroding gray sand castle. It's got
<v Speaker 1>the sand castle look to it. And that's where I
<v Speaker 1>saw a cleasanthis diffusa everywhere, which is like it's a
<v Speaker 1>nic tageneci. It's it's which there's a ship ton in
<v Speaker 1>the desert, you know, bougain Via family, Mirabilis family. But
<v Speaker 1>this thing was it's got these little, these little winged
<v Speaker 1>fruits and it's it's a woody subshrub. God, it was
<v Speaker 1>cool to see and it was it was like the
<v Speaker 1>only thing growing on some of these gypsum exposures. And
<v Speaker 1>there was another I think we saw Cipho maris, another
<v Speaker 1>weird nicktag. But you know, the nicktags normally have opposite leaves,
<v Speaker 1>their carry off fyle leaves, so they've got betelene pigments,
<v Speaker 1>so like any pinks or reds in them, or purples
<v Speaker 1>look more like the pigment you would see in a
<v Speaker 1>beet or a cactus fruit than you know, the red
<v Speaker 1>pigment you might see and you know something like that's
<v Speaker 1>a member of the blueberry family or the rose family,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. So it was. But these things, these things
<v Speaker 1>are like tough as nails. It's like growing out a
<v Speaker 1>barren gypsum. And then you realize that this gypsum eroding
<v Speaker 1>is what is constantly eroding from gypsum exposures like this
<v Speaker 1>in these mountains is basically what formed White Sands National
<v Speaker 1>Monument where they got that rare earless lizard. My friend
<v Speaker 1>Spencer just saw it. I guess, fucking earless lizard. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it looks like a reptilian overlord theme, like when they
<v Speaker 1>don't have yours. They look really that's when I start
<v Speaker 1>looking real real, you know, they look more human. It's disconcerting.
<v Speaker 1>I'll say that. He showed me a picture of it.
<v Speaker 1>Was disconcerting. Oh wow, you know, unrelated, but I just
<v Speaker 1>got noticed that, Oh that's fucking dope. That this plant
<v Speaker 1>that I thought was just a boring old sedge. No
<v Speaker 1>offense to anybody that's that likes the ciperacy, but I
<v Speaker 1>saw it in these ephemeral pools up in the paramo
<v Speaker 1>of Costa Rica. Really weird looking monocot looked like an octopus,
<v Speaker 1>was spiny tentacles upside down. When I saw it, I
<v Speaker 1>looked like an isoetes. But I you know, I picked
<v Speaker 1>off a leaf or two and there were I didn't
<v Speaker 1>see any black sporangia, but I guess it just wasn't
<v Speaker 1>producing sports at the time. But I just got word
<v Speaker 1>from eye naturalist. Thank you. By the way, fucking einad Is.
<v Speaker 1>It blows my mind that some people shit on that app,
<v Speaker 1>mostly old Caucasian. Mentally, you shouldn't listen to them anyway.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not not a hashtag, not all old Caucasian men.
<v Speaker 1>But I'm just saying the only people I've heard complain
<v Speaker 1>and shit on it are old, old white guys. But
<v Speaker 1>uh it, professional botanists in a professional capacity, they're very professional.
<v Speaker 1>They do professional work, and they're very career oriented in
<v Speaker 1>the field of botany. They do wonderful things, very important things,
<v Speaker 1>important work, important field work in a professional capacity for
<v Speaker 1>botany in the state of Texas anyway. Yeah, but you
<v Speaker 1>should listen to those people anyway. But the point is,
<v Speaker 1>you know the fact that people would shit on on
<v Speaker 1>I natural suppose of mine. But but this thanks to
<v Speaker 1>the I naturalist uh Rafael rafaela Cuna, Rafael acunya. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>it just it was all one word. I couldn't read
<v Speaker 1>it the right way. An I naturalist went through he
<v Speaker 1>was going through Allen's observations, saw it, and then he
<v Speaker 1>had hit some of my observations. But I guess he didn't.
