Upper Amazon Fungi w/ Alan Rockefeller in Ecuador

<v Speaker 1>Okay, welcome to the crime Page. A binding does a podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I'm here with Allan Rockefeller, my friend Allan Rockefeller, the mycologist,
<v Speaker 1>and we're in Ecuador at an elevation of thirty seven
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet in the Upper Amazon. And am I leaving
<v Speaker 1>out any other pertinent information? Allen?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we're in the in the Puyoh area, so pu Yo. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so a little little town called mara Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And I was excited when you invited me to come
<v Speaker 1>down here. I was like, Fuck, I don't know if
<v Speaker 1>I can do it. I'm getting back from Chile, got
<v Speaker 1>a lot of work to do. But then I'm really
<v Speaker 1>glad that I said yes because it turned out to
<v Speaker 1>be pretty incredible and I've learned so much. I've never
<v Speaker 1>really been into tropical botany before, but because I had
<v Speaker 1>no experience with it, but now it's it's a whole
<v Speaker 1>other world. And on the mushroom side of things, well,
<v Speaker 1>tell me, tell me what's going on here mycologically.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's a lot of really cool mushrooms here in
<v Speaker 2>this area. There's not a lot of ect microouzal hosts,
<v Speaker 2>so it's mostly sapatrophs. So you see a whole lot
<v Speaker 2>of Mycena marasmius, just all sorts of things that decay
<v Speaker 2>the leaf litter. But rarely you'll see just like a
<v Speaker 2>Russola or a Romeria something mic urhyzol just way out
<v Speaker 2>in the middle of the rainforest and there's so many
<v Speaker 2>trees around you can't really tell what tree they're associated with. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I don't think we saw any micrhyzol stuff for the
<v Speaker 2>whole ten days we've been here.
<v Speaker 1>No, but there is a lot of am fungy the
<v Speaker 1>glomero miceats, and with those you get a lot of
<v Speaker 1>those cool micoheterotrophs like the Voi rhea and the gymnociphon
<v Speaker 1>which gymnosiphons bermanniac voirieas gets a gent and ac. But
<v Speaker 1>so it's mostly probably am micro or postcular mic rhyzol fungi.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly. So with the am fungi, you never see
<v Speaker 2>anything directly, but they help out the plants. And yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we have been seeing some micro heterotrophs. I got really
<v Speaker 2>cool focus stacked photos of the gymno siphon yesterday.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck I'm jealous. I didn't go with you, guys.
<v Speaker 3>I saw my I saw Voi voi Ria though, so
<v Speaker 3>that was Yeah. Those are really cool too. Those are
<v Speaker 3>really pretty. And we also saw about an hour from
<v Speaker 3>here the tiputinia. It was Tiputinia foatita, So that one
<v Speaker 3>was described from Ecuador.
<v Speaker 1>What is that? What do you know what family that's in?
<v Speaker 2>Oh, we'd have to look it out.
<v Speaker 1>You guys saw that yesterday?
<v Speaker 2>No, no, it was last year. But it's really crazy.
<v Speaker 2>It smells like rotting flesh and it's like a little
<v Speaker 2>brown flower that just comes right out of the ground,
<v Speaker 2>no leaves or anything, and looks like completely unlike anything
<v Speaker 2>I've ever seen before. But if you just if you
<v Speaker 2>look it up on an I naturalist, you can you
<v Speaker 2>can see the pictures. There's not very many observations of it.
<v Speaker 2>But it's a really crazy looking thing. I p U
<v Speaker 2>T I N I A.
<v Speaker 1>P u. Oh yeah, oh feeted it? Oh shit?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so this thing and you know it attracts flies
<v Speaker 2>with its odor, so fly pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I think most of these little mico heterotrusts are
<v Speaker 1>probably pollinated by little fungus gnats or smaller flies. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>like the voiriea that I saw was two inches tall.
<v Speaker 1>If that so? Oh Jesus, Oh yeah, there's only four observations. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that thing's wild.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's it's very rare, and it's also really hard
<v Speaker 2>to spot, so you know, you're walking by at full speed,
<v Speaker 2>it's almost impossible to see. It's not as tiny as
<v Speaker 2>gymnaside things.
<v Speaker 1>Me Acy, it looks like me ac Herbermanniac. Now yeah, okay,
<v Speaker 1>Jesus God, that's a it's a tropical tropical parasite the
<v Speaker 1>family Jesus christ Man.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So it's got the brown petals and the orange center.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, that's wild. Tip U tinia t I p u
<v Speaker 1>t i n i A. Check it out on ain
<v Speaker 1>answer list if if you can't. That was a cruise found.
<v Speaker 1>The crews saw this.
<v Speaker 2>I hag fur Hat spotted it first.
