Plant Anatomy, Again with Dr. Jim Mauseth

<v Speaker 1>Okay, there we go, there we go. All right, Welcome
<v Speaker 1>to another episode of the Crime Page About It Doesn't podcast.
<v Speaker 1>Today today we're here with my friend, Professor Emeritus Jim
<v Speaker 1>moss Seth and plant anatomus and cactus practologist and fucking
<v Speaker 1>you just do it. Man. You like specializing in cacti,
<v Speaker 1>but like the nitty gritty stuff, the cell walls, the cells,
<v Speaker 1>the different types of tissues, the which is very good
<v Speaker 1>to have this conversation for me now now that I've
<v Speaker 1>been teaching all this stuff. So, oh Jim, how are
<v Speaker 1>you doing good? Yeah? Man, So we were just we
<v Speaker 1>were just started looking at Ariocarpus flowering and beautiful landscape
<v Speaker 1>that hasn't been tarnished or poached yet on a little
<v Speaker 1>private conservation property here in West Texas. So anyway, so yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to, uh, I guess where to start? You know,
<v Speaker 1>I just taught well this is I guess anyone listening
<v Speaker 1>to if you the last podcast episode I taught this
<v Speaker 1>stuff was basically a lecture on there's a brief lecture
<v Speaker 1>on the different types of tissues epidermal tissue, ground tissue,
<v Speaker 1>vascuar tissue, and then you know, within ground tissue. You've
<v Speaker 1>got Prankma, colin kamma, sclare incoma. You're kind of in
<v Speaker 1>a you know, respectively from softer to hard to harder.
<v Speaker 1>Sclaring come as the hardest, Colin come as kind of intermediate.
<v Speaker 1>Priankama is softest. But there's you know, whole definitions that
<v Speaker 1>go with each of those tissue types. And so I
<v Speaker 1>suggest listening to that if if this stuff throws you off.
<v Speaker 1>But I will be trying to you know, intersperse some
<v Speaker 1>crash course, you know, sentences in between the conversation that
<v Speaker 1>we have. So let's just start talking. I mean, let's
<v Speaker 1>just get to it. I guess what I wanted to
<v Speaker 1>ask you about initially, Well, there's a lot of things,
<v Speaker 1>but that that tissue in aerocarpus that's so hard that
<v Speaker 1>I always assumed it just was cutical the waxi layer
<v Speaker 1>exuded by the epidermist. But it's too thick to be
<v Speaker 1>cutical does have a really thick cuticle, but that's probably
<v Speaker 1>epidermis and hypodermis too.
<v Speaker 2>You were saying, yes, you almost all the cacti, Well,
<v Speaker 2>all cacti I have an epidermis on their young body
<v Speaker 2>where they don't have bark and almost all cact i
<v Speaker 2>have a several layers of hypodermis blow the epidermis, and
<v Speaker 2>the hypodermis always have thick walls, so it's always tougher
<v Speaker 2>than the epidermis. So when you can kind of peel
<v Speaker 2>a thick layer off of an opuntia or a barrel
<v Speaker 2>cactus or something like that, you're not getting just the epidermis,
<v Speaker 2>and you're not getting just the cuticle. You're getting hypodermis.
<v Speaker 2>You're getting two or three or four layers of hypodermis,
<v Speaker 2>one layer of epidermis and cutical and wax and stuff
<v Speaker 2>like that. It's going to be mostly the hypodermis.
<v Speaker 1>And but hypodermis is still I mean it's still epidermal tissue.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's not.
<v Speaker 1>What is it classified as or is it parankamar or
<v Speaker 1>kala kamar? What would you call it?
<v Speaker 2>Epidermis? The epidermis and plants has a really nice developmental definition.
<v Speaker 2>The the up in the shoot apical marrastem, the outermost
<v Speaker 2>layer of cells can only divide with cell walls that
<v Speaker 2>are perpendicular to the to the surface of the marrowstem,
<v Speaker 2>so that means both new daughter cells are laying in
<v Speaker 2>the same plane, there's still the outermost layers of cells.
<v Speaker 2>If if they if an epidermic cell divided in a
<v Speaker 2>with a wall that's parallel to the surface of the
<v Speaker 2>of this to the skin of the skin, then you
<v Speaker 2>have an outer cell and an inner cell. Don't do that,
<v Speaker 2>so you only divide with that perpendicular wall. So what
<v Speaker 2>the epidermis of a plant does is it is a
<v Speaker 2>single layer that grows as a single layer, a sheet
<v Speaker 2>that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
<v Speaker 1>So you can say still created in the appical marasteme,
<v Speaker 1>which you know, it's like the appical marastime on like
<v Speaker 1>a pay odior and aerocarpus is in the center of
<v Speaker 1>the plant. Yes, that's the only spot where well it's
<v Speaker 1>not the only spot where new cell growth is occurring,
<v Speaker 1>because cacti have secondary growth as well. They've got a
<v Speaker 1>vascular cambium.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, and you also have the growth of the spines
<v Speaker 2>and growth of the tubercles and long things like lutenbergia
<v Speaker 2>or there's long memalarium, lounge amandma and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 2>But the big deal is that with so with the
<v Speaker 2>epidermis coming from this one layer of cells in the
<v Speaker 2>in the marristem. And then and then having having only
<v Speaker 2>divisions by these perpendicular walls, you're growing as just one
<v Speaker 2>single sheet. So if you can imagine this being this
<v Speaker 2>tabletop being covered by a sheet of cells one cell
<v Speaker 2>layer thick, and every cell can only divide so that
<v Speaker 2>both daughter cells are now laying in this sheet, the
<v Speaker 2>sheet just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger,
<v Speaker 2>but never thicker and thicker and thicker. Okay, So that
<v Speaker 2>gives us a really good definition of epidermis and cacti.
<v Speaker 2>So that on the surface of a leaf, those epiderma
<v Speaker 2>cells have come from that one single layer of the
<v Speaker 2>shootoptical marrastem. And and so so when we're talking about
<v Speaker 2>an epidermis and a hypodermis with layers below the epidermis,
<v Speaker 2>those those layers below the epidermis have not come from
<v Speaker 2>that one single shoot epical marrastem layer, so they have
<v Speaker 2>a different developmental origin.
<v Speaker 1>They've still come from the shoot apical marius them, but
<v Speaker 1>from a but.
<v Speaker 2>From a deeper layers. So the fact that so a
<v Speaker 2>really interesting way of thinking about it. Imagine a imagine
<v Speaker 2>a fertilized egg and plants, So the sperm cells just
<v Speaker 2>cheesed with eggs. You've got this one single celled zygoat.
<v Speaker 1>In animals, you mean in plants too, Okay, yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So this single cells zygoat the device and have to
<v Speaker 2>get two cells divisa, those two divide and have to
<v Speaker 2>get four cells and then a cells. And very often
<v Speaker 2>when in plant embryos, when you go from the eight
<v Speaker 2>cell stage to the sixteen cell stage, you're all the
<v Speaker 2>cells divide by a curved walls that are parallel to
<v Speaker 2>the surface of that zygote. And so you get at
<v Speaker 2>that stage, you now get an outer an outer. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>eight cells divided to get eight outer cells and eight
<v Speaker 2>inner cells. Those eight outer cells are the progenitor for
<v Speaker 2>all the epidermis. So when you look at a when
<v Speaker 2>you look at a big old oak tree or a
<v Speaker 2>pine tree or whatever, and you see the epidermis on
<v Speaker 2>all the every leaf and every flower and everything, all
<v Speaker 2>those singles, all those that single layer of cells covering
<v Speaker 2>all that plant have come from that those outer eight
<v Speaker 2>cells of the sixteen cells stage plant embryo. So at
<v Speaker 2>that very early stage, the epidermis is set off as
<v Speaker 2>being distinct from all the.
<v Speaker 1>Rest of the they're just copies of those in exact right, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but it's all I mean, in an applical mirrors them.
<v Speaker 1>It's all undifferentiated at some point, isn't it. And then
<v Speaker 1>it later. But when you get leaf primoria and then
<v Speaker 1>obviously not in cacti.
<v Speaker 2>Well no, you do get in you get leaf primoria.
<v Speaker 2>In in cactus, the leaf primori stop developing while they're
<v Speaker 2>still very small. So when in perrescae they developed the
<v Speaker 2>full leaves, right, you know, puncas, they develop in the
<v Speaker 2>smaller leaves that fall off pretty quickly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, those a little cylindrical things, yes.
<v Speaker 2>And then the regular cacti they develop in the leaves
<v Speaker 2>that are pretty much microscopic by the time they're stopped developing,
<v Speaker 2>where they still have an epidermis, they have a hypodermis,
<v Speaker 2>they have an inner inner cells that are photosynthetic, they
<v Speaker 2>have a xylum they have flown. And there's the strange
<v Speaker 2>thing but these little tiny microscopic leaves of cacti is
<v Speaker 2>they're almost pure asylum. It's just it's just this huge
<v Speaker 2>nodule of xylum with a little bit of green photosynthetic
<v Speaker 2>parankama on one time on the other side, and a
<v Speaker 2>layer of epidermis and hypodermis.
<v Speaker 1>But and then the spines would be I mean they're
<v Speaker 1>they're technically not leaves, they're bud scales. Bud scales.
<v Speaker 2>So if you look at a you know, at an
<v Speaker 2>oak bud or the bud of any kind of a tree, well,
<v Speaker 2>it's still.
<v Speaker 1>Dormant before the leaves have burst out, or the best to.
<v Speaker 2>Look at them while the leaves are bursting out, and
<v Speaker 2>then the bud scales kind of peel back, and the
<v Speaker 2>bud scales are a little brown scales.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like on buckeyes. They exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so just imagine that those are modified into spines.
<v Speaker 1>No ship so it's not they're really not technically leaves,
<v Speaker 1>even though they're just called.
<v Speaker 2>The bud scales are modified leaves.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So.
<v Speaker 2>We think of plants as having just three organs, you know, roots, stems,
<v Speaker 2>and leaves. So everything everything that's not modified root or
<v Speaker 2>a modified stem is going to be a modified leaf.
<v Speaker 2>So you get really odd things. That is, it's pretty
<v Speaker 2>easy to see this as a modified leaf. Like the
<v Speaker 2>pictures of picture plants right are modified leaves obviously.
<v Speaker 1>Or the spines on okatillo, like you can see that's
<v Speaker 1>that's a pettiole. You can see it when that first
<v Speaker 1>new growth, the first leaves on okatillo, it's a that
<v Speaker 1>you could see the spine. It's a pettiole, but it's
<v Speaker 1>got a leaf at the end exactly. And then the
<v Speaker 1>leaf falls off and that's the spine. And then when
<v Speaker 1>then you've but you still got buds at the base
<v Speaker 1>of that spine. So the next season the leaves come
<v Speaker 1>out of that fascicle at the base of the spine.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yeah, that's right. Yeah, So so modified leaves are
<v Speaker 2>everywhere in all kinds of crazy shapes and forms.
<v Speaker 1>You had said you you were mentioning before to the
<v Speaker 1>one thing that cacked I had, Well, there's a couple
<v Speaker 1>of things, but the cortical bundles because they're parentama tissue.
<v Speaker 1>Because most of the MASSI of a cactus is mostly parentama.
<v Speaker 1>We got three tissue trankama. Most of a ca of
<v Speaker 1>a cactus is parentama. It's the low density you know, tissue,
<v Speaker 1>no secondary cell wall, only a primary cell wall. And
<v Speaker 1>most the most common in storage and photosynthesis like those
<v Speaker 1>are the photosynthetic tissue and storage tissue. So since you've
<v Speaker 1>got this and that's what the cortex is yeah right,
<v Speaker 1>So so that epidermal tissue, because that cortex is still thick,
<v Speaker 1>the epidermal tissue having to be supplied with water. Yes,
<v Speaker 1>that you run into a problem there. So that's I
<v Speaker 1>think that's the xylums on the other side of the
<v Speaker 1>cortex from the epidermis.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, I think it's the easiest to see in in
<v Speaker 2>the second euphobious euphobius that look like cacti. They and
<v Speaker 2>very often you'll see pictures of those were well, this
<v Speaker 2>looks just like a cactus, and they do look just
<v Speaker 2>like a cactus. But if you ever notice that from
<v Speaker 2>really euphobious, they're all is small and they never get
<v Speaker 2>to be great big and giant, like like a big
<v Speaker 2>kind of cactus plotycanthus or a golden barrel anything like that.
<v Speaker 1>You have a four engines does yeah, the big one.
<v Speaker 2>But each individual stem is not super thick. It doesn't
<v Speaker 2>have a super cortex.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, you're right.
<v Speaker 2>But so like we were talking about earlier today, if
<v Speaker 2>think about it, just an ordinary dichot, an ordinary broad
<v Speaker 2>leaf plant was skinny stem, non second stem, and and
<v Speaker 2>an epidermis. So this cortex is maybe an eighth or
<v Speaker 2>sixteenth of an inch thick, and the cortex may have
<v Speaker 2>a cuticle and wax, and it's water proof. It's when
<v Speaker 2>we say waterproof, if we're talking about it's more waterproof
<v Speaker 2>than nothing. But but it's always losing water. The epidermis
<v Speaker 2>is always losing water. So in a in a regular
<v Speaker 2>you die caught, that's not in a desert. Then then
<v Speaker 2>the water is coming up through the island zylum through
<v Speaker 2>the that ring of escuar bundles in the very center
<v Speaker 2>of the stem, and the water for the epidermis can
<v Speaker 2>and for the cortex, it just kind of leaks out
<v Speaker 2>the xylum into the cortex, diffuses across the cortex, plasm
<v Speaker 2>through monit through the wet walls, So all these cortex
<v Speaker 2>cells have wet walls. And then it gets to the epidermis.
<v Speaker 2>And and even though the epidermis is losing water to
<v Speaker 2>the to the air, it can be supplied with water
<v Speaker 2>from the xylum by by passing through this thin cortex.
<v Speaker 1>Because it doesn't have this, yeah, this thick ass cortex.
<v Speaker 2>So now imagine, imagine you've got a mutation that causes
<v Speaker 2>the cortex to be twice as thick. Well, that's really
<v Speaker 2>going to slow down the movement of water through it.
<v Speaker 2>So as long as that epidermis, which is now been
<v Speaker 2>pushed farther away from the islum, as long as that
<v Speaker 2>epidermis is not in a very dry area, then it's okay.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's not losing water too rapidly, and our movement
<v Speaker 2>of water through this now thicker cortex is slower, but
<v Speaker 2>it's fast enough to keep that epidermis alive. Okay. Now,
<v Speaker 2>let's have another mutation that moves the mikes, the cortex
<v Speaker 2>thicker and pushes the epidermis farther from the islum. So
<v Speaker 2>the epidermis is still losing its water and it's still
<v Speaker 2>hopefully getting water through the cortex from the islum. But
<v Speaker 2>at some point you can see where you're gonna have
<v Speaker 2>Every time you make the cortex thicker, the movement of
<v Speaker 2>the diffusion of water through that is slower.
<v Speaker 1>Right, it's slowing it down. But the benefit of having
<v Speaker 1>that cortex so thick because it now you've got all
<v Speaker 1>the storage tissue.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah right, yeah, But you can still imagine at some
<v Speaker 2>point the cortex is so thick and diffusion through the
<v Speaker 2>cortex is so slow that now the epidom missus in
<v Speaker 2>danger that that the epidemics is losing water and at
<v Speaker 2>some point where where it cannot get water from the
<v Speaker 2>from the dilum through the cortex fast enough.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna have to evolve some new tubes. You're going
<v Speaker 1>to have to evolve some new plumbing, right.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's and that's the that is the magic
<v Speaker 2>feature in the cacti, in.
<v Speaker 1>The the cortical bundles, the.
<v Speaker 2>Cortical bundles that they have, and they it could be
<v Speaker 2>that they're modified leaf traces that leaf. You know, you
<v Speaker 2>have vescar bundles that run from the from that central
<v Speaker 2>cylinder of escer bundles out to the leaves and the buds,
<v Speaker 2>and it could be that those started to branch and
<v Speaker 2>just just ramify and be a network out in the cortex.
<v Speaker 2>And and once that happened, and that was just that
<v Speaker 2>was just it has all kinds of benefits.
<v Speaker 1>Now you can get super thick, the cortex can be, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it can be. Now you can get biz nagas and yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it kind of cracked Plady of Canthus and all these
<v Speaker 1>other giants.
<v Speaker 2>The cortex can be really thick and and you're not
<v Speaker 2>moving water to the epidermis by means of diffusion. Now
<v Speaker 2>you're moving water from the inner set of vascar bundles
<v Speaker 2>out to the epidermis by means of these.
<v Speaker 1>Cortical bundles, tubes you've got.
<v Speaker 2>You've got tracheads or vessels.
<v Speaker 1>And is that what is that what cortical bundles. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>Are they're literally tracheads or vessels or are.
<v Speaker 2>They No, they have there's there's a both xylum and flowing.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my god, but they're later they're not.
<v Speaker 2>They're running, Yes, they're running. They're running more or less
<v Speaker 2>not straight out. It's forming a network. Think think of
<v Speaker 2>it like the network and leaf die caught leaf.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So it's a three dimensional network that's running out up
<v Speaker 2>and down and ready outward through the through the cortex.
<v Speaker 2>So even if you'd involved to have a cortex adius
<v Speaker 2>ten feet thick and your epidermis is away out there, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>as long as the xylum in the center of your
<v Speaker 2>plant has water, it's getting water from the roots, you
<v Speaker 2>can conduct that water out to the epidermist and keep
<v Speaker 2>the epidermis alive.
<v Speaker 1>So that makes me want to think, That makes me
<v Speaker 1>want to ask you about like when people graft like you,
<v Speaker 1>some of these people graf the cactus nerds grafted or
<v Speaker 1>even like I've been grafting stuff like some of the
<v Speaker 1>native cacti in South Texas, like a kind of serious
<v Speaker 1>Postsel Garrie, because I want to create a bunch and
<v Speaker 1>then you know, have cuttings to give people to re
<v Speaker 1>establish them native plant cards and stuff. You graph that thing.
<v Speaker 1>It grows ten times as fast, twenty times as fast.
<v Speaker 1>But what are you doing when you're grafting that? Because
<v Speaker 1>you're the ring right in cacti being a uticut there,
<v Speaker 1>the vasculature is a ring in the stem with asylum
<v Speaker 1>on the inside and the flow them on the aup correct,
<v Speaker 1>So what are you doing when you're grafting? Because I
<v Speaker 1>like it kind of serious Postel Gray. I'm not it's
<v Speaker 1>a really tall, skinny cactus. Then I'll graft it to
<v Speaker 1>like myrtillo cactus. And I learned that I'm not putting
<v Speaker 1>it directly vertically because it's just this tiny pencil thick thing.