<v Speaker 1>I've got so much shit up there for plants. So
<v Speaker 1>he was he was going through Allen's observations, saw it,
<v Speaker 1>commented Alan contacted me, said does this look like more
<v Speaker 1>like an isoetes? And I said, yeah, it does. But
<v Speaker 1>you know I there was. There were none reported from
<v Speaker 1>the flora of the Talamanca Mountains. I guess they just
<v Speaker 1>maybe they just left out Sela janella or like a potiac.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, no, because they didn't. I remember looking
<v Speaker 1>up WHUPERSI a species. Anyway, I didn't see it there,
<v Speaker 1>so I figured maybe there's none here. But the fucking
<v Speaker 1>habitat sure seemed right. I mean, like an ephemeral shallow pond,
<v Speaker 1>you know, ten inches deep. I was there in the
<v Speaker 1>dry season. It was empty. We were just there in
<v Speaker 1>mid July early July, and it was full. But that
<v Speaker 1>was a goddamned Isoetes. And then yeah, just I normally
<v Speaker 1>I've only seen one or two is Isowhetes species before,
<v Speaker 1>so I wasn't entirely familiar with it. But I know
<v Speaker 1>that the sporangia at the base of the leaves underwater.
<v Speaker 1>I pulled some up, didn't see any and I figured, okay, well,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I thought it was just an allocaris
<v Speaker 1>because it's you know, sedges. And also there was a
<v Speaker 1>mishap we had in Tasmania and I still never got
<v Speaker 1>resolution on this. We were looking for this really cool
<v Speaker 1>same thing, an aquatic plant that grows in ephemeral, shallow
<v Speaker 1>ponds in rocky areas. That plant was Tritheria philamentosa. And
<v Speaker 1>it's still I still never got any resolution on this.
<v Speaker 1>You know, this is a weird basal angiosperm. Let's see. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and I still don't know if it was Tritheria or
<v Speaker 1>if it was a sedge. I think it was Tritheria,
<v Speaker 1>and I collected a little piece for DNA sampling and
<v Speaker 1>sent it to Allen, but I think he lost it.
<v Speaker 1>He's got too much shit. To sequence anyway, really doing
<v Speaker 1>good work. Though by a way, I wish it was
<v Speaker 1>as easy to DNA sequence plants. If anyone out there
<v Speaker 1>wants to teach me, so I can teach others, and
<v Speaker 1>you work in a DNA sequencing lab. Well, also there's
<v Speaker 1>he's just using its for a lot of this stuff
<v Speaker 1>which works with plants. It gets a little bit more complicated.
<v Speaker 1>There's like five or six more gene regions. But if
<v Speaker 1>anyone out there wants to teach me and needs help
<v Speaker 1>in the lab, I will come work in your lab
<v Speaker 1>for free if you could teach me DNA sequencing, and
<v Speaker 1>then so I can teach others, so we can start
<v Speaker 1>doing what all the funky people are doing with plants,
<v Speaker 1>you know, which is citizen sciences, not people who work
<v Speaker 1>in a professional capacity. They don't work professionals than not experts,
<v Speaker 1>but just citizens, you know, citizens scientists, criminal scientists. Starts
<v Speaker 1>sequencing plants and then uploading those sequences of various gene
<v Speaker 1>regions to GenBank. It could really do a lot of good.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, the more people we have sequencing stuff the better.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, if you want to teach me, that's oh,
<v Speaker 1>I don't care where you are. If you're in fucking Germany,
<v Speaker 1>I'll go to German. If you're in Hong Kong, I'll
<v Speaker 1>go to Hong Kong. Teach me sequencing. Put the word
<v Speaker 1>out there, please, and then I will fucking teach other people.
<v Speaker 1>I'll do what Alan's been doing for fungi. But Tritheria
<v Speaker 1>philamentosa was thought to be It was thought to be
<v Speaker 1>something else. What was it it said or something, and
<v Speaker 1>then when it was sequenced, it was discovered. Holy shit,
<v Speaker 1>this thing is in one of the more basal angiosperm orders,
<v Speaker 1>the Nimphiales. Along with along with the quote water lilies
<v Speaker 1>and all, this one of the families in Nymphiales, right,
<v Speaker 1>it's the order after amber l a Lees, which is
<v Speaker 1>the most basal of the orders of angiosperms with flowering plants. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Hi to Telac Cabambase and ninmphi ac are the three families,
<v Speaker 1>and Nymphi a Lees, which is the nmphi Alies. I
<v Speaker 1>need to remember anytime it ends in Alies. It's an order.
<v Speaker 1>Ninphi Alis is sandwich between amberrell A Lei's everybody knows Amberella.