<v Speaker 1>God the damn Yeah. Okay, Well, botanically, it's been really
<v Speaker 1>it's really disorient thing because you'll see something and you'll
<v Speaker 1>see I've been taking pictures of leaves, which I don't
<v Speaker 1>normally do because they're not the best identifying factors, so
<v Speaker 1>you really have to focus on like extremely subtle stuff
<v Speaker 1>like pettiole length, presence of hairs, opposite of alternate leaves,
<v Speaker 1>of course, which is like the first thing, leaf shape,
<v Speaker 1>texture all that kind of shit, and then you'll see
<v Speaker 1>something flowering and then it kind of gives you a
<v Speaker 1>better idea. But but everything is yeah, mostly way up
<v Speaker 1>in the canopy, like what's that that that tree member
<v Speaker 1>of polygate Ac that we saw, species name is Comingiana,
<v Speaker 1>but that was you know, that was I could and
<v Speaker 1>get photos of it. And then I found the flowers
<v Speaker 1>all over the ground on a really rainy and they're
<v Speaker 1>really rainy day when I was cursing a lot tripleeris Comingiana, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and then I saw the flowers and figured out it
<v Speaker 1>was dioecious that the trees or their male or female.
<v Speaker 1>But but botanically, it's really interesting because these these are
<v Speaker 1>mostly plants that I only saw prior to this in
<v Speaker 1>like horticulture, you know, like in a conservatory where God forbid,
<v Speaker 1>like a fucking you know office like mall indoor, you know,
<v Speaker 1>plant type situation, but to see where they grow and
<v Speaker 1>like the incredible humidity and and it's not it's surprisingly
<v Speaker 1>it's not that hot here. Like the climate's much different
<v Speaker 1>from what I thought it would be. I thought it
<v Speaker 1>would be hotter.
<v Speaker 2>Well, the course still Ecuador is really hot and muggy,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, up here at a thousand meters, it's
<v Speaker 2>really comfortable almost all the time. But yeah, sometimes you're
<v Speaker 2>walking along the forest and you just see, like the
<v Speaker 2>ground littered with flowers, and you can't see where they're
<v Speaker 2>coming from. They're coming from some epiphyte way up in
<v Speaker 2>the tree. But you know, occasionally a branch will fall
<v Speaker 2>and you'll see it, and most of the stuff, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's pretty confusing. I'll usually only photograph something if it
<v Speaker 2>has flowers, unless it's got some crazy corrugated leaves or
<v Speaker 2>something like that, they would make it distinctive. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>sometimes you'll see these beautiful variegated leaves and you'll take
<v Speaker 2>good pictures of it and put it all over the
<v Speaker 2>plant identification forums and igh naturalists and people will just
<v Speaker 2>be like, no, there's no idea to identify that without flowers.
<v Speaker 2>But those are a few things that I keep seeing
<v Speaker 2>over and over that I really like. Like that Pallacoria tomentosa.
<v Speaker 2>That thing is super distinct.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it used to be psychoatry, I guess, but.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think four years back then put it into palakoria.
<v Speaker 2>But that thing is really distinctive, and I looked it
<v Speaker 2>up it turns on it. I saw it in Wahaka,
<v Speaker 2>just a little bit north of Wahaca City, which is
<v Speaker 2>the very north end of its range.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, the same species relative.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the same thing, the Pellachoria tomentosa. It actually looked
<v Speaker 2>kind of different than the Palachoria tomentosa. We get around
<v Speaker 2>here and then it kind of goes down in through
<v Speaker 2>middle Brazil. But that that's probably the easiest plant to
<v Speaker 2>identify around here because it's so bright and distinctive and
<v Speaker 2>you just can't mistake it for anything.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's super common too. Yeah, with those red bracts.
<v Speaker 1>It's I don't know what's going on. If it's like
<v Speaker 1>because the flowers are yellowish or white and then the
<v Speaker 1>two red bracts are really conspicuous. I don't know. If
<v Speaker 1>it's like trying to make hummingbird pollination with fly pollination too.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but a lot of hummingbird pollinated stuff here,
<v Speaker 1>like a lot like that. All its nereads, the tons
<v Speaker 1>of rubac, tons of the the larient. They see the
<v Speaker 1>tropical missletoes, which is another thing that you'll only see
<v Speaker 1>the flowers on the ground because the comparasites, like you know,
<v Speaker 1>fifty feet up in the the trees, the giant bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>I wasn't expect thing that, Go ahead, do it. And gustafolia.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that bamboo is kind of an interesting thing because
<v Speaker 2>there's this fungus that grows on the scale insects of
<v Speaker 2>the bamboo, and so it's called called asco polipperis, and
<v Speaker 2>asco polipperis, you know, starts out this like a little
<v Speaker 2>white ball on the bamboo and then it turns like
<v Speaker 2>bright orange and I threw it in my tackle box
<v Speaker 2>next morning. There was like this big white spore print
<v Speaker 2>where I put it. But it's just like this round
<v Speaker 2>thing and you cut it open. It's all gelatinous in
<v Speaker 2>the inside. But it's in the Corticipitacea, so related to cortuceps,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, like the other things in the Corticipitacea,
<v Speaker 2>it grows on insects, so scale insects in this case,
<v Speaker 2>but you only see it in bamboo, and those bamboos
<v Speaker 2>we kind of watch out for them because they're covered
<v Speaker 2>in you know, really long thorns.
<v Speaker 1>The lateral branches have these yeah dines on them really.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're like two three inches long sometimes and if
<v Speaker 2>you get stuck with them, usually you get, you know,
<v Speaker 2>pretty any bad infections because they're just like you. They're
<v Speaker 2>the opposite of sterile being.