<v Speaker 1>I'll cut it in half vertically and then lay it
<v Speaker 1>horizontally on top of them martillity caractus. What's going on there?
<v Speaker 1>How is the vascular because the vasculature has to meet
<v Speaker 1>up right.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, it does, and you know sometimes it doesn't, and
<v Speaker 2>that when it doesn't, then then your graft music okay
<v Speaker 2>for a few months, and then the then the sign
<v Speaker 2>just falls off. It shows up and falls off because
<v Speaker 2>you never have established a vascular connection.
<v Speaker 1>But maybe you were just tied into some cortical bundles
<v Speaker 1>and that's why it didn't die immediately. But you're not
<v Speaker 1>into the true zion, right.
<v Speaker 2>So what happens in in a successful graft is the
<v Speaker 2>cutting has caused a wound response, and so the cells
<v Speaker 2>that are near that, near the cut cells, they start
<v Speaker 2>to start to divide as if they were going to
<v Speaker 2>form a scar tissue over the surface, but now they're
<v Speaker 2>they're inside this graft union there with a nice wet
<v Speaker 2>stock on the top and a nice wet sign on
<v Speaker 2>the bottom, vice versa. And so they divide, but they
<v Speaker 2>don't then turn into scar tissues. They don't die because
<v Speaker 2>they don't die. Yeah, they did.
<v Speaker 1>It's glaring kama or what is it exactly?
<v Speaker 2>It's more kind of kind of a bark.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, But in that I mean, at the if you
<v Speaker 1>look at the cutting of say that the stock, you've
<v Speaker 1>got the pith and the cortex, and that's all the
<v Speaker 1>parent command and then you've got the vasculature, which is
<v Speaker 1>a completely different kind of tissue. But basically, what you're
<v Speaker 1>trying to do is mix the vascular tick mix, have
<v Speaker 1>the vascular tissue of the stock mate up with the
<v Speaker 1>vascular tissue of the scion.
<v Speaker 2>Trying to get there. You're trying to get the vascular
<v Speaker 2>cambium of the two to be as close together as possible.
<v Speaker 1>And where is the vascular cambium that would be more
<v Speaker 1>towards the outside.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, close to the flow. Between the flow and the xylum.
<v Speaker 1>The ring you see is going to be xylum and flowing.
<v Speaker 2>The ring you see is going to be mostly xylum,
<v Speaker 2>just a little bit of flowing and that. And that's
<v Speaker 2>because you know, the xylum, the xylem just persists and
<v Speaker 2>just a cumulus as wood with the flow. When foam stops,
<v Speaker 2>When floam stops conducting, it collapses.
<v Speaker 1>Well, flows alive at maturity, and xylon is dead at
<v Speaker 1>maturity as well. Right for the most part, are there.
<v Speaker 2>For the most part?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Okay, yeah, but but the floam, this the siep tubes
<v Speaker 2>and flow usually only conduct for anywhere from a few
<v Speaker 2>weeks to maybe two or three years. And then when
<v Speaker 2>they stop conducting, they usually collapse and then in everyplaced
<v Speaker 2>by Yeah, the cambium is concreting new floam if it's
<v Speaker 2>got a cambium.
<v Speaker 1>But like in monoconts, that's totally different thing. Secondary growth.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so you can't can you graph monocots.
<v Speaker 1>No, we're going to get that. We're going to get
<v Speaker 1>the Monocst's going to be a long conversation.
<v Speaker 2>So you've gotta grating. You're grapping woody plants, you're grapping
<v Speaker 2>die coots or conifers, and and so you you try
<v Speaker 2>to get those the two cambia lined up as much
<v Speaker 2>as possible, and they're creating cells. Basically, it's kind of
<v Speaker 2>a wound, kind of a wound callous and apparently there's
<v Speaker 2>some there's a factor that comes from the from the
<v Speaker 2>cambium of one and the fact that comes from the
<v Speaker 2>cambium of two, and so you have this diffusion field
<v Speaker 2>and the new xyland flow can can differentiate towards the
<v Speaker 2>new cambium of the one, the new cambium the cameum
<v Speaker 2>with the other one, and so we get this this
<v Speaker 2>graft union form. You get continuous asylum from the stock
<v Speaker 2>up into the scion continuous flow. So if it.
<v Speaker 1>Works, so you can't I didn't realize that before. You
<v Speaker 1>can't graft monocots like wow, I don't, Yeah, because it's
<v Speaker 1>totally different. Instead of it being a ring, they're just
<v Speaker 1>kind of scattered at a.
<v Speaker 2>Curtain and yeah and yeah, and they're usually not going
<v Speaker 2>to form a scar tissue. They mostly just die and
<v Speaker 2>you get maybe you get one layer of quirky cells
<v Speaker 2>at the surface, but you're not going to get a
<v Speaker 2>real proliferation of cells and monocots.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why I didn't realize that.
<v Speaker 2>But in the cortical bundles. There's a there's a mistletoe
<v Speaker 2>in in southern Peru that called Lagaria that attacks a
<v Speaker 2>big columnar cactus and and most yes Ligaria l I,
<v Speaker 2>G A, R A, and so it most cacti are
<v Speaker 2>protected from mistletoes because the mistletoe seed will land on
<v Speaker 2>the surface and then it's got to get some cells,
<v Speaker 2>got to get some house storyum root tip into the
<v Speaker 2>into the host and then get that root tip into
<v Speaker 2>the flow and start you know, getting nutrients. But the
<v Speaker 2>characters have big thick cortex that the poor parasite is
<v Speaker 2>in there and there's just cortex which is just water,
<v Speaker 2>just water balon, yeah, and nothing to eat more watermelon,
<v Speaker 2>more model watermelon. And finally after the poor little say
<v Speaker 2>ordinary mistletoe, this it's its root has grown through this cortex.
<v Speaker 2>Finally the seed just runs out of energy and it dies.
<v Speaker 2>So most cacti I pretty well protected from mistletoe just
<v Speaker 2>by being sold.
<v Speaker 1>It's got to tap into the xylum and flown exactly.
<v Speaker 2>But lagaria does this crazy thing. It taps into the
<v Speaker 2>cortical bundles.
<v Speaker 1>That sure, is that what trist rex does too, No.
<v Speaker 2>Tristrix, that's a whole different story.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, let's think tristris last conversation.
<v Speaker 2>So with with lagaria, it's it's a historium. Instead of
<v Speaker 2>searching for the those vascular bundles in the very center
<v Speaker 2>of this stem it, it finds a cortical bundle which
<v Speaker 2>has island flown and it's pretty weak and so you
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't expect it to have very much conduction capacity for
<v Speaker 2>this mistletoe. But the lagaria stimulates the cactus to then
<v Speaker 2>have this this cortical bundles to start growing and getting thicker,
<v Speaker 2>as if it were like say, uh, the basket supply
<v Speaker 2>to a branch.
<v Speaker 1>How is it doing that? It's how is it manipulating
<v Speaker 1>the cactus into.
<v Speaker 2>I would guess supplaying with hormones, probably xylon, probably with
<v Speaker 2>oxen or sodokin and then but so it's like, okay,
<v Speaker 2>the parasite went just making this, causing the host cactus
<v Speaker 2>to start making all this xylum which should be feeding
<v Speaker 2>the parasite. But wonderful thing about evolition Xylum secondary islum
<v Speaker 2>is conducting vessels and supporting fibers, and the fibers are
<v Speaker 2>just you know, thick walled.
<v Speaker 1>Tough fibers, aren't doing any conducting, they're.
<v Speaker 2>Not doing any clan struct cacti that can cacti. The
<v Speaker 2>fibers stay alive, but they're thick walled, they can't conduct,
<v Speaker 2>they have almost no nutrients in them. And so so
<v Speaker 2>the cactus has been tricked into making wood by the lagaria.
<v Speaker 2>But the cactus responds by making a wood that is
<v Speaker 2>almost purely fibers. It's not not conducting, So so the
<v Speaker 2>poor lagaria is pretty much just screwed. Now. Apparently, every
<v Speaker 2>once in a while it's able to get enough get.
<v Speaker 1>Enough, so lagaria doesn't normally infect cact diets.
<v Speaker 2>No it does.
<v Speaker 1>It's going for other things and then ends up on
<v Speaker 1>kacti or what.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's I think it's pretty specific, this lagaria, but
<v Speaker 2>run out of I mean, well, no, it is somehow
<v Speaker 2>Apparently every once in a while it works and it
<v Speaker 2>tricks the cactus and the cactus does respond properly, and
<v Speaker 2>so you get and then so you do get this
<v Speaker 2>these cortical bundles growing into a big, nice, good supply
<v Speaker 2>that that does keep the lagary growing. Then the lagary
<v Speaker 2>g to be a great, big bush. It's huge, and
<v Speaker 2>apparently and then the top of the cactus above this
<v Speaker 2>point of infection dies. So you're driving along and southern
<v Speaker 2>Peru and you see this cactus with a bush on
<v Speaker 2>top of it, and you go, what the hell is that? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and it's so you can't miss it. It's it's you know,
<v Speaker 2>with other plants you kind of have to search and
<v Speaker 2>search and search to find a missiletoe, and this is like,
<v Speaker 2>oh no, it's this huge bush sitting on top of
<v Speaker 2>a cactus.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. There's a paper I'm trying to look at right now,
<v Speaker 1>and I see host response and endophyte structure written by you.
<v Speaker 1>A missiletoe that attacks cacti like Garia cunifolia. Yeah, Choreo
<v Speaker 1>Cactus brevist stylista. I remember seeing that one. So that's cool.
<v Speaker 2>So this is the only one that we know where
<v Speaker 2>the missiletoe attacks is able to survive by attacking cortical
<v Speaker 2>bundles and the tristricks ay phyllis that you were talking
<v Speaker 2>about before that attacks, uh, the treka serius in Chili.
<v Speaker 2>What it does is a totally bizarre biology that the
<v Speaker 2>root tip the houstorium of the parasite seedling. The root
<v Speaker 2>tip presses against the cactus epidermis that has cuticle and
<v Speaker 2>wax and stuff like that, and layer after layer of
<v Speaker 2>thick walled hypoderma cells and like any missiles, so then
<v Speaker 2>the storiam tip just presses against the cactus surface and
<v Speaker 2>kind of spreads out and it glues itself. And then
<v Speaker 2>and then once it's really glued to the cactus, it
<v Speaker 2>spreads and contracts, and this contraction rips the epidermis off
<v Speaker 2>of the cactus and it it basically sucks the sucks
<v Speaker 2>the the cactus cuticle and wax and stuff like that
<v Speaker 2>up into the root tip of the parasite. You've gotta
<v Speaker 2>you have to see the pictures in the paper, so
<v Speaker 2>you can imagine a root tip down here, and you
<v Speaker 2>take a longitudinal section and there in the middle of
<v Speaker 2>the of the parasite's root you have the pieces of
<v Speaker 2>the cactuses cuticle got it ripped off, and then and
<v Speaker 2>then the parasite now is laying right against this naked hypodermis,
<v Speaker 2>no cuticle, no wax, no nothing to protect that poor cactus.
<v Speaker 2>And the tristrix then presses against the hypodermis and you
<v Speaker 2>have all wherever there was a stoma in the epidermis
<v Speaker 2>with your two guard cells below that. You have to
<v Speaker 2>have a hole in the hypoderma so that carbon dioxi
<v Speaker 2>I can get once it gets through the stoma, so
<v Speaker 2>model poor you can get through the hypodermis and into
<v Speaker 2>the cactus cortex. Well with the ligeria. What the tristrix
<v Speaker 2>does is it presses against those holes, and some of
<v Speaker 2>its root cells then squeeze through the holes and get
<v Speaker 2>into the The wholes are subst model chambers you sendto
<v Speaker 2>the charactus cortex and then they start to proliferate these skinny, skinny,
<v Speaker 2>skinny parasite cells and then start to divide and divide.
<v Speaker 1>It just using the endosperm from the original seed, or
<v Speaker 1>is it.
<v Speaker 2>Well, at this point, now they're probably starting to draw
<v Speaker 2>nutrients from the from the cactus cortex. Now no I
<v Speaker 2>talked to earlier that well, on regular missiletow they can't
<v Speaker 2>get enough nutrient from the cactus cortex because it's just
<v Speaker 2>so watery and so so poor and starch. But now
<v Speaker 2>we're not trying to feed a whole seeding, We're just
<v Speaker 2>feeding one or two cells of the parasite so creepy,
<v Speaker 2>So the parasite cells start to kind of proliferate almost
<v Speaker 2>like a like a little callous little nodule, and the
<v Speaker 2>seed dies at that point. Then the then the tristrics
<v Speaker 2>seed dies and the parasite exists as nothing except this
<v Speaker 2>little nodule of cells inside the cactus cortex. And so
<v Speaker 2>then they just start to make these long, skinny cells
<v Speaker 2>that then squeeze in between the cactus cells and start
<v Speaker 2>invading the cactus cortex kind of like a fungus my
<v Speaker 2>celium would do, and.
<v Speaker 1>So fucking insane.
<v Speaker 2>So at this point, you've got this, You've got this
<v Speaker 2>mistletoe which is in you a diecot seed plant that
<v Speaker 2>its body is nothing except a few little prank mysel exactly.
<v Speaker 2>So this and so it can grow. We have no
<v Speaker 2>idea how many months or years it takes, but it grows,
<v Speaker 2>and it grows up up the cortex and down the
<v Speaker 2>cortex and in and it it doesn't really look like
<v Speaker 2>it's well. It might there might be chemical cues for
<v Speaker 2>to find where the where the sugary floam is, but
<v Speaker 2>it kind of seems like it's just wandering around at random.
<v Speaker 2>But eventually some of the cells make it to the flow,
<v Speaker 2>and then they start to really proliferate and they become thicker,
<v Speaker 2>but they still just stay as these strands of parenama,
<v Speaker 2>and at some point they might form one cell of asylum,
<v Speaker 2>a cell of flow, not.
<v Speaker 1>A strand of just single cells. Yes, it's literally behaving
<v Speaker 1>because you look at the host plants in Chile, like
<v Speaker 1>you Lickna and the Tricho series, and they don't look sick.
<v Speaker 1>But they've got the tristrics flowers bursting out of the top,
<v Speaker 1>but it doesn't look like it's actually killing the tree.
<v Speaker 1>Like if you look at an oak tree that's got
<v Speaker 1>mistletoe on it, sometimes you can see the oak tree
<v Speaker 1>is stressed out, but none of the cact i seem
<v Speaker 1>too stressed out. Is that because it's it's so so thin,
<v Speaker 1>like it's this.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's a good question that it could be that.
<v Speaker 2>And of course to be a really well adapted parasite,
<v Speaker 2>you should not kill your host. Yeah, And it could
<v Speaker 2>be that the tristrix is just a really well adapted
<v Speaker 2>parasite that it's it's not vigor enough, vigorous enough to
<v Speaker 2>really hurt the host. So the host keeps growing so
<v Speaker 2>the parasite can keep on him. The case, the host
<v Speaker 2>keeps growing upward and the parasite can keep growing upward.
<v Speaker 1>Living in between the cells for the most part exactly.
<v Speaker 2>But how does it.
<v Speaker 1>It's kind of happen to the cells at some point,
<v Speaker 1>right nutrients.
<v Speaker 2>And but when you look at it with the microscope,
<v Speaker 2>it looks like the the host the cactus has no
<v Speaker 2>clue that the cell that the hosts cell right next
<v Speaker 2>right next to.
<v Speaker 1>The parasite, no defense response.
<v Speaker 2>No obvious defense response whatsoever. They just they just both
<v Speaker 2>look happy as they can be.
<v Speaker 1>And so you see that at a cellular level too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so then so then the tristrict can then,
<v Speaker 2>like I said, we have no idea how long it
<v Speaker 2>grows with no body other than just this frank or
<v Speaker 2>useless one or two useless zyum cells, one or two
<v Speaker 2>useless flow them cells. Test that by by taking a
<v Speaker 2>taking a coast cactus that has just a little tiny
<v Speaker 2>bit of obvious parasite on the outside of it, and
<v Speaker 2>then then we take samples up, up and down and
<v Speaker 2>on the sides and on the opposite side, and make
<v Speaker 2>microscope slides and look for are there any parasite cells
<v Speaker 2>here or is this parasite free? And so we can
<v Speaker 2>go a meter above and down below and all around
<v Speaker 2>and you'll find parasite cells. So the parasite looks like
<v Speaker 2>it's just growing all through.
<v Speaker 1>Throughout the cactus, but not only existing. Is these very
<v Speaker 1>thin strands between the cells.
<v Speaker 2>Get yeahs it finally gets from the zynom a flow
<v Speaker 2>and then the strands starts to thicken. They get they
<v Speaker 2>have longitudin each cell has a lunch ofitudinal division. So
<v Speaker 2>it's now two cells thick for cells thick. And then
<v Speaker 2>we'll make like I said, are useless one or two
<v Speaker 2>xium cells and flow them cells. Then at some point
<v Speaker 2>the strands will get to be pretty thick, but pretty
<v Speaker 2>thick still microscopic, and at some point they will start
<v Speaker 2>to grow outwards towards the surface of the cactus. And
<v Speaker 2>how they is that just random or can they detect? Well,
<v Speaker 2>there's there's sort of sort of some light out there,
<v Speaker 2>or there's more oxygen out there or something. But they
<v Speaker 2>grow towards the surface, and then there's still stuck below
<v Speaker 2>all these layers of hypodermis and epidermis, and they start
<v Speaker 2>to form a nodule again. And then inside this nodule
<v Speaker 2>you get some cells start to divide really fast and
<v Speaker 2>form an adventitious bud, an adventitious flower bud. And then
<v Speaker 2>it pushes out and breaks breaks the cactus epidermis and
<v Speaker 2>hypodermis breaks it open. And then this this tristrics flower,
<v Speaker 2>the parasite flower, emerges from the cactus.
<v Speaker 1>They come out the aerials, they do.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so the areals might be a soft spot where
<v Speaker 2>the there was a flower, and so there's just there's
<v Speaker 2>abscisions on that's soft. But yeah, and so then the
<v Speaker 2>and then the cycles complete. But then but then even
<v Speaker 2>after that's happened, the parasite, the parasite inside the host
<v Speaker 2>cactus still continues to grow and grow and and you've seen.