<v Speaker 1>If you don't, you're really fucking them. You gotta learn
<v Speaker 1>about You gotta read about amborella. You know, maybe if
<v Speaker 1>you're just new to this, read about amberrella. It's a
<v Speaker 1>fucking fascinating plant. Doesn't get enough respect. It's so so
<v Speaker 1>weird looking. I've seen it in New Caledonia in those humid,
<v Speaker 1>humid tropical forests at a thousand meters. Maybe they're less
<v Speaker 1>than that. Maybe it's like three thousand. Maybe it's less
<v Speaker 1>than three thousand feet. I don't know, but there's flying
<v Speaker 1>foxes and tree ferns where they grow. It's an understory plant,
<v Speaker 1>but it's the basalmost angiosperm wild ninpa Ale's the sandwichween
<v Speaker 1>amberrell A Leis and Austro Bailey Alies, which is where
<v Speaker 1>Skysandra and strabaili ac Sky's in. I gotta make that
<v Speaker 1>that's the rare plant from the Atlanta area. I got
<v Speaker 1>to make that video. Still put that out there. Really
<v Speaker 1>been slacking on the videos. I apologize. I need a
<v Speaker 1>fucking break, man. I've been going through hard. I'm doing
<v Speaker 1>other stuff. You know, I'll be back on a game soon.
<v Speaker 1>Don't worry. But uh hind to tell ac I think
<v Speaker 1>is the family try Thuria t r I t h
<v Speaker 1>u r I a if you if you need some
<v Speaker 1>shit to read and like a lunch breaker, some read
<v Speaker 1>about try thuria. It's a fucking weird one. Ask deep
<v Speaker 1>Seek about tri Thuria philamintosa and he's in you AI,
<v Speaker 1>you know, using AI to read research papers and teach
<v Speaker 1>yourself Spanish or teach yourself, you know, plant taxonomies. Not
<v Speaker 1>it's not like you're making, you know, posters of cartoon
<v Speaker 1>dogs driving fucking fire trucks and jerking off. Actually could
<v Speaker 1>you do that? How much? How much water would that take?
<v Speaker 1>How much water and energy would it take to make
<v Speaker 1>a dirty cartoon AI of a Dalmatian in a fire
<v Speaker 1>truck driving a fire truck, but maybe like with a
<v Speaker 1>scowl on, like he just stole it and jerking off
<v Speaker 1>in the driver's seat. Only my sick mind could think
<v Speaker 1>of something as ridiculous that, But it is kind of
<v Speaker 1>funny at the same time. What a waste of energy
<v Speaker 1>and water for the modern age. But anyway, read about tritheria.
<v Speaker 1>But that was my that was my bad running because
<v Speaker 1>when you get to these these highly reduced monocot look
<v Speaker 1>and aquatic bastards, it can be you're looking at such
<v Speaker 1>subtle traits, especially if there's no reproductive structure that it's
<v Speaker 1>a real mind fuck trying to look at what trying
<v Speaker 1>to figure out what you're looking at. So my tritheria
<v Speaker 1>identification on a naturalist is still unresolved. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>not a research grade yet and it shouldn't be. But
<v Speaker 1>let's see. Miguel looked at it. He said, I think
<v Speaker 1>it's too unlike any of the other possibilities. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>you need someone who's a real sedge nerd to really
<v Speaker 1>come at this. And because any so much cool shit
<v Speaker 1>can look like sedges. And I'm not saying that sedges
<v Speaker 1>aren't cool, but Cyperasi I lose. I lose a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of my enthusiasm, you know, unless you're talking about
<v Speaker 1>you know, some of the the what is the button
<v Speaker 1>sedge in Tasmania, Jim no, sheenis Spherrocephalus, which is a
<v Speaker 1>keystone plant and also the foundation of much of the
<v Speaker 1>peatlands that comprise the acidic soils of a lot of Tasmania,
<v Speaker 1>which and you getting you need those acidic peatlands to
<v Speaker 1>get all the cool carnivorous plants like drossers. And I
<v Speaker 1>gotta go back to fucking Australia. I love it there.
<v Speaker 1>Australia is so nice. They're so nice. You know, they
<v Speaker 1>really are not as fucked up as we are. I
<v Speaker 1>like guns, but I you know, I could gladly do
<v Speaker 1>without them. You know, the sad fact of the reality
<v Speaker 1>in the United States is that guns are never going away.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, you mix that with the insanity and
<v Speaker 1>stupidity here. You just got to own a gun. It's
<v Speaker 1>just the way it is. You need to have a
<v Speaker 1>you need to have a gun, and you need to
<v Speaker 1>know how to shoot. If you live in the United States.
<v Speaker 1>I would not miss them if I moved to Australia,
<v Speaker 1>though I might still go hunting for feral cats and pigs.