<v Speaker 1>Because it's humid as a nutsack down here too, and
<v Speaker 1>what is the rain Like five to seven meters, so
<v Speaker 1>that's like fifteen to twenty one feet depending on where
<v Speaker 1>you are. The interesting thing about the bambooo is like
<v Speaker 1>it's so fucking big. It's it's literally eighty feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>This is literally like a nearly thirty meter tall bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>I mean you can't really see the top in some places,
<v Speaker 1>and it forms these massive colonies and then you'll just
<v Speaker 1>see this like six foot tall new shoot popping out
<v Speaker 1>of the ground. And then the the leg ules and
<v Speaker 1>the protective bracts are covered in these tiny kind of
<v Speaker 1>like burgundy colored hairs that feel like a shark skin
<v Speaker 1>or like a cat tongue or something. It's the most
<v Speaker 1>bizarre thing. Yeah, I had no idea that was here.
<v Speaker 1>I thought that was like invasive when I first saw.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, see how it belongs here?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, that was crazy stuff. So, but corticipitasy and
<v Speaker 1>then there's Ophio cordyceps.
<v Speaker 3>Those are related, well, they're both in the hypocialities order,
<v Speaker 3>but they're not closely related, they're kind of kind of
<v Speaker 3>distantly related families.
<v Speaker 1>Is this probably independent evolution of insect Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>The insects have a lot of you know, nutrition and
<v Speaker 2>you know, things that fungi elect to metabolize, so they're
<v Speaker 2>they're really good substrate for fungi. So you know, the
<v Speaker 2>actually entomopathogens have evolved like six or seven times, and
<v Speaker 2>they are really widely dispersed. If you look at the
<v Speaker 2>phylogenetic tree, there's some that are kind of over by
<v Speaker 2>penicillium and other branches of fungi. The pine never heard
<v Speaker 2>of because they don't really make anything resembling a mushroom,
<v Speaker 2>but they are very widely distributed. So yeah, that's that's
<v Speaker 2>evolved a lot of sense.
<v Speaker 1>So this is I mean, because there's so many insects here.
<v Speaker 1>Once you if you're a fungus and you evolve the
<v Speaker 1>capability to digest insects and infect them, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>affect infect them efficiently by spore production, I mean, you've
<v Speaker 1>you've captured a whole niche.
<v Speaker 2>So that's yeah, And a lot of these entimapathogens are
<v Speaker 2>very very picky about which insects, like the Corterceps. They'll
<v Speaker 2>only grow on one species of insect, and so like
<v Speaker 2>a lot of the ones we've been seeing, there's a
<v Speaker 2>few common ones. We've been seeing a lot of opiod
<v Speaker 2>Corterceps crook courially on them, and that one grows on weavils.
<v Speaker 2>See I always see that weavil with a long snout
<v Speaker 2>coming out of that. And they've got another one, Corterceps australis,
<v Speaker 2>which you're on these really big they kind of look
<v Speaker 2>like carpenter ants. And then there's the ophiod Cordyceps melolonthe,
<v Speaker 2>which grows on the Melanthona beetles the larvae of that,
<v Speaker 2>and that's probably the biggest quarterceps. And then you get
<v Speaker 2>the bright red one Corterceps needest and that only grows
<v Speaker 2>on trap door spiders. So you find that and you
<v Speaker 2>excavate it and they'll be a spider do on that
<v Speaker 2>and if you do it real carefully you can actually
<v Speaker 2>get the trap door and everything.
<v Speaker 1>And that was the one that you saw in that cave.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that one we found growing in the cave. And
<v Speaker 2>there's there's always a lot of court Sepitacea in the cave,
<v Speaker 2>but we've never seen just a courterceps fruiting body like that.
<v Speaker 2>Usually we just kind of find them growing out of
<v Speaker 2>the sides of trails.
<v Speaker 1>I was so glad nobody came down with a zoonatic
<v Speaker 1>disease in the cave yet, because the bats were everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, we go into the caves a lot, and
<v Speaker 2>getting sick is really rare, but there's a ton of
<v Speaker 2>bats in there, so we're always a little bit careful
<v Speaker 2>with the mud.
<v Speaker 1>Everybody was wearing masks, except for you because he didn't
<v Speaker 1>because he didn't have one, but you're.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, Yeah, No, somebody had a mask for me, and
<v Speaker 2>I just couldn't find them when he went into the cave.
<v Speaker 2>So I've been in those caves a ton of times
<v Speaker 2>without masks and a couple of times with masks, and
<v Speaker 2>it didn't didn't seem to really, it's not usually a problem.
<v Speaker 2>There's some other caves that are deeper and have even
<v Speaker 2>more bats, and we're a little bit more serious about
<v Speaker 2>wearing masks and in those other caves. This cave was
<v Speaker 2>pretty big, had a lot of ventilation, and so I
<v Speaker 2>wasn't too worried about it, but I would have warned
<v Speaker 2>it if I had it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I mean, god, there was so much cool
<v Speaker 1>shit in there. It's it's its own ecosystem. There's these
<v Speaker 1>crickets that I presume are eating baguano and then they
<v Speaker 1>serve as the base of the ecosystem kind of. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there was the the whip scorpion, that massive whip scorpion
<v Speaker 1>we saw on there, and then there's pseudoscorpions, what other
<v Speaker 1>what else was it?