<v Speaker 2>You've seen sometimes the mistletoe on the outside, after flowering
<v Speaker 2>and fruiting.
<v Speaker 1>Will just die, but.
<v Speaker 2>That same plant on the inside is still healthy and
<v Speaker 2>still growing. You I can imagine like like when when
<v Speaker 2>bulbs die back during winter, so you lose all that
<v Speaker 2>outer part, but the bulb part still stays alive. So
<v Speaker 2>the same thing is happening with this parasite in this cactus.
<v Speaker 2>The out of parts die and the inner parts stay alive,
<v Speaker 2>maybe dormant, maybe still growing.
<v Speaker 1>It's so weird. Yeah, it was anybody else studying it.
<v Speaker 2>Its anatomy I don't know that I know of, and
<v Speaker 2>so I've just written like one or two papers on it.
<v Speaker 2>So it's something that anybody should study.
<v Speaker 1>Did you would you? You weren't able to get material
<v Speaker 1>back to U T. Austin. Were you were you doing
<v Speaker 1>at the university down there?
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, at the Catholic University in Santiago.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's so cool. If you hadn't done that work,
<v Speaker 1>nobody would have known how fucking weird that plants.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So I like to think of it as ask
<v Speaker 2>how much can a plant lose and still be a plant?
<v Speaker 2>So this so after this, after the parasite seed gets
<v Speaker 2>his few cells into the cactus, and this parasite seed dies.
<v Speaker 2>Then its body is just these few little prankama cells.
<v Speaker 2>So it has no it has no stem, no leaf,
<v Speaker 2>no root, no epidermis, no hypodermis, no flowers.
<v Speaker 1>No, it's just it's just p cells living inside the host.
<v Speaker 1>That's insane, yea.
<v Speaker 2>And of course it's living inside of a food source.
<v Speaker 2>So think of it. I think it was the tapeworm.
<v Speaker 2>So tapeworm gets inside of us. It doesn't need to
<v Speaker 2>have arms or legs or anything like that. All it
<v Speaker 2>just needs to do is be able to absorb material
<v Speaker 2>out of our gut and reproduce.
<v Speaker 1>Man, do you know, I wonder what's the case with
<v Speaker 1>pilos styles. Has anyone dissected like Dahlia for testins wood
<v Speaker 1>or any of the other host plants and seeing what's
<v Speaker 1>going on with.
<v Speaker 2>That, Yes, there's a nice there's there are several nice
<v Speaker 2>papers on Pilostylis, and it's pretty similar that it gets
<v Speaker 2>some parankuma into the Dahlia xylum and then that and
<v Speaker 2>then after that, the pilostyles seed dies and the pilot
<v Speaker 2>stati's body and I just consists of a few cells
<v Speaker 2>in this in the host plant body and grows up
<v Speaker 2>and down well, I don't know if it grows down
<v Speaker 2>grows up, and as long as the host is alive
<v Speaker 2>and healthy, then every year you get more and more
<v Speaker 2>host shoot and so the pilot starts presumably can grow up.
<v Speaker 2>There's I know of two or three papers. One is
<v Speaker 2>in nineteen fifty seven, I can't remember the author, and
<v Speaker 2>then there's been a more recent one with really beautiful,
<v Speaker 2>very very thin sections that that could trace where the
<v Speaker 2>cells are withinside the host's body.
<v Speaker 1>But the seed, I mean kind of like in restorates.
<v Speaker 1>The seed is just kind of a spaceship to get
<v Speaker 1>a couple of cells into the host and then anymore exactly,
<v Speaker 1>it's like a little shuttle just to get it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so then the idea of making a whole seed
<v Speaker 2>and then throwing it all away is is pretty bizarre.
<v Speaker 1>But why does does well? I guess I've only seen
<v Speaker 1>it on Dahlia for Testants. I've never seen pilos stylies.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like Sorro feminists, the smoke tree in i Mohave Desert,
<v Speaker 1>but but it liked the one in Daily in the
<v Speaker 1>Daily for Testants, I've seen. It's always the flowers always
<v Speaker 1>erupt out of the lower extremities of the shrub, which
<v Speaker 1>is weird.
<v Speaker 2>That's what I've seen to you.
<v Speaker 1>They smell really good. To have you smelled them afore?
<v Speaker 2>I can't.
<v Speaker 1>I haven't.
<v Speaker 2>I've tried. I can smell them.
<v Speaker 1>God, they smelled so good. They were going off and
<v Speaker 1>these butterflies were hitting them. They were pollinated by butterflies.
<v Speaker 1>They got a really nice photo of a butterfly. Second,
<v Speaker 1>I've been that.
<v Speaker 2>I look at the same population that you've looked at,
<v Speaker 2>and I've driven up and down that road at a
<v Speaker 2>time when they were not in bloom and and I
<v Speaker 2>couldn't see daily I couldn't see I saw a lot
<v Speaker 2>about the daily plants, but I didn't see any with
<v Speaker 2>the pilot studies on them. So I think it might
<v Speaker 2>be just a few as in that one small area.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder what the fruit looks like.
<v Speaker 2>I have no idea how.
<v Speaker 1>It's this spersed. There's that really tristrics. There's a really
<v Speaker 1>good David Attenborough footage you can watch it on YouTube
<v Speaker 1>of the bird shitting on a shitting out of tristric
<v Speaker 1>seed on a cacas. They they did a really great job,
<v Speaker 1>it's in depth.
<v Speaker 2>But well, the tristric seed has another sweet so it's
<v Speaker 2>a one seeded pseudo fruit, one pseudo seeded fruit. So
<v Speaker 2>it looks like a little tiny grape with a kind
<v Speaker 2>of a translucent skin, and you can see the seed
<v Speaker 2>inside and the the the embryo is bright green, emerald green,
<v Speaker 2>just packed full of chlorophylls. So no odd thing for
<v Speaker 2>a hollow parasite. But and this the little fruits will
<v Speaker 2>stay healthy for a long long time. But if you
<v Speaker 2>then just take a razor blade and just scar that
<v Speaker 2>fruit wall, probably what you're doing is letting out carbon dioxide,
<v Speaker 2>so the CO two that the respiration is built up
<v Speaker 2>inside is released. Then the embryo immediately, like within minutes,
<v Speaker 2>starts to get longer. And you can see this green,
<v Speaker 2>this green radical start to emerge. If you if you
<v Speaker 2>take the fruit and you just cut off the end
<v Speaker 2>where the radical is, then within minutes the radical pushes out.
<v Speaker 2>And if you if you're just letting it sit there
<v Speaker 2>on the table, the radical pushes out and then turns down.
<v Speaker 1>And within a few minutes.
<v Speaker 2>Within a few minutes, yeah, and so it's like, so
<v Speaker 2>I've always wondered if if you is that radical turning
<v Speaker 2>downward or as it turning towards the dark tabletop, you know,
<v Speaker 2>turning away from light. But that would help find the
<v Speaker 2>cactus body if it's growing towards something dark. If it's
<v Speaker 2>just growing down then if the seed dands on a
<v Speaker 2>on a spine, then the radical would just grow downward,
<v Speaker 2>which would be useless. So my guess is that probably
<v Speaker 2>grows towards darkness or or maybe away from light and
<v Speaker 2>finds the cactus body that way. But it's but it's
<v Speaker 2>fast and and the radical can get to be long
<v Speaker 2>two inches easily. Wow, you'll see them on rocks. You'll
<v Speaker 2>see the the the tristrics fruits have germinator fallen on
<v Speaker 2>rocks and germinate on rocks and big old long radicals.
<v Speaker 2>That of course then this everything dies.
<v Speaker 1>But it's just injecting cells into the host.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder how easy that would be to grow in cultivation.
<v Speaker 1>I've got a couple of trichos serious Chili Wentz's seedlings.
<v Speaker 1>I just need to get seed of trystrics. Now it
<v Speaker 1>would be really curious.
<v Speaker 2>To Yeah, it'd be. And there's a report that that
<v Speaker 2>Tristrix has been found on eight different species of cactus
<v Speaker 2>in Chile, and I've only seen it on the Trekoserris chiliensis.
<v Speaker 1>I've seen on Eulycnia, and I saw it on Michellio Pontia,
<v Speaker 1>that o pontioid, but it wasn't doing It wasn't It
<v Speaker 1>didn't seem like it was thriving. And the cactus looks fine,
<v Speaker 1>of course, so it can probably infect them, but it doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>It's mostly on Eulycnia.
<v Speaker 2>And Yeah, that's an interesting thing about parasites is some
<v Speaker 2>of the viscum parasites can infect various species of euphobia,
<v Speaker 2>but they don't do well, and they don't seem like
<v Speaker 2>they've It looks like the hosts are not really susceptible.
<v Speaker 1>Hid Nora africana. Have you seen that before?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>God? What is Has anyone looked at that? Because that
<v Speaker 1>infects some of those giant poison bush euphorbias.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, I don't know. I haven't seen papers, but I
<v Speaker 2>can't imagine nobody's look at it.
<v Speaker 1>Pro Panky the other weird one that I guess they're in,
<v Speaker 1>aristolochiac Prosa panky is Hignoria is too, I think their
<v Speaker 1>sister genia.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Prosa Panky is in Argentina.
<v Speaker 1>What is it in fact there or what is it?
<v Speaker 1>What's the host plant?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. I saw it with Roberto Kisling one time.
<v Speaker 1>I've only seen specimens. God, that's so great. You got
<v Speaker 1>to see it. And ye.
<v Speaker 2>That all the steaments united, the one great big anthro
<v Speaker 2>type thing. Okay, let's but there's so I said that,
<v Speaker 2>it's hard to imagine nobody's looked at it. But but
<v Speaker 2>it's just amazing how many bizarre things that nobody looks at.
<v Speaker 2>So so the tristicks on, the trichosaurs and Chile is
<v Speaker 2>right there on on next to the highway, and everybody
<v Speaker 2>drives by it, and nobody had looked at it until
<v Speaker 2>I came on.
<v Speaker 1>Man, people take everything for credit. They just.
<v Speaker 2>Well, it's also you know, you look at it and
<v Speaker 2>there's just nothing to compare to you. So it's like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, you find new a new composite flowering, Well
<v Speaker 2>you can compare to all the other thousands of compositis.
<v Speaker 2>Well it's different this way, it's different that way. But
<v Speaker 2>you find a missletone that is totally bizarre, where do
<v Speaker 2>you even start? So you have to be kind of
<v Speaker 2>like kind of naive and think, well, I'll just I'll
<v Speaker 2>just explain it I see, and then come to find
<v Speaker 2>out that's what it is, and nobody's ever looked.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder what's going on with some of the micoheterotrophes,
<v Speaker 1>like the plants that parasitize fungky like Monotropa uniflora like.
<v Speaker 1>Looking at the seeds of those, they're tiny, there's no
<v Speaker 1>there's barely any endosperm. They literally just have to fall
<v Speaker 1>in their dust. They literally have to fall on the
<v Speaker 1>ground and hope that they land on close close fungus. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I would suppose. I don't know that's but that's true.
<v Speaker 2>That's true of almost every kind of reproduction that you have.
<v Speaker 2>You produce a gigantic number of seeds or spores, and
<v Speaker 2>then almost all of them don't make it. So think
<v Speaker 2>of a think of a stable population of say let's
<v Speaker 2>use oaks. Since since we're in Texas, you've got a
<v Speaker 2>stable population of a thousand oaks in this area, and
<v Speaker 2>over the years or the lifetime of those thousand oaks,
<v Speaker 2>they're going to make zillions of seeds. But how many
<v Speaker 2>seeds have to germinate and survive and make it to
<v Speaker 2>where they can reproduce only one per plant. If you
<v Speaker 2>have if if some plant is really lucky and I'll
<v Speaker 2>say ten seeds germinate and survive, that it's not a
<v Speaker 2>stable of population anymore. It's growing population. No, you have
<v Speaker 2>ony ten seeds. Yeah, So so we look at it.
<v Speaker 2>Most of the ecosystems of the world, we've got pretty
<v Speaker 2>much table populations. Every one of those plants is succeeded
<v Speaker 2>by only one plant, which.
<v Speaker 1>Means that so many don't make it. They get eaten
<v Speaker 1>or they.
<v Speaker 2>Just exactly yeah. Right, So it's it's it's bizarre to think,
<v Speaker 2>but but you know, ideally the one that makes it
<v Speaker 2>is it's a little bit better adapted than all the
<v Speaker 2>ones that don't make it.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So moving on to another weird thing about cacti,
<v Speaker 1>and we're just using I mean, that's your specialty. And
<v Speaker 1>it's a great example too, because you have any pesky
<v Speaker 1>leaves to get in the way for the most part.
<v Speaker 1>But root spurs cactus roots have always like enthralled me
<v Speaker 1>because they just you got to figure in some of
<v Speaker 1>these deserts where they grow, the soil too is getting
<v Speaker 1>bone dry. Yeah, like just there's you know, moisture just
<v Speaker 1>it's there to an extent that sure it can go deep,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, most cac roots stay pretty close to
<v Speaker 1>the surface of the soil. Anyway, What what is going
<v Speaker 1>on with cactus roots? I mean, I want to talk
<v Speaker 1>about root spurs as well, but but how can a
<v Speaker 1>cactus roots they embedded in rock. I guess it's not
<v Speaker 1>losing moisture in most cases.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and this is this is something that's not really
<v Speaker 2>been studied very well. So at one point I thought, well,
<v Speaker 2>I'm going to start studying cactus roots because I've been
<v Speaker 2>studying shoots so long. But then all that takes is
<v Speaker 2>trying to dig a cactus route out of out of
<v Speaker 2>solid rock in the hot sun, and you find yourself, well,
<v Speaker 2>I'm going to study something else that's a little bit easier.
<v Speaker 2>So Norman Boke.
<v Speaker 1>And is that who Epathy Lantho Bogi is named it for?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yeah, okay, yeah, and that's an important name.
<v Speaker 1>He he uh.
<v Speaker 2>He did research on cacti in the America's Southwest in
<v Speaker 2>the nineteen fifties and sixties, and this beautiful paper just
<v Speaker 2>really really clarified lots of things and really made it
<v Speaker 2>understandable of what's going on in cacti. But for some reason,
<v Speaker 2>somehow he's just not very often sighted. That not people
<v Speaker 2>money know him. But but he was really great. He's
<v Speaker 2>passed away. But but Norman boat Be okay, e's really
<v Speaker 2>an important kind anatomous for cactus studies and things. But
<v Speaker 2>he found an opuntian near El Paso that was growing
<v Speaker 2>in sand and pulls it up and notice that there's
<v Speaker 2>on the roots, there's the little spurs along the roots,
<v Speaker 2>just short, little short, little nubs. And he found that
<v Speaker 2>when it rains, those little nubs can grow out to
<v Speaker 2>be short roots, and they grow out rapidly with just
<v Speaker 2>a maunter of hours, and they have root hairs a matter.
<v Speaker 1>Of hours, yes, and so they look like little nodules
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 2>So there basically the preformed roots that just need to
<v Speaker 2>be well, like the radical, like the root in a seed,
<v Speaker 2>it's already formed. It just needs to be hydrated.
<v Speaker 1>You've got a food reserve there too. I mean to
<v Speaker 1>grow that fast, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I would guess probably, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>But within a matter of hours of a rain shooting.
<v Speaker 2>And they shoot out, put out lots and lots of
<v Speaker 2>root hairs. They don't have a root cap so even
<v Speaker 2>over the apex, they have root hairs and can just
<v Speaker 2>absorb water like crazy, get it back into the.
<v Speaker 1>Main don't have a root cap. Wow, they can.
<v Speaker 2>Bring that water back into the main route and then
<v Speaker 2>get it up into the body very very quickly.
<v Speaker 1>The root cap is like the little helmet that protects
<v Speaker 1>them from wile, especially going if you're going through sand.
<v Speaker 2>But these are not going to last long, so it
<v Speaker 2>doesn't matter if they get hurt.
<v Speaker 1>So the root spurs are literally just out there to
<v Speaker 1>cast out, collect water and then die.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>The roots spurs, yeah wow.
<v Speaker 2>I would say think of them like the leaves of
<v Speaker 2>okotillo that when there's rain you put them out and
<v Speaker 2>then letting.
<v Speaker 1>They're just meant to be ephemeral.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, they're just ephemeral roots. And then but when
<v Speaker 2>they die at their base, a few roots, a few
<v Speaker 2>root cells stay alive and then make a root primoive
<v Speaker 2>and make this make the next little root spur. And
<v Speaker 2>then year after year after year after this happens over
<v Speaker 2>and over and over again, and then you build up
<v Speaker 2>this little spur. Now you can kind of see it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, So that's what the spur is. It's kind of
<v Speaker 1>like layers of those different.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, the remnants of the previous year's stuff. And
<v Speaker 2>so both found this in a puntia or an area,
<v Speaker 2>and then Nigel Taylor has looked for these in a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of other cacti and found them in a lot.
<v Speaker 2>I've looked at looked for them occasionally when I get
<v Speaker 2>a plant and from a nursery, and I very often
<v Speaker 2>see them, but I've never made a real all out
<v Speaker 2>effort enough to say, yeah, they occur in everything.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's so cool. Though. I knew there was something
<v Speaker 1>weird about because you figure, I mean, when you think
<v Speaker 1>about it, you like, this thing is sitting in like aerocarpus,
<v Speaker 1>it's sitting in limestone, like that's got to get hot
<v Speaker 1>as hell and completely dry, like bone dry. When you're
<v Speaker 1>going for a few months without any rain and whatever.
<v Speaker 2>It rains, you can't at that point, you can't say, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I better start making a root now, right.
<v Speaker 1>You've got to have it ready to go. Yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>there was in a few hours, it just shoots out.
<v Speaker 1>And so that's what. So that's the answer to there
<v Speaker 1>that soil or soil conditions is the roots burs.
<v Speaker 2>Probably, but it but then you think about it, that
<v Speaker 2>In addition to absorbing water and minerals, another thing that
<v Speaker 2>roots do is they secrete side of canons and so
<v Speaker 2>and so the side of canons and to go from
<v Speaker 2>the roots up into the shoots. So what this is
<v Speaker 2>and and of course the shoots are making oxens that
<v Speaker 2>get transported down to the root. And so this is
<v Speaker 2>so you've got this plant, you know, a great big
<v Speaker 2>tree or a little tiny cactus. And how do they
<v Speaker 2>know what's going on with the rest of the body.