<v Speaker 1>I was some guy sent me a video of h
<v Speaker 1>of this uh Bogan this AUSSI is Bogan offensive? It's not.
<v Speaker 1>It's not offensive, right, It's like redneck here some people
<v Speaker 1>self identify as Bogans. But this bogan shooting feral cats
<v Speaker 1>and pigs using all this like thermal vision sculpts and shit,
<v Speaker 1>wild crazy stuff. We just got two more feral pigs
<v Speaker 1>at Thorn scrub by the way. Drew Drew Niedo went
<v Speaker 1>out there and he they died in the trap. Which
<v Speaker 1>sucks for them. You know, they were they just got
<v Speaker 1>too hot, but they were destroying uh, you know, probably
<v Speaker 1>hundreds of plants, uh in the meantime, but they died
<v Speaker 1>in the trap. And so now it's just a vulture party.
<v Speaker 1>And we didn't have to use any bullets, which means
<v Speaker 1>we didn't you know, especially for the I used lead
<v Speaker 1>free bullets now. But because I don't want to poison
<v Speaker 1>the vultures in the car cars, you know, and those
<v Speaker 1>are my guys, I want I want to take care
<v Speaker 1>of them, you know, And so I think how many
<v Speaker 1>have we gotten now? Eight? We'll be doing this for
<v Speaker 1>the rest of Thorn Scrubb's existence as a conservation property,
<v Speaker 1>because the pigs aren't going away. It's just like weeding,
<v Speaker 1>you got to keep doing it. And there's so many
<v Speaker 1>of them. It's so sad, I mean, the damage they're doing.
<v Speaker 1>We'd like to eventually fence the whole property, but that's
<v Speaker 1>gonna cost twenty or thirty grand. But anyway, Yeah, I'm excited.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna we're probably gonna have a I guess they're
<v Speaker 1>gonna at some point this winter. We're gonna invite the
<v Speaker 1>comanches down to have a prayer ceremony, then a paoty
<v Speaker 1>ceremony maybe and then just fence off more of the
<v Speaker 1>the gardens, so the wild gardens, the wild payoty gardens.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, but yeah, I gotta get back to Australia.
<v Speaker 1>You know I could do without. You know, I'll gladly
<v Speaker 1>trading the gun thing for the free or affordable healthcare
<v Speaker 1>and just a generally more pleasant uh less idiotic, which
<v Speaker 1>isn't saying much civic populous. And plus the plant diversity
<v Speaker 1>is just epic. You know, the lapids, the venomous snakes.
<v Speaker 1>They're cool from a distance, but they still freak me
<v Speaker 1>the fuck out. Remember seeing a tiger snake in the
<v Speaker 1>alpine areas of Tasmania, a melanistic tiger snake, and just
<v Speaker 1>being like, you're not expecting to see a cobra relative
<v Speaker 1>in a in a place where you've got to like
<v Speaker 1>wear a daygo tea and like a thick hooded sweatshirt
<v Speaker 1>to stay warm. But that's what goes on, you know,
<v Speaker 1>chillin in the athro Texas forests of highlands of Tasmania.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, anyway, God, there were still some videos from Tasmania.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't finish making like we saw that weird quote
<v Speaker 1>the shrimp. It was an arthropod. It's like a weird arthropod.
<v Speaker 1>It's a Gondwana and arthropod that's got relatives in Chile
<v Speaker 1>and in Tasmania, Like the just dispersed across southern Chile,
<v Speaker 1>in South America and Tasmania. So it's you know, total
<v Speaker 1>gondwan and reliced. And I didn't put that video in there.