<v Speaker 2>There's also just a regular plane all scorpions. Yeah, we
<v Speaker 2>didn't see them this year, but last year in the
<v Speaker 2>same cave system, we got some pretty cool photos of
<v Speaker 2>just scorpions. And there's fish in there that you know,
<v Speaker 2>don't really have eyes. There's cave lizards, and then there's
<v Speaker 2>all those fossils, you know, just embedded in the cave walls.
<v Speaker 2>I saw a bunch of shells this year, you know,
<v Speaker 2>just like ancient clams and stuff. But sometimes you also
<v Speaker 2>see like cranoid stems. And in one of the caves
<v Speaker 2>about a mile from there, there's there's a whole just
<v Speaker 2>a big starfish, just like right there, embedded in the wall.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, how big is it?
<v Speaker 2>Pretty big? Like five inches across? Oh yeah, it's on one.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder what the age of the limestone is, if
<v Speaker 1>it's cretaceous or if it's earlier or what.
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure Alex knows. He studies those caves for a living.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, that was I guess that Cave two was
<v Speaker 1>used as munition storage during the war with Peru.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, I think Peru and Ecuador have kind of
<v Speaker 2>been battling over territory for a while, and so yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they would the army used to be all over that
<v Speaker 2>and then they settled out and they haven't been around
<v Speaker 2>there for a while.
<v Speaker 1>But there was a there was a cool bogonia growing epiphetically.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's so much shit here, it's nuts. There
<v Speaker 1>was what was the zygo micey thing that was growing
<v Speaker 1>on the cliff wall above the cave entrance. It just
<v Speaker 1>looked like insulation.
<v Speaker 2>It looked like, yeah, I call them pin molds. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, those things are pretty hard to identify. And
<v Speaker 2>they're hard to because if you put it in a
<v Speaker 2>tackle box that kind of gets banged around, it turns
<v Speaker 2>into a pile of slimes. So you kind of have
<v Speaker 2>to wrap it up in a leaf for something, and
<v Speaker 2>then put it on the dehydrator. As soon as you
<v Speaker 2>get back to get a good collection of that kind
<v Speaker 2>of thing.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know anything about that group with a claye
<v Speaker 1>of fungi.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was super diverse, very understudied. The most common
<v Speaker 2>one that you see around is called Ficho Mice's Blake's
<v Speaker 2>leanis and that's the one that you see on dog
<v Speaker 2>shit and it's like I seen before, yeah a million times,
<v Speaker 2>Like you know, just like every dog turd that's not
<v Speaker 2>in the in the woods for a couple of weeks,
<v Speaker 2>how's it growing on there? But that one it was
<v Speaker 2>described like in the nineteen twenties, and it was named
<v Speaker 2>after doctor Blakesley, And so the guy that described it
<v Speaker 2>hated doctor Blakesley. Nobody can figure out why, and so
<v Speaker 2>he named his dogshit fungus after him.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's so fucking petty man.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, one of the few disparagingly named fungi.
<v Speaker 1>It's kind of funny. How did you end up coming
<v Speaker 1>down here? Like, well, you came down here during COVID
<v Speaker 1>or during twenty twenty or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, first time I came was February twenty twenty. And
<v Speaker 2>when I first came down, I was like, Ah, this
<v Speaker 2>COVID thing is nothing. It's not going to be a
<v Speaker 2>big deal. It's just the media being silly. And by
<v Speaker 2>the time I left, I'm like, Okay, yeah, it seems
<v Speaker 2>like it's actually a real thing. Turns out maybe the
<v Speaker 2>former thing was a little bit more accurate, because you know,
<v Speaker 2>now there's more COVID than there was at the height
<v Speaker 2>of the pandemic and nobody cares.
<v Speaker 1>But I think it's probably become a little bit less
<v Speaker 1>virulent too. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, trains, they're not so bad.
<v Speaker 1>It wiped a bunch of people out.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, a lot of people like Anne Shulgan is
<v Speaker 2>one of them. Who is it the wife the chemist?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh brutal, Yeah, Billy Turner, Texas Bonnas died of COVID,
<v Speaker 1>I think. But yeah, it was mostly getting old people,
<v Speaker 1>I guess. But but still, I don't know. Maybe we'll
<v Speaker 1>have another pandemic now that Trump's in office again.
<v Speaker 2>So I'm sure there's more coming, just as more and
<v Speaker 2>more travel and more people kind of like encroaching in
<v Speaker 2>these areas and less public health. But yeah, one thing
<v Speaker 2>about that pandemic is that it was like impossible to stop.
<v Speaker 2>Remember they had all those mask laws, like you couldn't
<v Speaker 2>go into a store without wearing a mask, right, and
<v Speaker 2>that didn't even start to slow it down like that,
<v Speaker 2>Like they took counties that had mask laws and the
<v Speaker 2>adjacent county had no mask laws and just knowing wearing
<v Speaker 2>masks in public places, and they had the same spread.
<v Speaker 2>Like the masks weren't even sewing them down. So like
<v Speaker 2>if there was a pandemic that actually did something really
<v Speaker 2>bad like ebola, we'd basically be screwed.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we'd be fucked. I was really into the masks
<v Speaker 1>at first because I was like, yeah, this is fucking nasty.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to be breathing. You know, you're on
<v Speaker 1>a plane or someone. I don't want to be breathing
<v Speaker 1>these nasty motherfuckers viral particle was. But then I you know,
<v Speaker 1>I got sick when I was I was in the
<v Speaker 1>New York subway and I was still wearing a mask.