<v Speaker 2>You know, we've got blood that circuits around a nerve
<v Speaker 2>nervous system, But how does a shoot know. Oh my gosh,
<v Speaker 2>the roots are happy, the roots have water, the roots
<v Speaker 2>have minerals. I might as well I put out some
<v Speaker 2>relieves because it's my healthy root system is gonna give
<v Speaker 2>me water. So if so, when the roots are happy,
<v Speaker 2>they make cider kinin that goes up from them.
<v Speaker 1>Just the plant hormone like oxen.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and so it goes up this sudden this hormone
<v Speaker 2>goes up into the stem and says the roots are happy,
<v Speaker 2>go ahead, and then the shoe can become active. And
<v Speaker 2>they're making this hormone that goes down to the roots
<v Speaker 2>and says the shoot's active, so keep growing, keep getting water,
<v Speaker 2>keep getting minerals. In cacti where they can just sit
<v Speaker 2>in a dry soil for months and months and months
<v Speaker 2>and months, are the roots dormant and not making CID
<v Speaker 2>of kinin so they're telling the shoot don't grow, the
<v Speaker 2>soil is dry. I have no cid of kinon so
<v Speaker 2>and then and then do these spur roots when they
<v Speaker 2>grow out, do they give a burst of side of
<v Speaker 2>kind and say, oh, we're happy, go ahead and grow
<v Speaker 2>or or so this's that aspect. So I know a
<v Speaker 2>little bit of the anatomy of these things, but we
<v Speaker 2>don't know anything about the physiology.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy to me because those are that's such a
<v Speaker 1>huge I mean, they've just mastered growing in such a
<v Speaker 1>shitty place. I mean just in terms of I love
<v Speaker 1>the desert, but you know what I mean, Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's they shouldn't be there, and then they
<v Speaker 1>figured it out.
<v Speaker 2>Does this does this biology then carry over to the
<v Speaker 2>epiphetic cacti where you've got they've got roots in the
<v Speaker 2>in the humans and stuff and yeah, in dead litter
<v Speaker 2>in the tree tree canopy.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I mean you still aren't growing in any soil
<v Speaker 1>maybe some of them there's like there's humans up there,
<v Speaker 1>but you're still can get really dry even and you know,
<v Speaker 1>so you've got.
<v Speaker 2>Again the only thing to do is look, do these
<v Speaker 2>things have spur roots?
<v Speaker 1>Or how many cacti have been found that don't have
<v Speaker 1>spur roots?
<v Speaker 2>Well, that's I mean negative evidence. Negative evidence is always
<v Speaker 2>worse than that just because.
<v Speaker 1>They're not there, you don't see them, that it can't
<v Speaker 1>produce them.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, and you don't know because nobody's looked, because
<v Speaker 2>nobody's looked carefully enough, or that they don't.
<v Speaker 1>But I think it's safe to presume that most cacked i,
<v Speaker 1>at least in hot dry areas do this, because that
<v Speaker 1>seems that's a huge benefit. You're having a little root
<v Speaker 1>that can grow, can just take off within a few hours.
<v Speaker 2>Assumptions. Assumptions will get you into a whole lot of
<v Speaker 2>try Yeah. Well knowing that though, but well, yeah, that
<v Speaker 2>can be your hypothesis. Hypothesis is that probably most cacked
<v Speaker 2>i in hot dry areas have rootspurs So then the
<v Speaker 2>easiest thing to do is go out and look. You
<v Speaker 2>order a cactus from a nursery that's been pretty carefully unpotted,
<v Speaker 2>and the roots are probably pretty undamaged, or you dig
<v Speaker 2>one up from the habitat carefully and roots are undamaged,
<v Speaker 2>and look at them. And and what what Nigel did
<v Speaker 2>is he he got a bunch of cacti and parted
<v Speaker 2>them up until they were happy and growing well, and
<v Speaker 2>then just stopped watering them and let them dry for
<v Speaker 2>a long time. And then after they'd been pretty stressed,
<v Speaker 2>then he watered them and then parted them and looked
<v Speaker 2>and found these little roots spurs all over the place.
<v Speaker 1>That is that's so fascinating. I had no idea.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was a super simple experiment, and you don't
<v Speaker 2>need a lot of money, you don't need a lot
<v Speaker 2>of equipment. It's just just doing look maybe with a
<v Speaker 2>hand lenser naked eye.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, So root spurs basically are like these precharged
<v Speaker 1>little nodules in cacti that are ready to respond to
<v Speaker 1>rain really quickly and then just send out, send out.
<v Speaker 1>How many other plant families do that? You know there's
<v Speaker 1>something analogous to that.
<v Speaker 2>Well, well, that's a good question that then I don't
<v Speaker 2>know the answer to. And and one thing that's always
<v Speaker 2>interested me, interested me is what do the roots of
<v Speaker 2>bulbs do. So you've got like around Austin, we've got
<v Speaker 2>we've got oxplit lily that blooms now and then piss
<v Speaker 2>up its leaves in early winter and then goes totally
<v Speaker 2>dormant for months and months and months until the next September.
<v Speaker 2>And what are their roots doing. My guess is that
<v Speaker 2>they've hab sized all the routes that they have no
<v Speaker 2>roots doing.
<v Speaker 1>It would make sense. Yeah, I just cut them off
<v Speaker 1>because you're going to be losing moisture. I mean, even
<v Speaker 1>though the roots sealed off from the atmosphere, there's still moisture.
<v Speaker 2>They're in dry soil.
<v Speaker 1>They've got to be being Yeah, there's moisture, got it,
<v Speaker 1>that's probably going to be pulled out of them.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And onions and their roots are all dead, and
<v Speaker 2>it's not that the farmers cut them off. It's just
<v Speaker 2>the roots die. But on palm trees, their roots, their
<v Speaker 2>roots don't die. And palms are just a giant bulb
<v Speaker 2>they are.
<v Speaker 1>To explain that you have a dug of a palm seedling,
<v Speaker 1>so oh, yeah, actually, yeah, you're right, I have Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it does look kind of like an onion.
<v Speaker 2>Well, you know, you've got a little tiny palm seed,
<v Speaker 2>and that's the coconut. Most palm seeds are pretty small,
<v Speaker 2>and that seedlings makes us a little short, skinny shoot
<v Speaker 2>that doesn't have enough room for very many adventitious roots.
<v Speaker 1>So so what.
<v Speaker 2>Palms do is they go through a period called establishment
<v Speaker 2>growth where they stay where the base of the stem
<v Speaker 2>stays underground, and the thing just gets wider and wider
<v Speaker 2>and wider, but not longer. And you know, making one
<v Speaker 2>or two leaves, it gets wider and wider and water
<v Speaker 2>so it can make more and more adventitious boot but
<v Speaker 2>roots for all these extra vascuar bundles that's making. And
<v Speaker 2>then at some point when it's really wide and has
<v Speaker 2>lots and lots of basket bundles and lots and lots
<v Speaker 2>of adventious roots, then it starts to grow up and
<v Speaker 2>for a while it continues to make more adventurous roots
<v Speaker 2>out into the soil. And in palms especially, you can
<v Speaker 2>see that even after this stem is above the soil level,
<v Speaker 2>they'll still make adventitious routs. Yeah, but they aren't able
<v Speaker 2>to get to the soil, so they die and kick
<v Speaker 2>the bucket.
<v Speaker 1>And you'll even see on some public the Washingtonians which
<v Speaker 1>get planted weights in which they've got that kind of
<v Speaker 1>flanged base.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly, so they make all those adventirous roots that are
<v Speaker 2>pushing out, and then you gotta have room for them.
<v Speaker 1>But so it's wider, but it's not, it's still.
<v Speaker 2>Not it's seconds lateral as No, it's just lots and
<v Speaker 2>lots of bascular bundles in this, in this monocot cylinder,
<v Speaker 2>that is a bunch of scattered bundles, not a ring
<v Speaker 2>ring like in fact. So so I've wondered about the
<v Speaker 2>roots of most bulbs and monocass like go dormant? Do
<v Speaker 2>the do the roots die? And just think about it.
<v Speaker 2>We can just walk around and look at what a
<v Speaker 2>stem is doing. Oh, the leaves have fallen off. It's winter,
<v Speaker 2>it's dormant. Oh the flowers are coming out in the spring.
<v Speaker 2>The leaves are coming out. But we have no idea
<v Speaker 2>what the roots are doing unless you dig them up.
<v Speaker 2>And and once you dig them up then probably you
<v Speaker 2>can't really bury them again.
<v Speaker 1>And you don't have a tap root. Of course, it's
<v Speaker 1>fibers all monoconts.
<v Speaker 2>Yea, what is that? God?
<v Speaker 1>There's that? This is? This would be a curious thing
<v Speaker 1>to study there's that palm pseudo phoenix. It grows in
<v Speaker 1>the Dominican Republic. It's like a bottle palm. It's oh,
<v Speaker 1>why right, what is going on? That's that's got to
<v Speaker 1>just be parankama.
<v Speaker 2>I think it is. I think it's parankama that in
<v Speaker 2>between the basket bundles that for some reason, it just
<v Speaker 2>starts to divide again. After it's been sitting there for years,
<v Speaker 2>it starts to divide. Makes this makes the stem wider,
<v Speaker 2>gives it this bottle shape.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, Phoenix vaniphra here, this guy, what a beautiful it's
<v Speaker 1>it's yeah, it's got that layer of farina on the
<v Speaker 1>outside too. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So Bob, I would guess extra storage cells.
<v Speaker 1>That are just larger, I mean more and more storage
<v Speaker 1>cells and then yeah, but it's still originally created at
<v Speaker 1>the appical marast.
<v Speaker 2>Well, you know, you think of parankama as being these
<v Speaker 2>big cells with thin walls. But but there's one thing
<v Speaker 2>to be to have one big cell with thin walls,
<v Speaker 2>or if you have that same volume, you have two
<v Speaker 2>cells that together the same volume and they have thin walls,
<v Speaker 2>that's going to be a little bit stronger, a little
<v Speaker 2>bit tougher than one giant.
<v Speaker 1>Right, because you've masked for mass, you've got pine, you've
<v Speaker 1>got more cell.
<v Speaker 2>Walls in there. So I have So when you get
<v Speaker 2>really great big cells like in watermelon, fruit or or
<v Speaker 2>ice plant, the we have those giant crystalline cells on
<v Speaker 2>the surface, they're just so fragile you can't really do
<v Speaker 2>much of anything with them. So it's just better to
<v Speaker 2>have a bunch of smaller cells. Right, there's still pranking,
<v Speaker 2>just thin walls, but that's going to be strong on
<v Speaker 2>a few great big cells.
<v Speaker 1>You've still got thin walls, right, But because there's so
<v Speaker 1>many more cells, you've got more structure in there. Yeah. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>what is the I want to talk about innerclorie marastimes
<v Speaker 1>a mono constitute. But before I forget this, I want
<v Speaker 1>to get back to what like when you look at
<v Speaker 1>a choya or some of the cat you get that
<v Speaker 1>criss crossing wood. Oh, what's up with that? What is that? Exactly? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's old xylum tissue, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's the secondary'sonymous wood.
<v Speaker 1>It's old water plumbing.
<v Speaker 2>But well, think about think about something like bamboo is
<v Speaker 2>an easy example. So you bamboo, you've got these nodes
<v Speaker 2>and long, skinny nodes and especially think of think of
<v Speaker 2>a variegated bamboo with the yellow and green stripes, and
<v Speaker 2>the stripes always run perfectly straight up the stem. They
<v Speaker 2>don't run around in circles, they don't run around in spirals,
<v Speaker 2>they just go straight up the stem. Well, in bamboo,
<v Speaker 2>you're the cells that make the Internet is longer are
<v Speaker 2>transverse divisions, and the cells elongate, and the vascar bundles
<v Speaker 2>are doing the same thing. So a vascuar bundle runs
<v Speaker 2>straight up a stem of bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>And but.
<v Speaker 2>If that were the only thing, you'd have a vascuar
<v Speaker 2>bundle that starts with the route and then just goes
<v Speaker 2>all the way up to the top. And if something
<v Speaker 2>happens that you're you're in trouble, you know, if the
<v Speaker 2>insect bites to it. So at every place where there's
<v Speaker 2>a node, the bundles come together and and form a neck,
<v Speaker 2>a network that water can be shared in the zion flow,
<v Speaker 2>sugar can be shared in the flow. And if something's damaged,
<v Speaker 2>basket bundles damaged. Here at the next node you can
<v Speaker 2>you can kind of get around it and detur around it.
<v Speaker 1>It's like having a string of Christmas lights, the old
<v Speaker 1>school ones where if one light went out, the whole
<v Speaker 1>thing goes out. This is the way around that.
<v Speaker 2>But if you if you interconnect them, you can get
<v Speaker 2>around it. And then and then die coots and you
<v Speaker 2>dye coots. They don't. So when I say you dyecot,
<v Speaker 2>so the word die coot is now out right right
<v Speaker 2>right you I.
<v Speaker 1>Still explain it just monocot, diecot. But just know there's
<v Speaker 1>some stuff in between. Yeah, just you know, for for
<v Speaker 1>lay people, for people just getting into finding. But yes,
<v Speaker 1>so so this thing.
<v Speaker 2>So that's easy to see in bamboo, but in all plants,
<v Speaker 2>you really want to have these your bundles connected somehow,
<v Speaker 2>so they're not just not just independent strings of Christmas lights.
<v Speaker 1>And so.
<v Speaker 2>Usually everywhere there's a leaf, at least some bundles are
<v Speaker 2>going to come together, if not all bundles, at least
<v Speaker 2>some bundles are going to come together and share water,
<v Speaker 2>share flow, share sugars and stuff like that. And in
<v Speaker 2>the choices, that's what you're seeing that at the top
<v Speaker 2>of the top of each of those where well, this
<v Speaker 2>is where they come together.
<v Speaker 1>That's that's where a leaf was spinet exactly.
<v Speaker 2>And so and so if you could really very carefully
<v Speaker 2>dissect the skin off of a living choya and dissect
<v Speaker 2>the down through the cortex and get to the wood.
<v Speaker 2>You'd find that the wood forms a zigzag that matches
<v Speaker 2>where the leaves are.
<v Speaker 1>So those are nodes right where it comes together. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's basically a way for all those fi the interconnect
<v Speaker 1>not fibers, the plumbing, the InterPlaNet.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and that's a and that's a really big deal
<v Speaker 2>that we don't know about in a lot of plants
<v Speaker 2>is the interconnection of the plumbing. So so and we
<v Speaker 2>have is the vascuar bundles, so in a in a
<v Speaker 2>cross section of a stemia of individual bundles. So the
<v Speaker 2>important thing is do the bundles come together at some
<v Speaker 2>point so that they could share water? And and where
<v Speaker 2>they do come together, do the do the vessels then
<v Speaker 2>come together so that it's you know, it wouldn't be
<v Speaker 2>any wouldn't do you much good if the if the
<v Speaker 2>vascuar bundles came together, but the vessels in the bundles
<v Speaker 2>didn't come together. So if you want to share water,
<v Speaker 2>you have to unload water from this vessel through pranko
<v Speaker 2>my cell, the prank and cell prank cell get into
<v Speaker 2>this vessel.
<v Speaker 1>Just through plasma doesn'mount it. Yeah, yeah, So we're going
<v Speaker 1>to talk about that by the if you don't know
<v Speaker 1>what plasma doesn'mounter as we're getting to that, that's of
<v Speaker 1>massive importance.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So a much better thing is to have the vessels,
<v Speaker 2>if the bundles come together, then have the vessels come
<v Speaker 2>to gether, and the vessels gonna have their pitting between
<v Speaker 2>the in the in the common wall between them, so
<v Speaker 2>that water could be pulled from one into the other
<v Speaker 2>and vice versa. And but we don't know that for
<v Speaker 2>most plants, we assume that. And it's been it's been
<v Speaker 2>shown in some in some palms by Tomlinson and co
<v Speaker 2>workers that they were able to track where how the
<v Speaker 2>vessels move, what their pattern is, and a and a
<v Speaker 2>shoot and can they share water? Do they not share water?
<v Speaker 2>Stuff like that, and think of it in a petiole
<v Speaker 2>and a lot of diecots, a lot of you die
<v Speaker 2>kots have three vescue bundles that will go to the
<v Speaker 2>base of the petiole and then then do they stay
<v Speaker 2>as independent veins up the petiole and into the leaf
<v Speaker 2>and some plants they do. So if you could really
<v Speaker 2>carefully cut through the edge of a petiole. You'd cut
<v Speaker 2>one of those three and then one third of the
<v Speaker 2>lamina could be really you know sol. But in other ones,
<v Speaker 2>those three bundles come together, share water, share everything, and
<v Speaker 2>then they they break up into a whole set of
<v Speaker 2>bundles that runs through the petiole. So if you cut one,
<v Speaker 2>no problem.
<v Speaker 1>There's smaller bundles.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and then and then again at the top of
<v Speaker 2>the petiole they might join again and make another nexus
<v Speaker 2>and then spread out through the whole lamina. But again
<v Speaker 2>we don't know that for most plants that it's all
<v Speaker 2>great theory.
<v Speaker 1>But the lamina being the leaf blade.
<v Speaker 2>So and this is this is something that is really
<v Speaker 2>cool that in some old experience experiments and then maybe
<v Speaker 2>some newer ones that I don't know about, that what
<v Speaker 2>people would do is, you know, with a really sharp
<v Speaker 2>pointed scalpel, take a broad leaf and just cut on
<v Speaker 2>two little little nicks in the lamina and say, okay,
<v Speaker 2>is this is this going to cut off? So so
<v Speaker 2>you've got a mid rib, and you've got the lateral
<v Speaker 2>veins coming out of the mid rib, not going out
<v Speaker 2>to the edge of the leaf bank of the leaf blade.
<v Speaker 2>If we cut one of those, is all the tissue
<v Speaker 2>outside beyond that gonna die of dehodition. And for the
<v Speaker 2>most part the tissue survives that the network is able
<v Speaker 2>to get water around that cut and keep it alive.
<v Speaker 1>But but.
<v Speaker 2>It it seemed like, well, it just seems like we
<v Speaker 2>need a lot more studies of stuff like at how
<v Speaker 2>much of a safety margin is there built into these
<v Speaker 2>things now? On leaves, most plants have thousands of leaves.
<v Speaker 2>So if one, if part of one gets screwed up
<v Speaker 2>by having a broken bundle and it can't conduct around it,
<v Speaker 2>who cares, Well, we lose that one part of the leaf.