<v Speaker 1>I got a fuck man. It breaks my heart. You know,
<v Speaker 1>some of the stuff I gotta do, I wish I
<v Speaker 1>just it's it's hard though. Editing sucks. It takes a
<v Speaker 1>lot of time and you kind of have to put
<v Speaker 1>life on hold for it. But yeah, the Jim nosenis
<v Speaker 1>sphere ofcephalis there. It's a really cool button sedge. It
<v Speaker 1>sends up a scape and then it's got this this
<v Speaker 1>button like inflorescent stuff top looks like a little ride
<v Speaker 1>kind of looks like a button willow in fluorescence, like
<v Speaker 1>a little spherical globe on a rod. And then when
<v Speaker 1>those roots die, it makes those peat lands. And that's
<v Speaker 1>the same phenomenon I saw happen in the Paramo with
<v Speaker 1>Cheskea subtests a lot of this bamboo that's just fucking everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>and when it dies, it makes this peat material that
<v Speaker 1>you know is highly acidic, uh, and it causes this
<v Speaker 1>you know, this basically the sub straight of this plant
<v Speaker 1>community to be vary acid its only a few things
<v Speaker 1>can thrive there. And I think it also is part
<v Speaker 1>of what helps the forest surrounding forests because you're not
<v Speaker 1>in the alpine area. It fills alpine, but there's trees
<v Speaker 1>can grow at this altitude, at ten thousand feet in
<v Speaker 1>you know, nine degrees north latitude. And I think that
<v Speaker 1>acidic soil that peatland created by the roots of the Chiskea,
<v Speaker 1>the New World bamboo excellent fur caning is what helps
<v Speaker 1>keep the forest from moving in and also dictates what
<v Speaker 1>grows there. I mean, it's such a bizarre habitat. It's
<v Speaker 1>like peatlands with this bamboo that gets six feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>forming these little clumps of islands and then these intermittent ponds,
<v Speaker 1>which is where this Isohetes was growing. You know, Isoetes
<v Speaker 1>relative of the lepidodendron scale trees from the carboniferous. So
<v Speaker 1>you know, I did think that was the isohetes thing
<v Speaker 1>when I I first saw it crossed my mind, but
<v Speaker 1>I didn't see any sporangios, so I just put it
<v Speaker 1>down as a sedge, you know. But yeah, tri Thuria
<v Speaker 1>isowetes much cooler than sedges. No offense, all right. In
<v Speaker 1>other news, I gotta give a shout out to whoever
<v Speaker 1>sent me this BLM Colorado Special Status Plant Species Guide
<v Speaker 1>revised March twenty twenty five. It's someone asked me. I
<v Speaker 1>forget whether it was over Instagram or email, but they right,
<v Speaker 1>they wrote me and said, hey, we just put this out.
<v Speaker 1>You want one? I said, sure, and uh, I guarantee
<v Speaker 1>there this this kind of cool shit is going to
<v Speaker 1>stop since Trump's dumbass defunded, you know, basically defunded every
<v Speaker 1>It's amazing how dystopic it has gotten. I try to
<v Speaker 1>not keep it too political here because there's Trumpers that
<v Speaker 1>I want to, you know, get into my cult. But
<v Speaker 1>it's just this shit. I mean, if you're still for
<v Speaker 1>this fucking guy, I mean, we could still get down.
<v Speaker 1>Don't talk to me about anything that requires intellect because
<v Speaker 1>I just can't trust you anymore, but we can still
<v Speaker 1>get down and talk and hang up. But fucking hey,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it's unbelievable, you know, the shit he's doing.
<v Speaker 1>Not to mention that, you know, kidnapping people all the
<v Speaker 1>ice shit is disgusting. Again. I just I don't know
<v Speaker 1>how we got here in this country, but I'm starting
<v Speaker 1>to you know, I want by the end of my life,
<v Speaker 1>no matter how long I live, I want my time
<v Speaker 1>in the US only to be you know, moonlighting and
<v Speaker 1>only coming back here because I have to very very intermittent.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's it's not getting any better. It's a dystopia.
<v Speaker 1>The public's only getting dumber. People are so bamboozled here,
<v Speaker 1>it's just fucking mind blowing. And not to mention, we've
<v Speaker 1>created the ugliest landscape in the first world. You know
<v Speaker 1>that's bad for the physical, mental, and spiritual health. Just
<v Speaker 1>driving from parking lot, the parking lot completely isolated from
<v Speaker 1>each other, ugly plastic scigns. But you've heard me go
<v Speaker 1>through this before. Parking lots fucking used car dealerships or
<v Speaker 1>just car dealerships in general, then't have to be you us,
<v Speaker 1>you know it could be. It's normally you don't make
<v Speaker 1>a lot of money and used cars. You make most
<v Speaker 1>of the money selling the new ones and duping people
<v Speaker 1>into you know, into basically getting locked into a finance contract,
<v Speaker 1>so they spend twenty k more than they would have
<v Speaker 1>otherwise if they were able to just buy it hour. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I forget how even got on that fucking disjointed rant.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, I was just shitting on the Trump administration. Anyway.