<v Speaker 1>It was twenty two and I was like, because you're
<v Speaker 1>packed asket neek in a subway and I still got COVID.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it was just so such a dense.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean masks work a little bit, but not
<v Speaker 2>like in real life just like yeah, you know, if
<v Speaker 2>you're like a doctor or something, yeah, they definitely work.
<v Speaker 2>But just like in real life, you know, just like
<v Speaker 2>you never really breathe through it. And if you were
<v Speaker 2>wearing one of those masks that actually filter is enough
<v Speaker 2>to stop you from getting sick, then nobody can hear
<v Speaker 2>what you're saying.
<v Speaker 1>Right exactly exactly. I think they probably stop like ten
<v Speaker 1>or twenty percent maybe or help your chances that much
<v Speaker 1>if it's but if you if you're in like a
<v Speaker 1>packed subway car or some shit, it's not gonna yeah
<v Speaker 1>do anything. And probably just the like if you're on
<v Speaker 1>an airplane just having the fucking fans on, you know,
<v Speaker 1>if that's filtered air and it's blowing at you, that's
<v Speaker 1>gonna do more than a mask most likely.
<v Speaker 2>Probably.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, it's wow. I still see people wearing masks.
<v Speaker 1>It's it became this crazy thing for some people. It's
<v Speaker 1>nuts man like out outside and shit like people still
<v Speaker 1>wearing masks.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the whole political things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it became really politically charged. But now I
<v Speaker 1>just I don't know, I think it became this obsessive
<v Speaker 1>thing for some people, like, oh, look, that person's mentally ill.
<v Speaker 1>You know, that's normally where I go. There's always exceptions,
<v Speaker 1>of course, but I'm anyway. So okay, So so you
<v Speaker 1>sort of coming down here in twenty twenty, and then
<v Speaker 1>were you coming down here every year since? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>what was that? What was the main attractive for you
<v Speaker 1>in terms of tropical mycology as opposed to temperate zone
<v Speaker 1>mycology like you've been doing before.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Well, I'd always heard that there was really cool
<v Speaker 2>mushrooms in Ecuador, but you know, I never knew exactly
<v Speaker 2>where to go. But this guy, for hat, he built
<v Speaker 2>an eco resort about an hour from here called think
<v Speaker 2>of Himatlos I think a change in name now to
<v Speaker 2>High Matt Loos Amazon launch. But he is somebody that
<v Speaker 2>I've known on Facebook for a long time. He's one
<v Speaker 2>of the sharpest mushroom identifiers on Facebook. He's in like
<v Speaker 2>every group. And so I came down to visit him
<v Speaker 2>in twenty twenty and it was really good.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>I was here for like two weeks and stayed at
<v Speaker 2>his place, and there was just you know, things that
<v Speaker 2>I had never seen, and you know, just every inch
<v Speaker 2>of the forest is covered in cool stuff. I mean
<v Speaker 2>you could stop and just like look at one square
<v Speaker 2>meter of woods and like, you know, spend an hour
<v Speaker 2>looking there and not even see all of it. And
<v Speaker 2>so when you're walking at like a good speed, you're
<v Speaker 2>missing like ninety nine point nine nine percent of the stuff.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, no matter what speed you walk, you
<v Speaker 2>see so much.
<v Speaker 1>So you came down here and you saw, you saw
<v Speaker 1>that it was hyper diverse for funny.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so I kind of started coming back every year
<v Speaker 2>since then.
<v Speaker 1>I guess it makes sense. It's wet and there's a
<v Speaker 1>shit ton of organic material and so everything is just
<v Speaker 1>you need a lot of decomposers.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Like the forest here is just really full of life,
<v Speaker 2>much more so than a temperate forest. Things grow really fast,
<v Speaker 2>a huge amount of rain, and just like huge amount
<v Speaker 2>of competition. So it was kind of like the evolue
<v Speaker 2>that happens everywhere is happening in overdrive here.
<v Speaker 1>In tons of insect diversity too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so much. Yeah, Like it ferhats Eco Resort to
<v Speaker 2>have a permanent moth light there, and it's just like
<v Speaker 2>some really bright lights shining on a white board. And
<v Speaker 2>if you zoom in to the ten feet around the
<v Speaker 2>white board on I naturalist, there's like thirty five hundred
<v Speaker 2>species in this ten foot area, like you know, a
<v Speaker 2>couple of thousand of them are lepidopter of the different
<v Speaker 2>moths and butterflies, all kinds of bugs and just everything else.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, if you pay close attention, it's just really
<v Speaker 2>hyper diverse. And the closer you look, the more you see.
<v Speaker 1>There was a cool cicada on the moth light last night.
<v Speaker 1>When I got back, I was I was stoked to
<v Speaker 1>find it, to see it there because I've heard them,
<v Speaker 1>but I love cicada diversity. You can hear them, but
<v Speaker 1>I hadn't caught or been able to see me. And
<v Speaker 1>then there was one right on the moth Like that
<v Speaker 1>doesn't fuck if it's on all the time, it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>fuck with the moths too much, right, You're not, like,
<v Speaker 1>what is the downside?
<v Speaker 2>No, I don't know what the downside too mothlight is,
<v Speaker 2>but I mean there's like street lights in every city,
<v Speaker 2>and so if there's a downside, they're screwed. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like.