<v Speaker 2>We've got thousands of the leaves, all of which are
<v Speaker 2>functioning just fine. Yeah, So how important it is we
<v Speaker 2>don't know. But it just again, it'd be a simple,
<v Speaker 2>simple studies that might have that might surprise us. That
<v Speaker 2>might surprise us, and that would That's been something I've
<v Speaker 2>wondered about in cactus cortical bundles. If you could take
<v Speaker 2>a cactus with the really thick cortex and a narrow
<v Speaker 2>ring of bundles in the center, if you could just
<v Speaker 2>saw through the main bundles the main wood, could the
<v Speaker 2>cactus conduct enough water upwards through just the cortical bundles.
<v Speaker 1>That which are much smaller than the main which.
<v Speaker 2>Are much smaller. Yeah, but nobody's ever nobody's ever counted
<v Speaker 2>to say, well, yeah, there are ten big bundles in
<v Speaker 2>the center, and each of those ten big bundles has
<v Speaker 2>five vessels that could conduct so much water. But out
<v Speaker 2>of the out of the cortex, we've got two hundred
<v Speaker 2>cortical bundles, each of which has one or two vessels
<v Speaker 2>that altogether, the conducting capacity of the cortex is much
<v Speaker 2>greater than the center.
<v Speaker 1>So that yeah, so that cortex, I mean, that's the
<v Speaker 1>that's the key takeaway here though, on especially when you
<v Speaker 1>think about something like grafting. That cortex is conducting sugars
<v Speaker 1>and water with those cortical bundles. And that's why, like
<v Speaker 1>I think about when I grafted that, I laid a
<v Speaker 1>kind of series postel gray the pencil cactus, cut it
<v Speaker 1>in half, cut the stem in half, laid it down
<v Speaker 1>horizontally on top perpendicular to the tissue below on the stock,
<v Speaker 1>and it still takes. It takes, and then it just
<v Speaker 1>sends out. It's crazy. It's the weirdest thing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I would guess what did you graft it onto?
<v Speaker 1>I would guess way bigger. So it's like a quarter
<v Speaker 1>sized graft, like cutting a pencil in half and then
<v Speaker 1>graphing it onto like a.
<v Speaker 2>So it'd be interesting to do that again. And then
<v Speaker 2>if the graph is successful after a year or two,
<v Speaker 2>you know, cut it open. Look are the are the
<v Speaker 2>cortical bundles become woody and big and conductive or is
<v Speaker 2>it just really only a connection between the main centrals
<v Speaker 2>you'd be able to see.
<v Speaker 1>I would guess those cortical bundles are the main cambium.
<v Speaker 2>I would guess.
<v Speaker 1>So, yeah, okay, I'm gonna see that. I'm gonna make
<v Speaker 1>a bunch more and then we gotta go and there's
<v Speaker 1>come busy you we got to look at them under
<v Speaker 1>the scope.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I think I think a big deal is that
<v Speaker 2>there's so much that can still be figured out by
<v Speaker 2>just doing but just looking, you know, just.
<v Speaker 1>Well questioning, having a question at it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly that that.
<v Speaker 1>I'd tell that.
<v Speaker 2>You know, my research over the years, so many many
<v Speaker 2>years could be done with just a handful of dollars
<v Speaker 2>and I just simple microscope.
<v Speaker 1>But slicing those things that's the only hard part probably
<v Speaker 1>is like slicing it thin enough to look at.
<v Speaker 2>But a lot of times you can just do that
<v Speaker 2>with hand section, just just a razor blade and raise
<v Speaker 2>braided and steady hand and yeah.
<v Speaker 1>It's yeah, God, it's so cool. It's wild stuff to
<v Speaker 1>think about. Okay, well, okay, So moving back on to
<v Speaker 1>roots though, and I still want to talk about intercalorie marastems.
<v Speaker 1>We're putting that out there because that's a monocot specific thing, right,
<v Speaker 1>intercallorie marastimes. It's basically yeah, I mean just the you know,
<v Speaker 1>like the way that a lawn, the way you can
<v Speaker 1>mow along forbid forbid, you know, but it's you can
<v Speaker 1>mow it, but it's growing from the base versus you know,
<v Speaker 1>like something like a shrub or something is growing from
<v Speaker 1>apical marasims at the top. Yeah, what's well, okay, well
<v Speaker 1>let's talk about this now. I guess okay, we'll save
<v Speaker 1>the roots there. I want to talk about what's going
<v Speaker 1>on with that. Okay, explain that where there's marastimes and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of monocops do that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So, what so joays talking about with interculary mirrors
<v Speaker 2>stims is Mirraorsims are often classified by their positions. So
<v Speaker 2>if they're at the tip, there's a an apical marsine
<v Speaker 2>with the base or a bas of maristam. If they're
<v Speaker 2>in between the top and the bottom, they're an interculary
<v Speaker 2>mirror stem and and intercular mirrors stems of grasses of
<v Speaker 2>lawnsi you mow that is in a leaf where the
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of at the base of a leaf. It's
<v Speaker 2>the base of the blade between the blade and the
<v Speaker 2>and the sheathing leath. So in monocots, in most monocots,
<v Speaker 2>the leaf blade doesn't just come down and attached dirt
<v Speaker 2>into the stem. They do in a ga base put
<v Speaker 2>in grasses and in palms, the leaf blade comes down
<v Speaker 2>and then you get a thing that wraps around the
<v Speaker 2>stem and goes down for quite a ways, and that's
<v Speaker 2>the sheathing leaf base, and so the the and that
<v Speaker 2>gives a nice stable, stable attachment point to the to
<v Speaker 2>the lamina to the leaf blade, and that sheathing leaf
<v Speaker 2>base often goes all the way around this stem. And
<v Speaker 2>so I just talked about you die coos off and
<v Speaker 2>have just three rescue bundles going into them. And these
<v Speaker 2>monocods typically have dozens or in the big palm leaf
<v Speaker 2>will have hundreds and hundreds of ascube bundles going into
<v Speaker 2>this sheathing leaf base and they run up that base
<v Speaker 2>and then into into the leaf blade. So you have
<v Speaker 2>a really good connection in grasses uh an irises, and
<v Speaker 2>a bunch of things you have at the base of
<v Speaker 2>the blade is a mare. So so the blade you
<v Speaker 2>can cut off the tip of the tip of the
<v Speaker 2>leaf blade. And but you haven't heard the basal mara
<v Speaker 2>sam with the intercilary marrasim because that keeps growing. And
<v Speaker 2>so this the leaf lamina leaf blade will keep getting
<v Speaker 2>longer and longer and longer, and so you can keep
<v Speaker 2>mowing your lawn over and over and again. Now you're
<v Speaker 2>not mowing the same leaf year after year. Each leaf
<v Speaker 2>will finally stop growing. But the lawn is rhizomes have
<v Speaker 2>spread and setting up new leaves that you've got to
<v Speaker 2>cut off.
<v Speaker 1>Right. But this is why bunch of grasses can't be
<v Speaker 1>made into the lawns because they don't spread by rhizome,
<v Speaker 1>spread by raisomes.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but like let's say you're doing with this with
<v Speaker 2>this with an iris, you could you next you know,
<v Speaker 2>next spring, when your irises start to grow. Just cut
<v Speaker 2>off the tip and you can watch and measure how
<v Speaker 2>long and how much lamina is left down to the soil.
<v Speaker 2>And then you can just watch it measure how much
<v Speaker 2>it grows, and you can do that over and over again.
<v Speaker 2>But at some point it's going to stop. That the
<v Speaker 2>inticular amrastime just stops. So so grass leaf, if you
<v Speaker 2>don't move your long your grass leaf is not going
<v Speaker 2>to get infinitely long. And an irish leap or an
<v Speaker 2>agabi leaf will not get infinitely.
<v Speaker 1>It will reach a certain length and then stop and
<v Speaker 1>then to flower it'll send up another and entirely separate.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>The bud that sends up that inflorescence is down at
<v Speaker 1>the end.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And it's going to make them. It's going to
<v Speaker 2>make more and more new leaves instead of have the
<v Speaker 2>same old leaf just get longer and longer and longer.
<v Speaker 1>But interclory marastims, does that apply strictly to monocots? You
<v Speaker 1>get in dicots at all?
<v Speaker 2>Or no? Let me think.
<v Speaker 1>I would imagine it's mostly monocots.
<v Speaker 2>I think mostly monocots now with spines. We call that
<v Speaker 2>a basil marrastem because there's really the tissue below the
<v Speaker 2>spine marrestem is not more spine. It is it's you
<v Speaker 2>know this this stem shoot, it's the shoot body. So
<v Speaker 2>then there's the marristam at the base of each spine.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So because it's the base of the spine, we call
<v Speaker 2>it a basal marrot stem. If we were say halfway
<v Speaker 2>up the spine, then we so we'd have then we call.
<v Speaker 1>It ins that branches. But I've never thought about that
<v Speaker 1>and cact that for some reason, Like in an aerial
<v Speaker 1>is there an applical marrastem there where, Yes, there has
<v Speaker 1>to be, because that's where the flowers are coming out
<v Speaker 1>of one.
<v Speaker 2>Right, and and that apical marastim is making the primordia
<v Speaker 2>for each of those spines. So the spines are modified
<v Speaker 2>bud scales, so that actually bud marrastem, that accellent marestem
<v Speaker 2>is a little short bud, a little short shoot that
<v Speaker 2>is making leaf primority that turn into spines. And then
<v Speaker 2>each spine rather than growing like a regular leaf, grows
<v Speaker 2>as a spine with a basal marrow stem.
<v Speaker 1>But those marrow stems they can can they keep producing
<v Speaker 1>flowers out of an aerial or yes?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So it's a it's just like a regular bud
<v Speaker 2>on on on like cotton or anything like that, and
<v Speaker 2>it could grow out to be a say and I
<v Speaker 2>can prictly grow out to be another little pad, another
<v Speaker 2>shoot more as a flower. And in most plants, most cacti,
<v Speaker 2>most plants, if it flowers, then it's kind of one
<v Speaker 2>and done. It's you get one flower.
<v Speaker 1>And because with cacti you only get one flower per areal,
<v Speaker 1>correct normally, but in some once it's already flowered, can
<v Speaker 1>that same aerial produce another flower the next year In.
<v Speaker 2>A small number of feces of cacti, and uh, in
<v Speaker 2>a martillo cactus, they you have three or four or
<v Speaker 2>five flowers at the same time from this one areole,
<v Speaker 2>and then the next year they'll do it again and
<v Speaker 2>do it again.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, and.
<v Speaker 2>Gradually you build up to have an obvious little spur shoot.
<v Speaker 2>But this but you have to have a really old
<v Speaker 2>martillo cactus. And and in prue you've got near ammonia,
<v Speaker 2>and near ammonia does that like crazy?
<v Speaker 1>So but like peoti areocarpus, they never flower out of areoles.
<v Speaker 1>They only flower out of the center of the plant,
<v Speaker 1>of the direct that they're.
<v Speaker 2>Flowering out of. They're flowering out of super young areals,
<v Speaker 2>it's still the center of the plant, right right, right,
<v Speaker 2>So every cactus flower is coming out of an aerial
<v Speaker 2>but older areoles.
<v Speaker 1>Once that tissue divides and moves away from the center
<v Speaker 1>of the plant, like in of paoti, they're not they
<v Speaker 1>don't flower anymore.
<v Speaker 2>And again that's that's pretty much species by species, so
<v Speaker 2>really easy to see. In mammalarias, they're very often mammalarias.
<v Speaker 2>The areas have to be say one or two years,
<v Speaker 2>three years old, get that beautiful ring that's a certain
<v Speaker 2>distance from the apex. That and that distance is one
<v Speaker 2>year's growth or two years growth. So whereas something like
<v Speaker 2>like peyote or areacarpas they grow, they flower from super
<v Speaker 2>young areas that are still down at the very y.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I mean physiologically like if you look at
<v Speaker 1>the I don't know. But then they can't do it again.
<v Speaker 2>Mostly they can't do it again.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they have to grow and create a new stem.
<v Speaker 2>That and that is a yeah, And that's a good point.
<v Speaker 2>So in almost all plants they're going to produce with
<v Speaker 2>some exceptions, they're going to produce one flower per axi
<v Speaker 2>ray bud, and some of produced two or three a
<v Speaker 2>little cluster like red buds with prusio cluster of flowers
<v Speaker 2>from an axioy bud. And that's because that bud is
<v Speaker 2>a little tiny short shoot and it's producing little it
<v Speaker 2>has its own little axoy buds on it that heat
<v Speaker 2>produce a flour. And yeah, in the most cacti, once
<v Speaker 2>it's flowered, they can't flower again for some reason. But
<v Speaker 2>then I can Martillo cactus near ammondia, Yeah, they do
<v Speaker 2>flower and they all.
<v Speaker 1>The ways around it. And then you've got the cephalium
<v Speaker 1>of course, like a melo cactus and disco cactus, which
<v Speaker 1>are something that was a disocca God, damn it.
<v Speaker 2>Disco cactus.
<v Speaker 1>Always I always can yeah, okay, and and so like
<v Speaker 1>with not to be confused with dio cactus, which is
<v Speaker 1>another genus.
<v Speaker 2>Right, total different genus. But like in the cacta that
<v Speaker 2>have a lateral cephalium where the cephalium runs down the side,
<v Speaker 2>like an espostoos, so you have this zone that you'd
<v Speaker 2>expect if we're anything like mammalaria, you'd have just flowers
<v Speaker 2>coming out of the top of the lateral cephallium.
<v Speaker 1>But in s.
<v Speaker 2>Postoa you'll find a flower at the top this and this,
<v Speaker 2>this latter of sophallium can be like two or three
<v Speaker 2>or four feet long, a big long stretch.
<v Speaker 1>Of yeah, just like it's hilarious. Looks like a beaver
<v Speaker 1>pelt on the side of a canic.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And that's the only part that can flower. All
<v Speaker 2>the rest of the stem, same age can't flower. And
<v Speaker 2>so you'll see it an s postoa that has a
<v Speaker 2>flower at the top and a flower at the bottom,
<v Speaker 2>of flower of the middle, fruit at the top, a
<v Speaker 2>flower at the bottom. So so you got some young areos,
<v Speaker 2>you've got some old areoles flowering at different ages.
<v Speaker 1>What are they doing? Then they've just got so many
<v Speaker 1>buds stacked up in that who knows?
<v Speaker 2>Who knows?
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy. Nobody's researched, and it's yeah, wow, okay, so
<v Speaker 1>all right, well, moving back to roots. This is and
<v Speaker 1>this is why I think what blows people's minds, if
<v Speaker 1>they don't already know it is that most of the
<v Speaker 1>absorption of water and nutrient instead of root is occurring
<v Speaker 1>in like the tips where the root hairs are, right,
<v Speaker 1>But the root hairs are ephemeral too. They die after
<v Speaker 1>a certain amount of time, and then that root is
<v Speaker 1>no longer where they've died, that root is no longer
<v Speaker 1>absorbing anything. It's just it's just the conduit. It's just
<v Speaker 1>the plumbing. And so so most of the most of
<v Speaker 1>the root, like if you dig up a bush or something.
<v Speaker 1>Is why it doesn't work when people are like, I
<v Speaker 1>want to move a plant. Most of the root when
<v Speaker 1>you dig it up, you're cutting off all the Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you're cutting off the part unless you're getting a giant
<v Speaker 1>root ball, you're cutting off the part that's doing all
<v Speaker 1>the absorbing and nutrient uptake. And you might have this
<v Speaker 1>big root ball, but if it doesn't have root hairs
<v Speaker 1>on it, if it's all like the older root.
<v Speaker 2>There's no absorption whatsoever.
<v Speaker 1>There's no absorption, and so that thing's just gonna die
<v Speaker 1>of thirst.
<v Speaker 2>So that's why you always transplant. If you're digging up
<v Speaker 2>a bush or a tree, you always do that in
<v Speaker 2>winter when there's when the planet is leafless and this
<v Speaker 2>has no transpiration, is not pulling on waters, not losing
<v Speaker 2>water from leaves. Yeah, and you sit there and again,
<v Speaker 2>like I mentioned, it's so easy to see what the
<v Speaker 2>shoes are doing, but we don't know really what roots
<v Speaker 2>are doing. So you you transplant your tree in winter,
<v Speaker 2>and it looks like the planet is just sitting there.
<v Speaker 2>But soil is usually going to be warmer than air
<v Speaker 2>in winter, and so the roots might not be mostly
<v Speaker 2>are not going to be dormant, and so they're going
<v Speaker 2>to be healing those cuts you've made when you dug
<v Speaker 2>the thing up and generating new adventitious root tips or
<v Speaker 2>or lateral roots are going to beat.
<v Speaker 1>Unless you're in a really high latitude spot like Chicago
<v Speaker 1>in February or something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, well even then, you know, even then you
<v Speaker 2>probably the the top few inches are going to be frozen, but.
<v Speaker 1>Especially with climate change and that doesn't even get that
<v Speaker 1>cold and Chicago on the winters anymore.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, in most places the roots are going
<v Speaker 2>to be active, and when maybe slowly active, but it
<v Speaker 2>be active. So by the time spring has come after
<v Speaker 2>you've transplanted your plant, then then you've got some.
<v Speaker 1>They've actually rowing. The roots are probably growing using stored energy.
<v Speaker 2>So you're getting a bunch of regenerated root tips and
<v Speaker 2>root hairs and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>And if you have to transplant and the death of
<v Speaker 1>summer you gotta remove, it's not going to work well.
<v Speaker 1>It won't work in most cases. But you've got to
<v Speaker 1>get a lot of the root all and then also
<v Speaker 1>cut the shoots, reduce the shoots in that case. And
<v Speaker 1>then but then you're just relying on dormant buds in
<v Speaker 1>the bottom parts of the stem.
<v Speaker 2>So you're going to have a really bizarre looking plant
<v Speaker 2>when you're.
<v Speaker 1>It's still gonna there's a chance that may not wak,
<v Speaker 1>so you're still gonna be losing moisture through those cut
<v Speaker 1>ends of the shoots.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, long story short is, don't ever transplant a
<v Speaker 2>root or a bush in the summer. It's just going
<v Speaker 2>to work.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah, especially when it's hot as the.
<v Speaker 2>Thing, and it's it's so easy to think of, well,
<v Speaker 2>you know, you're transplanting this thing in the winter. No leaves,
<v Speaker 2>they can't full of synthesize. But but plants mostly are
<v Speaker 2>full of starch you've got and they can. They can.