<v Speaker 1>This is a wonderful guide I got sent. It's spiral bound,
<v Speaker 1>no hardcover, it's all paper. They got a little plastic
<v Speaker 1>thing on the back, but it is. The photos are incredible.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not sure who compiled it, but it's all these
<v Speaker 1>rare plants for Colorado, and of course the coolest ones
<v Speaker 1>occur on barren landscapes like gypsum or some sort of
<v Speaker 1>limestone talus. Here's Ipomophsis pollyantha, Gentianella tortiosa. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>look at these landscapes and they're all somewhat low elevation
<v Speaker 1>for Colorado. They're not high up. They're not like alpine
<v Speaker 1>Ariogonum tumulosum woodside buckwheat. They just look incredible. There are
<v Speaker 1>places where I would see out a map and I'd see,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the contour lines of the betting planes of
<v Speaker 1>the limestone from a satellite map, and the generally barren,
<v Speaker 1>whitish gray nature of the substrate, and immediately know there
<v Speaker 1>was cool shit there. They may not be hyper diverse,
<v Speaker 1>but what's growing there is probably going to be restricted.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, have that kind of matted cushion look
<v Speaker 1>to it. I mean, just really fucking crazy stuff. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>plants shouldn't be growing here. It's high, it's exceptionally dry
<v Speaker 1>and windy, it gets really cold winters. But there's stuff
<v Speaker 1>just thriving. Tons of astragglers, you know, and most of
<v Speaker 1>the species in this book, this little booklet are astraggoluss.
<v Speaker 1>And you know there's not many different genera. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you've got your family's apac, plantagenac. You know, penstemen's simopterouslamation.
<v Speaker 1>Oh there's cactus in here, Sclero Cactus dasoni grows in
<v Speaker 1>western Colorado near Grand Junction Fizaria. There's a few physarias,
<v Speaker 1>of course, a bunch of penstemens, bunch of astragolis. What
<v Speaker 1>is this parthenium looking think Parthenium ligulatum. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>dwarf matted parthium that grows in northwestern Colorado by a
<v Speaker 1>Dinosaur National Monument, only known from four populations, probably grows
<v Speaker 1>in Utah too. Holy shit, what is this Oxytropius bessii
<v Speaker 1>variety ob napiformist Bessie's loco weed. And it's grown on
<v Speaker 1>these shale barrens with you know, very sparse plant cover.
<v Speaker 1>And then there's just these giant pink flushes of flowers.
<v Speaker 1>There's Oreo carrier ra Lindsayi baragein ac and a little
<v Speaker 1>white popcorn flowers. Everything's covered in hairs. Almost every plant
<v Speaker 1>is covered in tiny hairs. Oreo carrier revelii named after
<v Speaker 1>Jim James Reveal obviously that grows in southwestern Colorado. It's
<v Speaker 1>got maps on every species page. I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>a Whoever put this together did a great fucking job.
<v Speaker 1>This is an excellent booklet. I am inspired. Whoever sent
<v Speaker 1>this to me? Who sent this? I can't find out
<v Speaker 1>who sent this to me either. I searched my Instagram messages,
<v Speaker 1>I searched Gmail. I couldn't find shit. This thing's amazing.
<v Speaker 1>Look at this. They got landscape photos too, wonderful photographs.
<v Speaker 1>You got habitat photos as well as flower and leaf photos.
<v Speaker 1>It looks fucking spectacular. Neoperia lithophila, which is a carrot
<v Speaker 1>it's APAC bills, Neoperia and my friends have photos in it.
<v Speaker 1>Matt Berger, Matt reala damn man. I don't know. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, but if you can get your hands on it, Oh, Gudirizia,
<v Speaker 1>Ela Games. I don't even know that. But tons of
<v Speaker 1>unheard of, little known plants. If you live in uh,
<v Speaker 1>if you live in Colorado, I would only put this
<v Speaker 1>on your your to do list, you know, acquiring this
<v Speaker 1>booklet somehow. I don't know if it's online again BLM
<v Speaker 1>Colorado Special Status Plant Species Guide from the US Department
<v Speaker 1>of the Interior Bureau of Land Management. But Trump's going
<v Speaker 1>to cancel all that. Don't worry. It's so counterintuitive, the
<v Speaker 1>shit this fucking idiot's doing. I saw another There was
<v Speaker 1>a video today showing the graph of China's electricity production
<v Speaker 1>compared to the United States. Is electricity production and China
<v Speaker 1>is I mean, granted it's all feeding the tumor, but
<v Speaker 1>still you need electricity if you're It just goes against
<v Speaker 1>everything that the United that would be beneficial to the
<v Speaker 1>United States. And you know, China's is shooting up. The
<v Speaker 1>US is is just staying at a mid level plateau
<v Speaker 1>because Trump's canceling all the renewables and oil and gas.