<v Speaker 2>Wasting light isn't going to do very much compared to
<v Speaker 2>all the city.
<v Speaker 1>Well, just a twenty four to seven months light. But
<v Speaker 1>that's also kind of cool. I suppose it, you know.
<v Speaker 2>I mean that's what street lights do.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well, you know, what I'm sure it becomes when
<v Speaker 1>once the day comes and they fly off.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they fly off when it gets light again.
<v Speaker 1>You know it's it's still they'll be fine. But is
<v Speaker 1>it a UV light he's got going on there?
<v Speaker 2>No, there's regular white lights. They like UV too. They
<v Speaker 2>like three ninety five better than three sixty five nanometer,
<v Speaker 2>but you actually get different things with different spectra. When
<v Speaker 2>I'm out camping, I just use the headlights from my
<v Speaker 2>car and just shine my head headlights on bright, just
<v Speaker 2>pointed at like a white sheet or just anything, and
<v Speaker 2>they all come and land on my car. And that
<v Speaker 2>works really well for attracting all sorts of insects.
<v Speaker 1>The three sixty five that's what you use mostly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So for ultraviolet lights, I use three sixty five
<v Speaker 2>nanometer because your eyes can see from four hundred to
<v Speaker 2>eight hundred, you know, four hundred being purple, eight hundred
<v Speaker 2>being red. So three ninety five is the black lights
<v Speaker 2>that most people are familiar with. That's those the party
<v Speaker 2>lights that look kind of purplish. But three sixty five
<v Speaker 2>just a little bit farther outside of what you can see.
<v Speaker 2>So when you use a three sixty five nanometer flashlight,
<v Speaker 2>all you're seeing is the fluorescence. You're not seeing any
<v Speaker 2>of the actual lights. So stuff lights up really well.
<v Speaker 2>And what's happening is you shine some of this ultraviolet
<v Speaker 2>light and a lot of materials they will kind of
<v Speaker 2>trap the photon for a second and then re emit
<v Speaker 2>it at a longer wavelength, so you see just basically
<v Speaker 2>every color of the spectrum can be emitted. And what
<v Speaker 2>it is, it's like a chemical sensor, so you can
<v Speaker 2>sense a lot of chemicals. Just like all the substances
<v Speaker 2>in nature have different colors, they also have different fluorescences.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, sometimes it's really good for taxonomy. Like
<v Speaker 2>you shine an ultraviolet light at a log and what
<v Speaker 2>looks like one species of lichen. You shine the black
<v Speaker 2>light on there, and all of a sudden, you notice
<v Speaker 2>there's fifteen different species of lichens because they're all different chemically.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's a really good use of it. It's a
<v Speaker 1>lot you said, A lot of stuff is fluorestas under
<v Speaker 1>UV here, much more so than especially in a place
<v Speaker 1>like a desert.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly. So if you shine a black light around
<v Speaker 2>in the desert, you don't see much other than minerals
<v Speaker 2>because all of the plants are getting full sun, they
<v Speaker 2>have to have a lot of protection from ultraviolet, so
<v Speaker 2>they have that thick cuticle. And part of what those
<v Speaker 2>chemicals and the cuticle do is they stop the ultra
<v Speaker 2>violet light because the ultra violet will just dnature the DNA.
<v Speaker 1>They're UV blockers.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but then when you're in a deep rainforest, then
<v Speaker 2>very little UV reaches the ground, so plants don't need
<v Speaker 2>any like UV protections. So that may that everything is
<v Speaker 2>really fluorescent. And you know, the chlorophyll fluoresces this deep
<v Speaker 2>blood red. It's a super beautiful shade of red. And
<v Speaker 2>then you know a lot of the insects, especially like
<v Speaker 2>orb weavers and crab spiders, they fluoresce really bright. And
<v Speaker 2>then about ten percent of mushrooms are super fluorescent as well.
<v Speaker 2>So a lot of times we'll run a black light
<v Speaker 2>over the table at a fungus fair and the rusolla
<v Speaker 2>table always lights up like crazy. Uh, they just have
<v Speaker 2>some kind of chemicals in them. Any anything that's a
<v Speaker 2>purple rusola will look electric blue black light, and then
<v Speaker 2>hyphalomas light up like crazy. And then some stuff doesn't
<v Speaker 2>light out very much, but the light you do get
<v Speaker 2>looks really cool, like silosity only the gill edges light
<v Speaker 2>up and a little bit of the stem, and that's
<v Speaker 2>probably the beta carbulines in them. But carbilines, beta carbulines
<v Speaker 2>are molecules. A lot of them are m a O inhibitors.
<v Speaker 2>So you have an enzyme in your body, it's called
<v Speaker 2>m a O and if you inhibit the m a
<v Speaker 2>O and then a lot of chemicals don't break down.
<v Speaker 2>So the m O inhibitor is what's in the ayahuasca
<v Speaker 2>vine that makes the d M t orally active. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, these chemicals are pretty common in nature, Like
<v Speaker 2>that's the chemicals that make a scorpion light up and
<v Speaker 2>ultra violet light. Beta beta carbal carbilins. Yeah, and so what's.
<v Speaker 1>The connection between beta carbalings any m a O so.