<v Speaker 2>They can regenerate buds, they can regenerate new leaves grow,
<v Speaker 2>they've got some storage starch and it's and so like
<v Speaker 2>in my garden, I'm always trying to kill hackberry seedlings
<v Speaker 2>because they elm seeds. They German German, and I crazy
<v Speaker 2>as well cut them off at root level.
<v Speaker 1>They're wonderful natives, but they could be aggressive, right, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, and so there's a little bit of a root,
<v Speaker 2>it's gone enough storage storage to get a butt active
<v Speaker 2>and stand a butt up for this oil and start
<v Speaker 2>making new leaves and yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So that's hilarious. Yeah, man, it's crazy the types of
<v Speaker 1>things that we don't think about. Yeah, that I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>move plants thing always drives me nuts. It's like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>you just move it. It's like, man, you can't. It
<v Speaker 1>doesn't work.
<v Speaker 2>Like like coming here, I saw a truck driving down
<v Speaker 2>the road, you know, real borrow and all the all
<v Speaker 2>the gardening stuff and a bunch of plants in the
<v Speaker 2>back of a pickup leaves driving down the road at
<v Speaker 2>seventy miles an hour, and the leaves are just you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's Texas that's hotter than heck, and.
<v Speaker 1>Well, especially with it when it's dry, it's just soaking
<v Speaker 1>those plants.
<v Speaker 2>Those plants are almost certainly dead by now. Yeah, So
<v Speaker 2>it's it's just crazy to.
<v Speaker 1>See maybe cover them with something if you can, like
<v Speaker 1>mitigate because the humidity loss especially. That's anothering people don't
<v Speaker 1>think about, is how much humidity affects plants, Like the
<v Speaker 1>humidity is really important. If you're trying to grow plants
<v Speaker 1>inside in Chicago in a winter when the air is
<v Speaker 1>exceptionally dry because it's so cold outside, you bring that
<v Speaker 1>air inside heat it up. War amer can hold a
<v Speaker 1>lot more moisture. You know, it's the capacity the relative humidity. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and so that's you know, plant it's so easy to
<v Speaker 1>kill shit growing in indoors and really cold climates. But also,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I see that being on one hundredth meridian
<v Speaker 1>here in Texas, and I talk about this all the time.
<v Speaker 1>I probably don't emphasize that as much as I should.
<v Speaker 1>But West Texas and South Texas are completely different. You
<v Speaker 1>get the same so many of the same plant species
<v Speaker 1>growing in both places, but with different ecotypes in South
<v Speaker 1>Texas where it's more humid, in West Texas, where it's
<v Speaker 1>more arid. And it's not just the aridity, but it's
<v Speaker 1>how the aridity affects the nighttime temperature too. You get
<v Speaker 1>huge temperature swings. In West Texas, it'll be ninety during
<v Speaker 1>the day, it'll cool down to fifty eight at night.
<v Speaker 1>Never happens. In South Texas it'll be one hundred degrees
<v Speaker 1>ninety five degrees during the day cool now to maybe
<v Speaker 1>seventy nine at night. So I mean, how does that
<v Speaker 1>affect plant metabolism? How does that affect I mean there's
<v Speaker 1>so that humidity holds so much warmth. Yeah, and it's
<v Speaker 1>shipped down there, grows so fast compared to here. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I killed my lawn. I have like a forest within
<v Speaker 1>two years, you know, and the stuff up here, you
<v Speaker 1>kill the lawn, it takes two years. You've got shit
<v Speaker 1>that's waist high if that. You know, it's just the
<v Speaker 1>much more arid climate. And you see it in the
<v Speaker 1>plants too. The ego types in West Texas have thinner leaves,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>And just watering is not necessarily enough to make up
<v Speaker 2>for that atmospheric community.
<v Speaker 1>No, no, it's not for the lack of atmospheric community.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the lack of atmospheric commidity here. One of my
<v Speaker 2>favorite cacti is Perscia, the cacti that look like ordinate
<v Speaker 2>trees with big leaves and stems, and you can grow
<v Speaker 2>those except for the winter cold in Austin you can.
<v Speaker 2>Otherwise they do fine, they grow and everything. You can't
<v Speaker 2>grow them at all in Phoenix that you can water
<v Speaker 2>them and water them and water them, and they just
<v Speaker 2>don't make enough.
<v Speaker 1>There's shoots, it's just being pulled out so quick.
<v Speaker 2>It's pulling. It's big. That dryer pulls the water out
<v Speaker 2>of the leaves faster than the shoots can conduct water.
<v Speaker 2>Even if they have water in the roots, then the
<v Speaker 2>shoots can conduct water to them. But if you've got
<v Speaker 2>in an area with higher humidity, then you just find
<v Speaker 2>that that the leaves are not losing water as much.
<v Speaker 1>And even just I mean just just environmental plasticity or
<v Speaker 1>you know in a plant, you'll see you know, if
<v Speaker 1>you grow it in a dry climate, the same individual,
<v Speaker 1>if you grow at any more human climate, might produce
<v Speaker 1>big leaves. But you grow in a drier climate and
<v Speaker 1>the leaves don't get that big, and the leaves just
<v Speaker 1>only get And that's not an ecotype thing, that's just
<v Speaker 1>you know, plasticity.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, response to stress.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, this response to this environment. It's just dependent on environment.
<v Speaker 1>I've seen that same thing. I remember I was really
<v Speaker 1>obsessed with the medicine coil, which is love is a
<v Speaker 1>humid plant. It's a humid plant, you know, grows all
<v Speaker 1>the flood zones. Yeah, the Don Redwood, and I was
<v Speaker 1>trying to grow them in Oakland like fifteen years. I
<v Speaker 1>just got obsessed, which is Oakland's not that hot, it's
<v Speaker 1>like coastal California, but it's super dry. In the summer.
<v Speaker 1>You get six months of just really arid and they
<v Speaker 1>just I water them every day and they still just
<v Speaker 1>weren't growing that fast and looked like shit. I did
<v Speaker 1>it with American chestnuts out there too, and once you
<v Speaker 1>put it in the ground, then it's different story. They
<v Speaker 1>can do a little bit better, but especially growing it
<v Speaker 1>in the pot, you're just watering it every day, and
<v Speaker 1>it's just the pot loses moisture so quick and they're
<v Speaker 1>just transpiring too much.
<v Speaker 2>One of my favorite plants is monkey Puzzle around Carria. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I'll carry bid Willie and uh I would. I would
<v Speaker 2>just love to be able to grow that. But they're
<v Speaker 2>like the downward where they have got to have fog
<v Speaker 2>and mist and humid air and cool air, and.
<v Speaker 1>They've got at least thicker leaves though, and they've got
<v Speaker 1>more like sclerophyll type leaves very much, very much much
<v Speaker 1>more cuticle probably in wax, yeah, a little bit more
<v Speaker 1>resistant to drying up. Those are great trees, but they're
<v Speaker 1>so cool they get I think.
<v Speaker 2>I think if they if they were in a nursery
<v Speaker 2>and saw that they were going to be shipped to Austin,
<v Speaker 2>they would die right there. You wouldn't have to get
<v Speaker 2>to Austin before they'd kick the bucket. Yeah, No, they
<v Speaker 2>just don't make it.
<v Speaker 1>So what's going on with that then? Like why? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you can be supplying endless water to a plant, but
<v Speaker 1>if it evolved in a place with humidity, it's and
<v Speaker 1>then you put it in and the air is dry
<v Speaker 1>where you're trying to grow it, is it just pulling?
<v Speaker 2>I think the amount of conductive capacity in the wood
<v Speaker 2>in the asylum that it just is exceeded by how fast.
<v Speaker 2>Well that's exactly what we're talking about bundles, that you
<v Speaker 2>have a certain amount of capacity and if you're if
<v Speaker 2>the top is evaporating water faster than you can conduct
<v Speaker 2>it water up to it. Even if you have plenty
<v Speaker 2>of water and the roots, you just can't do it.
<v Speaker 2>So Yeah, I remember a class I had one time.
<v Speaker 2>So so I used to teach in Austin and I
<v Speaker 2>had a plant anatomy class with some kids from some
<v Speaker 2>students from Houston, some students from Arizona and I asked
<v Speaker 2>the question of describe what kind of adaptations you'd find
<v Speaker 2>for a plant that's adapted to Austin and and the
<v Speaker 2>Houston kids said, well, in a desert like Austin, you
<v Speaker 2>have to have all these xeric adaptations, and the and
<v Speaker 2>the Arizona students said, well, in a tropical rainforest like Austin,
<v Speaker 2>so it's own's perception.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's all relatives what they're used to.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So the Awesome people thought that we're just too
<v Speaker 2>humid to survive, and the Houston people that were too
<v Speaker 2>dry to survive.
<v Speaker 1>So it's cool. It's for me, it's just fascinating to
<v Speaker 1>think about. I mean, that's one of the best things
<v Speaker 1>for me about being in Texas is you're right where
<v Speaker 1>the continent starts to dry out and you see it
<v Speaker 1>in all the plants. Yeah, and we're starting with the
<v Speaker 1>Edwards Plateau. It's where you start really getting some of
<v Speaker 1>the hairer plants and the North American continent. And then
<v Speaker 1>the extreme of that is like in the Mojave Desert,
<v Speaker 1>where it's everything's all the plants are fucking white, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like they're so dense with hairs. Are tomicon, the bear
<v Speaker 1>poppy Salvia Fune area funeral stage just just covered in hairs. Man,
<v Speaker 1>you could see how much that dry air affects, right, And.
<v Speaker 2>We were talking earady about the idea of humidity and
<v Speaker 2>moisture and desert adaptations and so like. In you know,
<v Speaker 2>even in the worst desert, you're going to have some
<v Speaker 2>streams that always have at least a little bit of water.
<v Speaker 2>So so you're gonna have a plant here on the
<v Speaker 2>hillside that is it's dry air and dry roots all
<v Speaker 2>the time, except after a rain and a few feet
<v Speaker 2>away you've got a plant that has dry air and
<v Speaker 2>its roots are in this wet stream soil, and they're
<v Speaker 2>gonna have totally different biologies and totally different leaves and
<v Speaker 2>like cuticles and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>God, what is that? I can't believed forgot the name
<v Speaker 1>of it. It was one of my favorite plants. Is it?
<v Speaker 1>Yerba manza? The plant that I can't remember the genus
<v Speaker 1>name of it? Now, Jesus Christ, I haven't seen because
<v Speaker 1>I guess you get it in West Texas, but I
<v Speaker 1>haven't seen it in so long. What is the anyway?
<v Speaker 1>But it grows in play it grows like in the
<v Speaker 1>Mohave desert, but it occurs in seeps. You know, you
<v Speaker 1>get Epipactis gigantea growing in Death Valley, but in seeps. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the same orchid you get in ri paring areas here
<v Speaker 1>grows in Death Valley as well. Yeah, there we go. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>come on, Animopsis californica. I can't believe I forgot that
<v Speaker 1>it escaped me. That's weird. Okay. Well, on that note,
<v Speaker 1>I want to I want to ask do you think
<v Speaker 1>you know, for people that grow cacti from seed and
<v Speaker 1>they've got them in these humidity chambers and they keep
<v Speaker 1>them in there for six months to a year sometimes less,
<v Speaker 1>how does it affect the growth? Because cacti being cam plants,
<v Speaker 1>I would assume if it's humid all the time, they're
<v Speaker 1>keeping their stomata open, right, But at the same time,
<v Speaker 1>the way that they photosynthesize, they've got to close their
<v Speaker 1>you know, most of them take in stomata or open
<v Speaker 1>their so nomata at night, taking CO two at night.
<v Speaker 1>They close them during the day.
<v Speaker 2>And then you also have and so that would be
<v Speaker 2>obligately calm where they have to do this no matter what.
<v Speaker 2>And then you have some plants that are facultatively CAM,
<v Speaker 2>where if it's cool enough and if it's wist enough,
<v Speaker 2>then they won't do CAM metabolism. They can, but they won't.
<v Speaker 2>They'll just leithers. Some are to open during the day
<v Speaker 2>and do regular C three photosynthesis. And I don't think
<v Speaker 2>there's any way to just look at a plant and
<v Speaker 2>guess which it is. And I don't know. It could
<v Speaker 2>be that a bunch of people have studied this, and
<v Speaker 2>maybe that most cacti are obligately CAM, but I think
<v Speaker 2>that I think that a bunch of them, and maybe
<v Speaker 2>even especially seedlings, might be facultatively or that they only
<v Speaker 2>survive if it's springtime, is cool enough and wet enough
<v Speaker 2>that they can grow as C three plants until they
<v Speaker 2>get to be a certain size, and then at that
<v Speaker 2>point they'll switch to being CAM. I think I don't
<v Speaker 2>know that for sure.
<v Speaker 1>You think some cacti can just be regular old C
<v Speaker 1>three plants. I know they grow a lot faster as
<v Speaker 1>seedlings if you keep them in humidity, like when I'm
<v Speaker 1>growing a bunch of the native cactive for the Rio
<v Speaker 1>Grand Valley. They grow, I can get them so big.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, So it could
<v Speaker 2>be that this has all been investigated and is written
<v Speaker 2>up somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>When you keep that human, I mean certainly, if you've
<v Speaker 1>got the humidity up, it's much easier for their stamata
<v Speaker 1>to be open. Yes, because they're not the atmosphere is
<v Speaker 1>not pulling as much water out of their stamata. But
<v Speaker 1>and if they can keep their somata open, they can
<v Speaker 1>be taking in CO two but more often than they
<v Speaker 1>otherwise would be.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and that's a that's a physiology. So I'm a
<v Speaker 2>plant anatomist. You know, you can cut plants open and
<v Speaker 2>look at what's going on. And I have tremendous respect
<v Speaker 2>for a physiologists because physiologists you've got to do experiments.
<v Speaker 2>Do they grow better? You give them this water, grow
<v Speaker 2>them like this for months and months? Do they grow better?
<v Speaker 2>Do this? Do that? Do that? So you have to
<v Speaker 2>do all these experiments and then interpret what's going on.
<v Speaker 2>You can't just look and see like an anatomy. So
<v Speaker 2>physiology is a lot harder. But with stillmata, you can
<v Speaker 2>just look at those and say are they open or
<v Speaker 2>are they closed? Or you can put a little instrument
<v Speaker 2>on there and you can detect is water vapor coming
<v Speaker 2>out of the plant or not coming out of the plant,
<v Speaker 2>So don't know if the stilla open or close. So
<v Speaker 2>the control of still model opening has been studied a lot,
<v Speaker 2>and as you would guess, there are a million aspects
<v Speaker 2>to the control of that. So most plants dawn, dawn,
<v Speaker 2>light comes down, you open your stomata for your C
<v Speaker 2>three plant camplant dusk, the sun goes down, you open
<v Speaker 2>your stomata. But if it's water stressed then and the
<v Speaker 2>plants really is suffering, then that light doesn't matter. The
<v Speaker 2>still model will stay closed.
<v Speaker 1>But generally it's the light you would assume that it
<v Speaker 1>controls the model opening and cactive.
<v Speaker 2>For instance, everything's okay, but if everything is not okay,
<v Speaker 2>if you're water stressed, then that light is overridden by
<v Speaker 2>other steps. And if and if that is wrong, then
<v Speaker 2>that's overridden by other things, and then that's overridden. And
<v Speaker 2>that's what it is. It is an exquisite area of physiology.
<v Speaker 1>There's so many different factors that's take into account.
<v Speaker 2>I wonder, yeah, and so the so the first you know,
<v Speaker 2>the first the first reasonable assumption is yeah, light C
<v Speaker 2>three cam stuff like C four, But that can only
<v Speaker 2>be a first assumption. But you can't you can't be
<v Speaker 2>sure because like you get the drought varieties of cotton
<v Speaker 2>that most cotton is just takes a huge amount of
<v Speaker 2>water because because it'll just transpire like crazy, and and
<v Speaker 2>if and we'll just die if you're not watering and
<v Speaker 2>like crazy. But you have drought ress cotton that can
<v Speaker 2>close this stone in the daytime.
<v Speaker 1>And so they'll was that that was bread or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so they can they can survive. They might
<v Speaker 2>not thrive, but they can survive with less water because
<v Speaker 2>they're not following the regular rules. Are they cam?
<v Speaker 1>Are they are they doing camera?
<v Speaker 2>Don't? I don't know. I don't think so. I would
<v Speaker 2>doubt it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's the And that's that's the other thing too
<v Speaker 1>to think about with growing some of these things, like
<v Speaker 1>for growing cacti for restoration, like if you germinate them
<v Speaker 1>in a humidity dom, how do you acclimate them to
<v Speaker 1>lower humidity? Probably it's much easier in the Rio Gram
<v Speaker 1>Valley where it's more humid than out here in West
<v Speaker 1>Texas where it's exceptionally dry. But in how long, like
<v Speaker 1>what are you doing when you're acclimating it? That's what
<v Speaker 1>I want, are you waiting for still model density to
<v Speaker 1>be reduced in the new growth or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I don't know, And that is that is you know,
<v Speaker 2>and that could probably that might be all out there
<v Speaker 2>in the in the horticultural literature, because no matter what
<v Speaker 2>you're doing, that acclamation from you know, in in a
<v Speaker 2>mis chamber and a growth chamber.
<v Speaker 1>With people doing cuttings, right, or if.
<v Speaker 2>You're growing if you're growing orchids from tissue culture and
<v Speaker 2>you're generating a zillion little orchid plantlets from inside of
<v Speaker 2>a test tube with one hundred percent humidity, you can't
<v Speaker 2>just plant them out so so that that.
<v Speaker 1>They'll just wilt, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Getting them acclimated. What actually happens? I would guess that
<v Speaker 2>during acclamation there's something synthesizing a whole bunch of cuticle
<v Speaker 2>on epiderma and and wax. But but I don't know,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I don't even think about that.
<v Speaker 2>And it could be different from.
<v Speaker 1>From plant to cuticle, and free is produced in the epidermis,
<v Speaker 1>not just at the apical maris, then that's.
<v Speaker 2>No from the epidermis. And and how long how long
<v Speaker 2>an epidermis can synthesize cuticle or wax that probably varies
<v Speaker 2>from plant to plant to plant.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and can it regenerate it if it's been and where.
<v Speaker 2>That can regenerate, I don't. I don't know if any
<v Speaker 2>plant can regenerate cuticle if you would say, strip it
<v Speaker 2>off or you can't really dissolve it off the way
<v Speaker 2>you dissolve wax as you like with ether or chloroform
<v Speaker 2>or something like that, which of course is going to
<v Speaker 2>kill your plant. But let's say you would you just
<v Speaker 2>take a razor blate and scrape off.