<v Speaker 1>He's just you know, he's just pleasing the oil and
<v Speaker 1>gas oligarchs, which have done such a great job of
<v Speaker 1>duping the American public, you know. And I don't think
<v Speaker 1>the US is investing in nuclear at all, which they
<v Speaker 1>probably should. I don't know. It's just fucking nuts, man.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this country is just so it's so toast.
<v Speaker 1>It's so over and sad, you know. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>you spend forty years defunding education and you know, widening
<v Speaker 1>the wealth gap and rewarding oligarchs. That's what's gonna happen. Anyway.
<v Speaker 1>Let's look at the I don't know if you've ever
<v Speaker 1>heard of California Carnivores. It's a carnivorous plant nursery. It's
<v Speaker 1>a my friend Damon's carnivorous plant nursery, and I think
<v Speaker 1>it's sin Sebastopol. And I used to visit it when
<v Speaker 1>I lived in California. I would go visit him and
<v Speaker 1>see all the wild shit he's got growing on. He's
<v Speaker 1>got heliamphoros growing, and he's got him growing under lights
<v Speaker 1>in a in a soda fridge because there of course
<v Speaker 1>from the Tipui habitats. They like it much cooler. He's
<v Speaker 1>got Darlingtonia's, he's got a bunch of drossers, and he's
<v Speaker 1>hybridizing a bunch of the penthes. But he hybridized this
<v Speaker 1>in the penthes. It's basically a living rat trap. It's
<v Speaker 1>a hybrid between a Nepenthes species that you know, is
<v Speaker 1>a true carnivore eats other things, and another the Penthes
<v Speaker 1>species that's known as the toilet Nepenthes. It's the lid
<v Speaker 1>of the pitcher leaf produces an exitit that shrews go
<v Speaker 1>and eat, and then they shit inside the the trap.
<v Speaker 1>It's funny. It's like a gg Allen the Penthes. But
<v Speaker 1>he hybridized these two. And so the lid that holds
<v Speaker 1>the exitit, which is the bait for the shrew. And
<v Speaker 1>again this Nepenthes lowii doesn't eat the shrew. It just
<v Speaker 1>gets the nitrogen from the feces once the shrew takes
<v Speaker 1>a shit, you know, because these these little guys they
<v Speaker 1>shit a lot. If you've ever noticed rodents, and they
<v Speaker 1>shit a lot. But this the lid doesn't, it doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>It's not laid flat. It's upright so it basically this
<v Speaker 1>hybrid that he created still lures the rodents in, but
<v Speaker 1>then they end up falling into these giant pitchers. And
<v Speaker 1>he shows Oh, this nepenthes digesting how efficiently it digests
<v Speaker 1>the rodent is mind blowing. I mean it's there's only
<v Speaker 1>like a few bones left. It's like a mealy soup.
<v Speaker 1>It's fucking well. Here, we'll watch it right now.
<v Speaker 3>This is actually the penthe's truncata by a low eye.
<v Speaker 3>And here at the nursery for the first time ever,
<v Speaker 3>I did something that it's really kind of amazing, and
<v Speaker 3>we brought my nephew here, Sam, who just wants to
<v Speaker 3>see this. So Loli has a complicated interaction with the
<v Speaker 3>tree shrew in Borneo, and it produces this exitit underneath
<v Speaker 3>the lid. It's pure lowye, that is, and it draws
<v Speaker 3>in the tree shrews and they eat that exitit, and
<v Speaker 3>then they reward the plant by pooping into the picture,
<v Speaker 3>which is kind of gross, but that's that's food for plants.
<v Speaker 1>For most plants, that's what they need.
<v Speaker 3>So when you cross it with truncata, which is one
<v Speaker 3>of the biggest of all the nepenthees, you get this
<v Speaker 3>kind of crazy monster plant that has an exitit for
<v Speaker 3>drawing in rodents, but it's big enough.
<v Speaker 1>To actually eat them.
<v Speaker 3>And so here this year, this picture back here actually
<v Speaker 3>pot all.
<v Speaker 1>On its own a rat or a mouse.