<v Speaker 2>Beta carbalines, If you eat them, they inhibit m a
<v Speaker 2>O for a f they are MAO inhibitors, So you
<v Speaker 2>have m a O in your body. And that's just
<v Speaker 2>something that breaks down. You know a lot of things,
<v Speaker 2>you know, including psychoactive substances. So if you eat pure
<v Speaker 2>d MT, nothing will happen unless you take an ma
<v Speaker 2>AO inhibitor and then and then you get the psychedelic effent.
<v Speaker 1>So the is beta carbaling. Is that probably what's in
<v Speaker 1>the paganem harmala.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they have harmine, those are a few other So
<v Speaker 2>it's a.
<v Speaker 1>Class of compounds basically.
<v Speaker 2>And then those things are super fluorescent. Like if you
<v Speaker 2>take an ayahuasca vine and cut into it and just
<v Speaker 2>find the black lane on it, you can see the
<v Speaker 2>beta carbilines in there. And if you have like extracted
<v Speaker 2>crystals from the penguam harmala, they're super super fluorescent and
<v Speaker 2>they look really beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>So the Banistereopsis has a lot of big beta carblines exactly.
<v Speaker 1>And then the DMT is in the Pellicorea or the.
<v Speaker 2>Psychotria psychotria or around here they use diplopteris more than psychotria.
<v Speaker 1>What is diplopterus another rubiac thing?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well no, Diplopterus lung giolata is in the malpiggy Aca.
<v Speaker 2>Oh it's got those really cool flowers.
<v Speaker 1>I have not seen flowers on any of the banistereopses
<v Speaker 1>that I saw.
<v Speaker 2>Or yeah they're not. You don't really see the flowers
<v Speaker 2>very often because they're usually way up in the canopy.
<v Speaker 2>But I got some really cool photos of the flowers
<v Speaker 2>when I was visiting a farm in Hawaii, somebody was
<v Speaker 2>growing a whole bunch of the Diplopteris. And when I
<v Speaker 2>was in Colombia a few months back, we got some
<v Speaker 2>really cool malpiggy aca flowers. But yeah, they those things
<v Speaker 2>they got like five petals and they're just beautiful, distinctive
<v Speaker 2>flowers they've got.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, all the malepigs have those prominent I think they're
<v Speaker 1>oil glands at the base of the flower. They look
<v Speaker 1>like little teeth.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, they looks like nothing else. But if you
<v Speaker 2>look up my photos on I Naturalist, I got really
<v Speaker 2>nice focused decked photos on a black background. And then
<v Speaker 2>there's some definitely some toxinomic confusion about these ayahuasca plants
<v Speaker 2>because you know, most people they call it diplopteris. What's
<v Speaker 2>the common name.
<v Speaker 1>They've got samorrow like fruits. They look like maple fruits. Jesus,
<v Speaker 1>let me see if I can find your observation of filters,
<v Speaker 1>Alan Rockefeller. We should talk about that new species. What
<v Speaker 1>is a possibly new species of silasso be that you
<v Speaker 1>found up in the Permo too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean this area is really diverse for silasib
<v Speaker 2>We got we saw a beautiful cluster of Silasi B
<v Speaker 2>young Genzis the other day. So that's one that was
<v Speaker 2>described from the youngest region of Bolivia, and it's the
<v Speaker 2>main one that grows directly from wood out here. And
<v Speaker 2>then we've been seeing a bunch of Silasi by hoogchigini
<v Speaker 2>i the sharpest nipple, the one with a really sharp
<v Speaker 2>nipple and kind of a stem that's really dark in
<v Speaker 2>color and slowly expands towards the base. Donalin turns out
<v Speaker 2>to be really closely related to silasap mexicana, so it
<v Speaker 2>has a really strong cucumber oder. And then we typically
<v Speaker 2>see a lot of silasib moserai, which is a lower
<v Speaker 2>elevation Zapata chorum relative. I don't think we've seen any
<v Speaker 2>of this trip, but where we're going next week it's
<v Speaker 2>it's super common over there. And then we saw some
<v Speaker 2>silasab Zappa de korum in a few places, which is
<v Speaker 2>the most potent wild silasity that's known. Another landslide mushroom
<v Speaker 2>that has the really thick stem and can get really big.
<v Speaker 2>They can be like a foot tall sometimes, but you
<v Speaker 2>usually see them like near landslides or creeks.
<v Speaker 1>They need that landfall to basically create a fresh open
<v Speaker 1>substrate for them to fruit in.
<v Speaker 2>They don't need it, but they do much better when
<v Speaker 2>they have it. So I think it just kind of
<v Speaker 2>changes how how the different You know, when you have
<v Speaker 2>a landslide, you know, it turns a whole bunch of
<v Speaker 2>organic material in and it changes, you know, the dynamics
<v Speaker 2>and the competition, and all of a sudden, the species
<v Speaker 2>like silosity several lessons and zapat decorum can really easily
<v Speaker 2>outcompete all the other fungi when you have disturbed grounds.
<v Speaker 2>Several lessons is another one that we've we've been seeing
<v Speaker 2>around over by the caves. That's a larger one, right,
<v Speaker 2>like the ones that we saw this trimp were kind
<v Speaker 2>of small, but they can get really big. They can
<v Speaker 2>be like five inches across that can grow in clusters
<v Speaker 2>of one hundred if they have a lot of substrate.