<v Speaker 1>Like plandilia, like any.
<v Speaker 2>And so next time I see you, I'll expect that
<v Speaker 2>you've done that.
<v Speaker 1>That'll be But on that plant, that's not just cutical,
<v Speaker 1>that's farina too, that's the And for you said varina
<v Speaker 1>is long chain fatty acids. Cuticle is I.
<v Speaker 2>Think varina is wax, wax pellets, wax particles.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah it is, yeah, okay, but how does it
<v Speaker 1>differ structurally from cuticle?
<v Speaker 2>Cuticle is usually made up of cutin, which is shorter
<v Speaker 2>chain fatty acids. But apparently, and lots of plants, what
<v Speaker 2>we think of is the cuticle that we used to
<v Speaker 2>think of just being a pure cutan layer has pockets
<v Speaker 2>and lens and lenses and patches of wax in it,
<v Speaker 2>so the cuticle is both cutin and wax. And then
<v Speaker 2>a lot of plants then after they've made their cuticle,
<v Speaker 2>go on synthesizing the the long chain fatty acids.
<v Speaker 1>They need for wax, producing more weight.
<v Speaker 2>And then that those long chain fatty acids just move
<v Speaker 2>right through the cuticle and cumulate onto the surface and
<v Speaker 2>then polymerize into wax. And and in some plants, and
<v Speaker 2>some plants they plummerize in a nice smooth surface, and
<v Speaker 2>other ones with different fatty acids. They'll they'll make plates,
<v Speaker 2>they'll make spirals, they'll make blobs, they'll make all kinds
<v Speaker 2>of different needles, shapes, and and a lot of times
<v Speaker 2>the it's only the cells right around the guard cells.
<v Speaker 2>So either the guard cells themselves or the next cells
<v Speaker 2>out called subsidior cells, they will synthesize special waxes that
<v Speaker 2>then will grow out the waxes plumerize into these needles
<v Speaker 2>that that over arched system model pour so carbon dioxide
<v Speaker 2>can still get through easily because it's just needles. But
<v Speaker 2>if you have rain or mist or dew, then those
<v Speaker 2>water droppers we're gonna that drop is gonna form a
<v Speaker 2>We're gonna sit on those needles and it's not going
<v Speaker 2>to get down to the model poor and block the poor.
<v Speaker 2>So carbon dioxide, even all that water molic water droplet
<v Speaker 2>is sitting there on top of those needles over the
<v Speaker 2>sumadel poor, the carbon dioxide can get around it and
<v Speaker 2>get into the plant. Whereas if they didn't have these
<v Speaker 2>special waxes right around the this the poor, then the
<v Speaker 2>then then do or whatever it might just phone then
<v Speaker 2>film block it and you're in the Yeah, the planet
<v Speaker 2>would basically not suffocate, but would be cut off from
<v Speaker 2>its carbon dioxide.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so moving on from this and I'll let you go. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I didn't even realize it's been an hour and forty
<v Speaker 1>five minutes it's been. It doesn't feel like that.
<v Speaker 2>Before we move on, So we're talking about epidermis. Let's
<v Speaker 2>go back to those those missiletoes that get inside the
<v Speaker 2>host of their plant. So you know, epidermis is such
<v Speaker 2>a crucial feature to survival and and the cuticle and
<v Speaker 2>the waxes and stuff like that. Now, if you if
<v Speaker 2>you can strip off the the epidermis of a cactus
<v Speaker 2>would die out in West text it would die within minutes.
<v Speaker 2>But here we have these mistletoes that are inside their
<v Speaker 2>host plant. Don't make any epidermis, don't make any cuticle,
<v Speaker 2>don't make any wax. Of course, they don't need it.
<v Speaker 2>They don't need to conserve water. They're in a watery plant. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so it's it's again the idea of something that seems
<v Speaker 2>to be such a fundamental feature of plants, an epidermis.
<v Speaker 2>We don't need it.
<v Speaker 1>We just a lot of aquatic plants don't produce cuticle
<v Speaker 1>or even stomata, which is wild, right, right, they've just
<v Speaker 1>lost it. They had it at one point, but when
<v Speaker 1>they went back into the water.
<v Speaker 2>They yeah, and in most The one thing I find
<v Speaker 2>extremely bizarre is the epidermal cell. Epidermal cells are the
<v Speaker 2>most exposed to sunlight and carbon dioxide. They don't have chloroplasts.
<v Speaker 2>You know, there are some reports of microscopic, super microscopic
<v Speaker 2>chloroplasts and a few epidermal cells. But if you just
<v Speaker 2>take a pure epidermis, it is not going to be green.
<v Speaker 2>You look out of the microscope, you see chloroplasts all
<v Speaker 2>over the place, and so all the photosynthesis is done
<v Speaker 2>deeper inside the tissue and the prankima. Yeah, and the
<v Speaker 2>cortex with a leaf mesa phil It's like, why on earth,
<v Speaker 2>what's what's the advantage of that that that you're epidermis
<v Speaker 2>is not for synthetic. But when you get into the water,
<v Speaker 2>plants that live submerged, their epidermis very often has.
<v Speaker 1>Chloroplasts and show.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so something that we expect to be a fundamental
<v Speaker 2>aspect of epidermis not in water.
<v Speaker 1>Filmy ferns are weird too. Filmy ferns are really hemenophylesi.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, well when filmly ferms are so strange because
<v Speaker 2>very often between the where you have a vein and
<v Speaker 2>a only fern leaf, you have an upper epidermis and
<v Speaker 2>lower epidermis and some mesophyl cells on your zion flown.
<v Speaker 2>But between the veins there's often just one layer of cells.
<v Speaker 2>And I don't know if that's anybody's figure out whether
<v Speaker 2>that's a layer of epidermis or music field.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, that one layer of cells, does it have chloroplasm?
<v Speaker 1>Is it doing any photo setting?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>They're always in really humid places.
<v Speaker 2>I mean they have they have super humidity. They die
<v Speaker 2>instantly in dry air.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so Okay, let's let's talk about because this is
<v Speaker 1>a wild thing. So plasmo desmata, which are essential, right essential,
<v Speaker 1>but they're also what connect every cell and a plant
<v Speaker 1>that's alive to every other cell. So you've got the
<v Speaker 1>cell wall, you know, and like parentma colma, only a
<v Speaker 1>primary cell wall sclaringkima secondary cell wall composed leg. But
<v Speaker 1>you get the cell wall, and then you've got the
<v Speaker 1>cell membrane beneath that. And like animals of course don't
<v Speaker 1>have a cell wall. There's no cell wall. It's just
<v Speaker 1>just the cells just have a membrane. What the membrane
<v Speaker 1>Like when you were when we were talking about like
<v Speaker 1>siguar was melting and Phoenix because it's too hot. The
<v Speaker 1>cell membrane is a lipid molecule in LA, the layer
<v Speaker 1>of lipid moleus. And you were making a comparison to well,
<v Speaker 1>how does it like butter behave at cold temperatures versus
<v Speaker 1>hot temperatures? And so what happens at hunt one hundred
<v Speaker 1>and thirty degrees? You've got a fucking saguaro, you know,
<v Speaker 1>planted in a mall parking lot. Yeah, and Phoenix, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's probably not the cell wall which is composed of
<v Speaker 1>cellulose that the primary cell well that is being affected
<v Speaker 1>by those temperatures. It's the membrane.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, So a crucial thing that we were talking
<v Speaker 2>about earlier that that the membranes that the cell membrane
<v Speaker 2>that surrounds a cell, or the internal membrane like the
<v Speaker 2>membrane around the nucleus, or the membrane of the mitochondria chloroplasts.
<v Speaker 2>Those are those membranes are a or two layers of
<v Speaker 2>lipids that on one end one end of each lipid
<v Speaker 2>molecule is is kind of usually a phosphate group that
<v Speaker 2>is that makes it attract water, and the rest of
<v Speaker 2>the molecules is a lipid, so it repels water. And
<v Speaker 2>so if you mix those together in water and then
<v Speaker 2>shake it up, then all the the the hydrophobic parts
<v Speaker 2>are going to can avoid water if they associate with
<v Speaker 2>other hydrophobic parts of other lipid molecules, and so and
<v Speaker 2>the and the the phosphate ants can associate with water.
<v Speaker 2>So you get these automatically form these these two layered membranes,
<v Speaker 2>and inside these membranes you have a lot of proteins, enzymes, pumps, channels,
<v Speaker 2>and those proteins have got to be able to move
<v Speaker 2>around through that memorane, not not in and out of
<v Speaker 2>the membrane, but just from side to side in that
<v Speaker 2>layer of the.
<v Speaker 1>Membrane, in the membrane itself, within this trapped.
<v Speaker 2>In the membrane itself. So the memorane has got to
<v Speaker 2>be fluid at least it can't be hard more than
<v Speaker 2>if it's hard, then they then the proteins can't move
<v Speaker 2>to where they've got to be. And so so think
<v Speaker 2>of taking certain types of lipids and you like butter
<v Speaker 2>sticking your refrigerator and it gets hard, and you can't
<v Speaker 2>use that in a membrane of a cold area plant.
<v Speaker 2>If you did that, then all the memories would get
<v Speaker 2>hard and the plant would die. On the hand other hand,
<v Speaker 2>you got things like olive oil, corn oil that that
<v Speaker 2>even if you get them cool, there's still lick liquid
<v Speaker 2>and will still fluid. But then when you get them
<v Speaker 2>too hot, like phoenix one hundred and thirty degrees, then
<v Speaker 2>maybe maybe they get to be too fluid and they
<v Speaker 2>can't really.
<v Speaker 1>Serve as a membrane anymore. They're not holding anything in
<v Speaker 1>or do they dissolve into the cell or what. But
<v Speaker 1>that's probably what's happening.
<v Speaker 2>There's probably probably the there's probably the fluidity of the memories,
<v Speaker 2>that the memories just can't maintain their integrity. And that's
<v Speaker 2>and that's also a big deal about when when a
<v Speaker 2>seed dries out, that such a crucial thing as you've
<v Speaker 2>got to have you know, water on one side, on
<v Speaker 2>the two sides that the membranes keep their their orientation.
<v Speaker 2>That when you dry a seed out, that keeping the
<v Speaker 2>membranes from just you know, just going to heck is
<v Speaker 2>a is a tricky deal. And then but they do it,
<v Speaker 2>and resurrection plants like Seleganella does it. They can dry
<v Speaker 2>these things out to where how on Earth are their
<v Speaker 2>membrane survive and then and then as you rehydrate them
<v Speaker 2>that the membranes are still where they should be in
<v Speaker 2>doing doing what they should.
<v Speaker 1>So that's a big So what happens to because I
<v Speaker 1>mean the obviously many like some opunthia can freeze, some
<v Speaker 1>frankly pairs can freeze, some of the small ones, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>or potossa or human fuse or whatever. But then some
<v Speaker 1>will just melt, like in that Texas freeze, they just
<v Speaker 1>went flasted. What's actually being affected there it's not the
<v Speaker 1>cell wall, it's probably the membrane. Or yeah, when when.
<v Speaker 2>When plants are killed by freezing, a lot of times
<v Speaker 2>that's the formation of ice crystals. That you get an
<v Speaker 2>ice crystal that the water inside the cell freezes or
<v Speaker 2>entire they intercell, your spaces freezes, and then those crystals
<v Speaker 2>puncture the membranes and so you gotta so a membrane
<v Speaker 2>in a cell is just like a SOB blobal membrane
<v Speaker 2>that has no edge. That it's that you know, once
<v Speaker 2>you pop it, you pop it. And so so maybe
<v Speaker 2>when an ice crystal punct just grows through a membrane,
<v Speaker 2>it just pops the membrane until the cell dies and
<v Speaker 2>you may not know it until spring, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>basically the cell has dyed during the middle of the winter.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, and a lot of the and they're prickly
<v Speaker 2>payers that often just just lay down flat on the
<v Speaker 2>ground in the middle of winter and then the spring
<v Speaker 2>they just perk right back up.
<v Speaker 1>Well, some of those ones in northern latitudes, because there's
<v Speaker 1>a punty that grows up in Canada, I think, well
<v Speaker 1>they turned pink. So they fill with betaline pigments which
<v Speaker 1>has a which has a freeze protective you know, that's
<v Speaker 1>like a protective pigment basically. But then I think they also,
<v Speaker 1>well they also get wrinkled too, so they're kind of
<v Speaker 1>they're expelling water and then probably filling with more sugar
<v Speaker 1>and salutes to lower the freezing point of the inside
<v Speaker 1>of their cells.
<v Speaker 2>Maybe that would make sense, I would.
<v Speaker 1>I did a video on this four years ago. I
<v Speaker 1>just forget it. I just forget. But I mean when
<v Speaker 1>you see him, you know, you see him like.
<v Speaker 2>You spend your whole life, your whole life learning stuff
<v Speaker 2>and then you forget it.
<v Speaker 1>I know, yeah, if you're not doing you're not staying
<v Speaker 1>on top of it and going through it again every
<v Speaker 1>six months. But uh, but I know that, Like I'll
<v Speaker 1>point the human fusa, like that cool prickly pair that
<v Speaker 1>grows in the sand prairies thirty miles south of Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>You see him in winter, they're wrinkled and fucking stressed
<v Speaker 1>and pink, and then you see them in spring or
<v Speaker 1>summer and they're like green, and.
<v Speaker 2>It's the same and it's the same.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I've just been so that by too.
<v Speaker 1>It's weird. Okay, So all right, we'll moving on to
<v Speaker 1>plasmo dismodel.
<v Speaker 2>This is this is the essential he's been bugging me
<v Speaker 2>about plastic.
<v Speaker 1>This is all days on the connections where every cell
<v Speaker 1>and a plant is connected to every other cell, and
<v Speaker 1>animals don't do that.
<v Speaker 2>It's yeah, it's and that is a yeah, that's crucial.
<v Speaker 2>So we needed to kind of start from the beginning.
<v Speaker 2>So an animal cell is very easy to define. You
<v Speaker 2>have a blove of protoplasm that's surrounded by a cell
<v Speaker 2>membrane everywhere, and you take one animal cell and push
<v Speaker 2>it up against another animal cell and there are two membranes.
<v Speaker 2>Cell membranes come together, So when we say cell membrane,
<v Speaker 2>we're talking about the outermost membrane of it. Now you
<v Speaker 2>have inner membranes like the membranes of the nucleus, membranes
<v Speaker 2>of mitochondria, and.
<v Speaker 1>Get the membranes of the organelles.
<v Speaker 2>So they are membranes in a cell. But when we
<v Speaker 2>say cell membrane, we're talking about the automost covering and
<v Speaker 2>the technical term for the technical term for that is
<v Speaker 2>plasma lemma. But that term is kind of old fashioned now.
<v Speaker 2>So it's easy to define a cell in animals that
<v Speaker 2>is a man of protoplasm surrounded by a cell membrane.
<v Speaker 2>In plants, it's not so easy.
<v Speaker 1>So the.
<v Speaker 2>Example I like to give you take those, you know,
<v Speaker 2>cardboard and melk cartons that are kind of shaped like
<v Speaker 2>a plant cell, and the cardboard is cellulose like this
<v Speaker 2>plant cell wall. And you glue some mel cartons together.
<v Speaker 1>The little ones like a school lunch or something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and you glu glue is together side by side,
<v Speaker 2>and the glue is your is your middle amella. So
<v Speaker 2>you really got a nice, beautiful, accurate model of plant cells.
<v Speaker 2>But now you take that, take those and you take
<v Speaker 2>a needle of some kind.
<v Speaker 1>Of and the way the littamella is what the the
<v Speaker 1>middle of mello.
<v Speaker 2>Is the glue that holds plant sells to each other.
<v Speaker 1>Well, tell everybody what it is in the yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>mean it's it's in between the cell wall.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So so this is the amazing thing that that
<v Speaker 2>between one plant cell and another plant cell is a
<v Speaker 2>layer of calcium pectate. And and you're familiar with calcium
<v Speaker 2>pectate if you've ever made jam. What you're doing is
<v Speaker 2>you're boiling the fruit.
<v Speaker 1>Oh it's pectin.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So you're just dissolving the middle lamela. And then
<v Speaker 2>and then when you when you make your jam, you
<v Speaker 2>just let it. The middle that now you're pectin is
<v Speaker 2>now diffused with all that water. But basically when you
<v Speaker 2>look at your favorite redwood trees, all those cells are
<v Speaker 2>being held together by jam pack then by pectin.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, and it works.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's strong. You'd never guess if I'm looking at
<v Speaker 2>jam but so so.
<v Speaker 1>In this milk carton model, so each milk carton represents
<v Speaker 1>a plant. So you get a bunch of glue together.
<v Speaker 2>The glue is the middle, the middle of that's the
<v Speaker 2>peck and that's swung them together. But now you take
<v Speaker 2>a needle and you poke a hole through the two
<v Speaker 2>milk carton to glue together, and the other two milk
<v Speaker 2>dart and tot of glue together. And and now you
<v Speaker 2>just take and poor paint into one of the cartons,
<v Speaker 2>and that paint is going to flow through those holes
<v Speaker 2>into all all the milk cartons. And then you pour
<v Speaker 2>that paint out, and that paint that remains is your
<v Speaker 2>cell membrane. A layer inside the layer that stays inside
<v Speaker 2>is your cell membrane. And so it's you know, all
<v Speaker 2>on the inside of.
<v Speaker 1>The connecting the milk cartons or the plasma that is
<v Speaker 1>not right.
<v Speaker 2>And so your plasma membrane of one cell, it goes
<v Speaker 2>through the plasma's model these little holes into the next
<v Speaker 2>milk carton, the next cell, and it's that layer around
<v Speaker 2>all of those, but it goes through those plasmia's moda
<v Speaker 2>into the next milk carton, and the next melk carton
<v Speaker 2>and the next milk carton. They're all connected, and so
<v Speaker 2>you have all connected connected, and techniqually you got just
<v Speaker 2>one single plasma membrane, one single cell membrane. And so
<v Speaker 2>by the animal definition of a cell, a plant has
<v Speaker 2>just one single cell that every single bit of protoplasma
<v Speaker 2>in a plant is connected to every other single bit
<v Speaker 2>of protoplasm in in the plant. And and so it's so,
<v Speaker 2>you know, this is one of those things that botany
<v Speaker 2>graduate students like to get think about when they get
<v Speaker 2>drunk on a Saturday night. The one cellars are multiple
<v Speaker 2>cells and stuff, which is kind of a useless thing,
<v Speaker 2>but it's interesting that so when you know, you guys
<v Speaker 2>something like a furn that's making spores, it's going to
<v Speaker 2>release the spores, and of course, now the spores of
<v Speaker 2>course cannot be connected to the rest of the plant.