<v Speaker 3>We're not really sure what's inside there, but we saw
<v Speaker 3>hair floating and then that's all sunk to the bottom
<v Speaker 3>and you can see it's made this explosive growth because
<v Speaker 3>now it's making all these huge pictures, and this pictures,
<v Speaker 3>you know, they're like surreally big. So what we're gonna
<v Speaker 3>do now is.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna cut. And that's what they do. If I
<v Speaker 1>if I like, if I every time I get the
<v Speaker 1>mosquitos out of the mosquito trap and I put them
<v Speaker 1>on a pinguicula, or I got a little in the
<v Speaker 1>penthes hybrid too. I'm not much in a the penties
<v Speaker 1>because they'd be a pain in the answer to take care.
<v Speaker 1>But there's one that just sits in water like all
<v Speaker 1>the carnivorous plants under lights in the ac because of
<v Speaker 1>where I live, it's too fucking hot. And every time
<v Speaker 1>I dump mosquitos in there, you get bursts and new growth.
<v Speaker 1>And same thing with the pings. You feed them nitrogen
<v Speaker 1>you get burst of new growth. It's pretty cool to see.
<v Speaker 3>Put this off because it's digested all the soft parts,
<v Speaker 3>we think, and gotten a lot of benefit from it.
<v Speaker 1>Otherwise we leave it on there. We're gonna cut it
<v Speaker 1>and then we're gonna go over here, jump it into
<v Speaker 1>the soil sift here.
<v Speaker 3>To see what's actually inside.
<v Speaker 1>Let's do that right here, right, he's got a sifter.
<v Speaker 1>He's got a soil shifter. He's pouring out the water. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>it looks like puke, but there's no large particles in there.
<v Speaker 3>You know it's weird is that it actually doesn't smell.
<v Speaker 3>It's grossy shack concoction looks there's really no smell.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like bean puke.
<v Speaker 3>There's not smelling off because the penthes are actually properly digesting.
<v Speaker 3>So there's acids and enzymes in there. But then there's
<v Speaker 3>also antibiotics and anti fosls that keep it from rotting.
<v Speaker 3>And you can see almost everything is gone. The bones
<v Speaker 3>are gone. There's a little foot.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my god, that is bizarre.
<v Speaker 3>There's a little foot that's left.
<v Speaker 1>Disgusting.
<v Speaker 3>There's a little segment of vertebrae and the teeth are left.
<v Speaker 3>But I think if we left it in there, it
<v Speaker 3>would have digested all the bones and everything, so plants,
<v Speaker 3>the vertebrates, mammals.
<v Speaker 1>Even that's fucking fast. You know, that thing would have
<v Speaker 1>wonderful applications. Is a rat trap in a city if
<v Speaker 1>you could find a way to you know, if you
<v Speaker 1>could find a way to provide the conditions it needs
<v Speaker 1>in any you know, large American city where you could
<v Speaker 1>you know, create a moderate and mild enough climate for it,
<v Speaker 1>but still have it be outside. I mean, the applications
<v Speaker 1>are endless. But uh, I wonder could a Norway rat
<v Speaker 1>shoo its way? Maybe maybe you gotta get it. But
<v Speaker 1>this looked like a big fucking rat in there. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. It's pretty amazing though. He basically the guy
<v Speaker 1>basically hybridized a living rat trap. All right, that's hour
<v Speaker 1>and forty minutes. This has gone on far too long. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I'll try to get another one of these out next week.
<v Speaker 1>I'll be fucking around gallivanting throughout New Mexico possibly southern
<v Speaker 1>Colorado for the next week, then headed back to Texas
<v Speaker 1>for a brief spell doing some stuff at Thorn Scrub,
<v Speaker 1>and then heading up to Chicago and Minnesota for September.
<v Speaker 1>So if you're in those areas and know something interesting
<v Speaker 1>going on, get at me Crimepace. A body doesn't it
<v Speaker 1>Gmail And yeah, I guess that's if you want to
<v Speaker 1>order thorn Scrub shirts. We still got a bunch. Email
<v Speaker 1>me about that too. Stickers are twenty bucks for nine
<v Speaker 1>and uh, you know I did to draw on the
<v Speaker 1>envelopes depending on how much time I have, so I'll
<v Speaker 1>give you a nice little doodle or something too. But
<v Speaker 1>other than that, shout out to everybody who arranged the
<v Speaker 1>New Mexico Mycological Society Fest this year. It was fun
<v Speaker 1>and it was uh, it was a good time, so
<v Speaker 1>fucking New Mexico, the Sacramento Mountains. Uh yeah, all right,
<v Speaker 1>Well thanks for listening, have a grocery day, go fuck
<v Speaker 1>yourself by