<v Speaker 2>So they've got to break down the middle lamella, and
<v Speaker 2>they have to break the plasmidasmata and the plasma membrane
<v Speaker 2>of the mother cell, and the plasmid is mada of
<v Speaker 2>the of the plasma membrane of the spores have to separate.
<v Speaker 2>And they do that now in in flowering plants where
<v Speaker 2>the the like the like the where the egg cell
<v Speaker 2>is being made and the or the mega well technically
<v Speaker 2>the megaspores being made in the far distant past, that
<v Speaker 2>megasphore would have been released when it's not released anymore,
<v Speaker 2>but the plant still breaks all the plasma's mauna as
<v Speaker 2>if it were going to be released. And yeah, so
<v Speaker 2>it's really odd and very often when in the guard cell,
<v Speaker 2>so that.
<v Speaker 1>That cell, that egg cell in an angiosperm is no
<v Speaker 1>longer concted, no longer it's not part of that continuous
<v Speaker 1>cell membrane exactly exactly.
<v Speaker 2>And and in at least a bunch of plants, when
<v Speaker 2>the when the cell that's going to become the two
<v Speaker 2>guard cells starts to form, it breaks its plasmia's mata,
<v Speaker 2>at least some of them, and becomes isolated from the
<v Speaker 2>rest of the plant. Wow, And it may be that
<v Speaker 2>that helps it have its own physiology distinct from the
<v Speaker 2>physiology of the nearby cells.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if they're opening and closing and it's
<v Speaker 1>dependent on turger pressure, right, wouldn't it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that makes sense.
<v Speaker 1>That makes sense because there's nothing, there's nothing, there's no
<v Speaker 1>other barrier, right, there's no there is no barrier between
<v Speaker 1>well in the plasmata, like between one cell and another.
<v Speaker 2>But so the plasma is mata. So we just talked
<v Speaker 2>about you're just punching holes into the end of the walls,
<v Speaker 2>but they're a lot more complicated than that. In in
<v Speaker 2>a real plant, each plasma is moda this hole between
<v Speaker 2>two adjacent cell walls. It's lined by the plasma membrane,
<v Speaker 2>by the cell membrane, but it has a thin It
<v Speaker 2>has a thin tube of proteins, just a protein tube
<v Speaker 2>called the desmo tubule, and the cell membrane. A sell
<v Speaker 2>organelle called the endoplasma particulum comes to one end and
<v Speaker 2>hooks onto the plasmadesma and on the other end and
<v Speaker 2>the other cell some more endoplasma particulum comes on and
<v Speaker 2>hooks onto the the other end of the plast of
<v Speaker 2>the of the plasmadesma. So they're they're really complicated, and
<v Speaker 2>if you microinject certain types of ions into one cell,
<v Speaker 2>they don't necessarily automatically flow into the next one. So
<v Speaker 2>it's not just an open hole that the plasma is.
<v Speaker 2>Mada can control what goes through them. I don't think
<v Speaker 2>there's any evidence that they can pump things through them,
<v Speaker 2>but but they're not just open holes now, No, and
<v Speaker 2>something like a fiber and sclank myselves, but typically die
<v Speaker 2>when they're mature. Then at that point you still have
<v Speaker 2>these holes in the walls, but since the cell is dead,
<v Speaker 2>you no longer have the the plasma membrane or the
<v Speaker 2>desma tubule or the endoplasma particulum. But we still use
<v Speaker 2>the name plasmadesma, so you have to be careful when
<v Speaker 2>you see that.
<v Speaker 1>Term, right, So it's a little more complicated than just yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>It turns out to be pretty complicable.
<v Speaker 1>What was the other thing that we were talking about
<v Speaker 1>today and the drive down where we mentionedgend because selaginella
<v Speaker 1>are weird they do all this stuff.
<v Speaker 2>It was vessels.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, yeah, they have vessels, so.
<v Speaker 2>We think of we usually think of well of engines
<v Speaker 2>from the flowering plants is having vessels.
<v Speaker 1>So xylum tissue. We have tracheads and vessels. Trakheads are
<v Speaker 1>generally smaller, they've got a different shaped. Vessels are bigger,
<v Speaker 1>more efficient, the transporting water all just applies to asylum
<v Speaker 1>for anyone listening.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, and and the and the wonderful thing about
<v Speaker 2>vessels is that they tend to be very wide, so
<v Speaker 2>they have low friction. And think about you, you're trying
<v Speaker 2>to drink a milkshake. You're going to drink it through
<v Speaker 2>a wide straw, not a narrow straw. But the big
<v Speaker 2>deal is that vessel. Each cell of a vessel has
<v Speaker 2>a big hole in this and where water can go
<v Speaker 2>from one vessel's element, yeah, perforation, So so water can
<v Speaker 2>go from one vessel to another just by passing through
<v Speaker 2>this hole. So there's very little friction, and so water
<v Speaker 2>can move easily through vessels. And a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>and vessels we usually think of as flowering plant. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and and a lot of you'll hear people say, well,
<v Speaker 2>the vessels allowed Angi sperms to adapt to all kinds
<v Speaker 2>of different conditions. But we have vessels occurred evolved independently
<v Speaker 2>in Solaginella, and they also evolved in equisite them and
<v Speaker 2>in uh and three conifers called uh efed will which
<v Speaker 2>you and need them. So so vessels have evolved at
<v Speaker 2>least four times and in three times in Solgenella and
<v Speaker 2>equisite and this need them, et cetera. It's really not
<v Speaker 2>led to any big success that they have these vessels,
<v Speaker 2>and theoretically they can conduct water very easily, but that
<v Speaker 2>hasn't let them take over the world.
<v Speaker 1>Like angiosperms did, right, or requires more than just updated
<v Speaker 1>plumbing to whereas conifers just have traking. It's no condifer conference,
<v Speaker 1>no gymnal Sperms except for the federal relatives have vessel elements,
<v Speaker 1>right right, that's wild. Silaginella is just so bizarre. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's got so many traits that it shares with angiosperms,
<v Speaker 1>but it's totally unrelated.
<v Speaker 2>Andospory, yeah, and so the elements and so the heterosprey
<v Speaker 2>means that it makes big spories and little spores and
<v Speaker 2>and a big deal about that is is in flowering
<v Speaker 2>plants and seed plants and all seed plants, the one
<v Speaker 2>of the sports called the megasport is retained inside the
<v Speaker 2>the mother cell body, and then that mothers the mother
<v Speaker 2>plant body, and then that mother plant can nourish that
<v Speaker 2>spore and protect it and get it take taken care of.
<v Speaker 2>And that's what's going to develop into the seed, into
<v Speaker 2>the embryo of the seed.
<v Speaker 1>Like all the seed plants are the spores and so
<v Speaker 1>and so.
<v Speaker 2>The so the cruise thing in evolving to have seeds
<v Speaker 2>is first you have to have this big this spore
<v Speaker 2>that's retained inside the parent plant's body and the parent
<v Speaker 2>takes care of and Selaginella has that first step. It
<v Speaker 2>has big spies and little sports.
<v Speaker 1>Instead of just being instead of just being cast out
<v Speaker 1>like ferns do, and the.
<v Speaker 2>And the big spores that the when that sport germinates,
<v Speaker 2>it doesn't just grow like crazy bunch of cells. It
<v Speaker 2>stays basically inside that megaspore wall. And so it's so
<v Speaker 2>the next step would be for the parent plant to
<v Speaker 2>retain that megaspore and let that megaspore germinate there inside
<v Speaker 2>inside the host plant and the mother plant and then
<v Speaker 2>grow to be a four under a seed and at
<v Speaker 2>that point then let it be released. So so the
<v Speaker 2>legend of the of the nine or ten steps you
<v Speaker 2>need to become a seed plant. So Selaganella has taken
<v Speaker 2>lots of those steps, but it hasn't made the last
<v Speaker 2>few steps. Whether it ever will, who knows.
<v Speaker 1>It's still pretty cool to think about it.
<v Speaker 2>And another thing about Slagenella that you probably didn't know
<v Speaker 2>is that if you cut a if you cut a
<v Speaker 2>cross section of it, you'd expect to be, you know,
<v Speaker 2>this solid cortex parankama and then a vascuar bundle or
<v Speaker 2>set of bascuar bundles, and not in Solagonella. In selaganella,
<v Speaker 2>you cut across and you have the cortex perankoma, and
<v Speaker 2>then you have a hollow chamber. And this hollow chamber
<v Speaker 2>that's where your zion floam were running. And there's a
<v Speaker 2>little bit of parankama right around the xiomon flow and
<v Speaker 2>that's supported by some little bridges, but for the most part,
<v Speaker 2>the zyomon floam run through this big empty chamber where
<v Speaker 2>all the cells are broken down. What the hell? Why
<v Speaker 2>do they do that?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>And it's you know, I can remember reading about that. Anything. No,
<v Speaker 2>that can't be right, and so cut one open and sure.
<v Speaker 1>Enough, I'm so curious about the ones out here in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas, like or any of the drought tolerant ones,
<v Speaker 1>the desiccation, not drought, the desiccation tolerant ones that can
<v Speaker 1>completely dry. Okay, Crispy, I'm so curious about, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the process of them like a spore germinating and and
<v Speaker 1>how a new plant gets established. Like I'd love to
<v Speaker 1>see someone do that and horticulturally and just study it
<v Speaker 1>how it you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 2>My guess is that people have studied that because it
<v Speaker 2>is such a bizarre phenomenon.
<v Speaker 1>I think that I think there's papers in it now.
<v Speaker 2>So Lagenda looking to do that, and it's so Lagenda
<v Speaker 2>is really bizarre because it's a big plant basket tissue,
<v Speaker 2>complicated tissues. But you know, most all desert mosses do
<v Speaker 2>the same thing that that maybe in spring every you know,
<v Speaker 2>every spring or so, they dry out completely during the day,
<v Speaker 2>just like Solagenala, and then you get in the evening,
<v Speaker 2>you get dew forming and they hydrate, so in the
<v Speaker 2>morning they're they're nice and fresh and green and happy
<v Speaker 2>and and then carrying out the photosynthesis and then in
<v Speaker 2>the afternoon they dry up again, right right.
<v Speaker 1>But the difference in in Solaginella is the gametophyte stays
<v Speaker 1>inside the spore. Yeah, like even in the male sport. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's yeah, fucking weird. And so then it's got to
<v Speaker 1>produce Anthridia and arcogonia respectively. But but how does the
<v Speaker 1>sperm get out? You know, That's what I'm curious. How
<v Speaker 1>does the sperm get out of it emerges out of there.
<v Speaker 2>So we'll keep keep in mind that the sperm are
<v Speaker 2>formed in anthridia, right, so right in the sport in
<v Speaker 2>the in the microgamedifyt inside the spore the microamedifi. But
<v Speaker 2>the anthridia are tiny, tiny things.
<v Speaker 1>So you've got to get a microspore landing next to
<v Speaker 1>a megaspore and.
<v Speaker 2>Then growing to a microgamunify near a mega gamutify with
<v Speaker 2>anthidia on the male plant and archigonia on the female plant.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, and then when you have a film of
<v Speaker 2>water when it's raining, then the antherity breakdown release the
<v Speaker 2>sperm cells. The sperm cells become active. They've got flagella
<v Speaker 2>and they can swim.
<v Speaker 1>They're still mobile, yeah, swim, and.
<v Speaker 2>So they can if the rain and then splashes some
<v Speaker 2>sperm cells next to an and to an archigonium, they'll
<v Speaker 2>swim down into the archegonium and for unfertilized the egg.
<v Speaker 1>There, but it's got to swim inside the female.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, that's crazy, but but the spore at that point
<v Speaker 2>is broken open to the the gamaedify, the megagamedify, the
<v Speaker 2>female gamedifyt is now visible through the broken the broken,
<v Speaker 2>cracked spore wall, and the archigonia, the organized that the
<v Speaker 2>organize actually make the egg are visible on the surface
<v Speaker 2>of the communifed through that crack in the spot wall.
<v Speaker 2>So the the range of splashes the sperm cells and
<v Speaker 2>they swim to there. And and an important thing that
<v Speaker 2>most people don't realize is that that swimming sperm cells,
<v Speaker 2>sperm cells that have flagella just like our own sperm
<v Speaker 2>cells and that can swim vigorously occur through all the
<v Speaker 2>plants up to.
<v Speaker 1>The psychads and psycads and ginka are the only ones
<v Speaker 1>that of the gymno sperms, yeah can go I'm not sure,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah's got motile sperm.
<v Speaker 2>But in psychads psycha each sperm cell of the psycad
<v Speaker 2>has hundreds of flagella. They're giant and they occur in
<v Speaker 2>these big rows.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they don't look like human sperm, not at all.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're just they're they're a great big and have
<v Speaker 2>very hairy with all the all the leagil on them.
<v Speaker 2>But we have plant cells that swim all the way
<v Speaker 2>up into the seed plants.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, god, yeah, the Kinkos man. And then you think
<v Speaker 1>about all the stuff that's extinct that this is only
<v Speaker 1>known from fossils. I had a paleo bonus on the
<v Speaker 1>podcast the last year and they were talking about taking
<v Speaker 1>c T scans to to some of these rocks so
<v Speaker 1>they could get good three D images of these structures.
<v Speaker 1>And he was just telling me, Yeah, we see shit
<v Speaker 1>that we just don't know. It's so bizarre compared to
<v Speaker 1>what like, we can't we know it's a plant, but
<v Speaker 1>we can't figure out what it's doing. What's the reproduct
<v Speaker 1>you know, what the reproductive structure is doing. What the seed?
<v Speaker 1>You know, why does it seed look like this or
<v Speaker 1>so nuts?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, we have flowering plants. And then you know
<v Speaker 2>a couple of species of selaginal unlike a podium and
<v Speaker 2>equisiteum and ferns, and these are the remnants of groups
<v Speaker 2>that used.
<v Speaker 1>To be huge and comprise these major linea.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, lots and lots of diversity, and we just don't
<v Speaker 2>know what they look like, and especially so legend and
<v Speaker 2>like William Thatt there that they're a whole different line
<v Speaker 2>of evolution from all the seed plants and ferns, and
<v Speaker 2>so they're their ancestors are big trees.
<v Speaker 1>Like isoetes, that's the modern day descendant of these things
<v Speaker 1>that the lepidodendrons.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, yeah, great, big leaves, huge reproductive structures.
<v Speaker 1>That form the coalbads of you know, most of the
<v Speaker 1>coal bads these three hundred and twenty million year old covids.
<v Speaker 1>And how different was the planet of look back then?
<v Speaker 2>That I would love to have, I would love to have.
<v Speaker 2>You know, some palaeobotanists team up some really good artists
<v Speaker 2>and try to come up with, oh my god, I
<v Speaker 2>know we have a few reconstructions. Yeah, they look at.
<v Speaker 1>A mural in my bathroom. Yeah, a carboniferous coal swamp.
<v Speaker 1>And then but then you think about all this shit
<v Speaker 1>that just we haven't found yet, we'll never know exists
<v Speaker 1>because it never got fossilized. Yeah, it's crazy, it's madden
<v Speaker 1>to think about. It's really fun to think about.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, one time I was in the the
<v Speaker 2>Eric Carrier forests and and uh, in Chile and Eric Carrier.
<v Speaker 2>You know, there's worlds of worlds of branches. Yeah, being
<v Speaker 2>real prehistoric and in that being in that forest where
<v Speaker 2>everything nothing looked familiar, nothing looked right and compared to
<v Speaker 2>what we know today, and and yeah, just imagine what
<v Speaker 2>was It gave you a.
<v Speaker 1>Little taste of what it might have been like, you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>three hundred million years ago.
<v Speaker 2>I think, what would it be like to be an
<v Speaker 2>Archaeoptre's forest or these other fossil trees?
<v Speaker 1>And that's so fun to think about it. Man, Well, thanks,
<v Speaker 1>it's two hours fifteen minutes. I could keep going, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if anyone We've probably burnt out some
<v Speaker 1>of the this is good stuff. I mean, I think
<v Speaker 1>I think again, once you once you get a basic
<v Speaker 1>understanding of the different tissue ties and what you know,
<v Speaker 1>what's composing, you actually think about like a three dimensional
<v Speaker 1>view of what you're what's going on in a plant
<v Speaker 1>that you're looking at. It helps to start then asking
<v Speaker 1>these questions. It gives you what you need to start
<v Speaker 1>thinking about this.
<v Speaker 2>I think, I think a fun way to look at
<v Speaker 2>look at it is so think if imagine you're a
<v Speaker 2>carbon dioxide molecule, and you've just bounced into a stoma
<v Speaker 2>in a leaf and you've been caught by chloroplastid turned
<v Speaker 2>into a part of a sugar molecule. And how you're
<v Speaker 2>being transported through the floam and where do you go?
<v Speaker 2>What are you passing through? Or your or your a
<v Speaker 2>nitrate molecule that gets absorbed by a root and you're
<v Speaker 2>going up through the through the asylum and some enzyme
<v Speaker 2>catches you and makes you into a new amino acid
<v Speaker 2>and part of a protein protein. What cells do you
<v Speaker 2>go through? And what walls do you go through? What
<v Speaker 2>plasma is might And it's it's fun to just you know,
<v Speaker 2>next time, you're next time you just don't want to
<v Speaker 2>get out of bed, you're you know, Saturday of alarm's
<v Speaker 2>gone off, you don't want to get out of But
<v Speaker 2>just today, what would it look like if I was
<v Speaker 2>a molecule?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, a carbon dioxide molecule. You could end up in
<v Speaker 1>a dandelion. You're put back into the carbon cycle really quickly.
<v Speaker 1>You could end up in a fucking redwood tree and
<v Speaker 1>you're entombed for twenty five hundred years.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and then you end up in a cold dead yeah,
<v Speaker 2>And you're there for millions of years.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so that's fucking crazy. I didn't man about that.
<v Speaker 2>I spent hours think you've been on Saturday instead of
<v Speaker 2>instead of getting up and doing my work.
<v Speaker 1>Well, Jim, thanks a lot, man, I appreciate it. Right,
<v Speaker 1>everybody else, have a good rest of the day. Go
<v Speaker 1>fucking somebody,