<v Speaker 2>But that's another one that's kind of related to Mexicana
<v Speaker 2>and has the really strong cucumber roder and then the
<v Speaker 2>Zappa tachorum ones. You know, they kind of smell a
<v Speaker 2>cucumber and radish at the same time. But then a
<v Speaker 2>couple of days ago we went up to thirty five
<v Speaker 2>hundred meters elevation, so up you know, above eleven thousand feet,
<v Speaker 2>and the plants up there were completely different than the
<v Speaker 2>fungi were completely.
<v Speaker 1>Dire were I noticed many more affinities with temperate zone
<v Speaker 1>plants up there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it gets cold up there. It never snows, but
<v Speaker 2>it's gets kind of close sometimes.
<v Speaker 1>So twelve thousand foot elevation at zero degrees latitude, they
<v Speaker 1>were roughly zero degrees latitude. Maybe it was like zero
<v Speaker 1>point five south.
<v Speaker 2>Hey, we might be about one and a half degrees
<v Speaker 2>around here. But yeah, it's uh, super unique habitat. And
<v Speaker 2>one of the most common things we solved there was
<v Speaker 2>silasab and so these things they looked a lot like
<v Speaker 2>Silasi be zepticorum, but in this they grew more like
<v Speaker 2>in the habitat of Silasi by molecula. So Silosa by
<v Speaker 2>maleucula described from Mexico at really high elevation, and so
<v Speaker 2>it's a landslide mushroom that really likes these high elevation
<v Speaker 2>volcanic soils.
<v Speaker 1>Do you think it was molecula.
<v Speaker 2>No, because the stem texture was different. So silosavy millercola
<v Speaker 2>has the same stem texture as several lessons, where the
<v Speaker 2>bottom half has these kind of rough band squamulose bands
<v Speaker 2>of mycillium, and then the top half is prurunos with
<v Speaker 2>the callosastidia, and so the silasav mallercola has that same
<v Speaker 2>stem texture. What are colossdia our cells that are bottle
<v Speaker 2>shaped and they're on the stem.
<v Speaker 1>What is there? No one? What is the function?
<v Speaker 2>I don't think anybody knows the function.
<v Speaker 1>But they're not reproductive.
<v Speaker 2>No, the only reproductive cells are the basidia. That's what
<v Speaker 2>makes the spores and the gills. But mushrooms, not all
<v Speaker 2>of them, but many mushrooms are covered in substidia, and
<v Speaker 2>they're kind of sometimes they're shaped like bottles, like a
<v Speaker 2>coke bottle, or sometimes they're like larger or more inflated,
<v Speaker 2>or shaped like real sharp like a harpoon. But these
<v Speaker 2>cells are just all over the gills sometimes the top
<v Speaker 2>of the.
<v Speaker 4>Cat, so kilosastidia the gill edge, callosastidia on the stem,
<v Speaker 4>frosastidia on the gill faces, pylosistidia on the top of
<v Speaker 4>the top of the cat.
<v Speaker 1>But the carlosstidia. All these cells could be diagnostic.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're all really diagnostic. If you're trying to figure
<v Speaker 2>out what you have because you know a lot of
<v Speaker 2>little brown mushrooms. They look pretty much pretty similar, and
<v Speaker 2>once you get really familiar with them, you can tell
<v Speaker 2>them apart without a microscope. Until you really know them well,
<v Speaker 2>you need a microscope to tell a lot of these things.
<v Speaker 1>And if people might have bioways, say this silosophy species,
<v Speaker 1>this new one, was there any effect that you heard
<v Speaker 1>people talking about or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so silosity sections Zapaticorum is a pretty diverse section,
<v Speaker 2>and all the species in that section tend to be
<v Speaker 2>pretty potent, so they're all quite a bit more potent
<v Speaker 2>than kubensus.
<v Speaker 1>What were the comments, what were the what was the
<v Speaker 1>commentary like that people described?
<v Speaker 2>I didn't really ask for a lot of details, but
<v Speaker 2>I know, I know a few people definitely tried them
<v Speaker 2>and they said they they said that they definitely felt
<v Speaker 2>something and they didn't you know, they said that it
<v Speaker 2>worked and they didn't have to eat a whole lot
<v Speaker 2>of them. So yeah, they're definitely pretty strong.
<v Speaker 1>But either way, these things are up there decomposing and
<v Speaker 1>just growing in this describe what the habitat was like.
<v Speaker 1>It was it was dominated by this tree Esclonium or tilioides.
<v Speaker 1>You and then there was a little shrub that I
<v Speaker 1>thought was more tasty before I could before I should
<v Speaker 1>have known from the spines that had that it was
<v Speaker 1>rose family rose asy, but it was Hesperomile's and two sofolia,
<v Speaker 1>and those were like the two dominant woody plants there.
<v Speaker 2>Don one was so cool. I love the flowers of that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they were fucking wild man.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, like nothing I ever seen before.
<v Speaker 1>Multiple stamens, little nectar disk style in the center of
<v Speaker 1>five distinct petals. But the weirdest is up where this
<v Speaker 1>pilosophy was growing was.
<v Speaker 2>Like a habitat because they were just under the Peramo.
<v Speaker 2>So we wanted to go visit the Paramo, but we
<v Speaker 2>couldn't drive all the way up there because the road
<v Speaker 2>stopped before we got to the paramouth. So we you know,
<v Speaker 2>parked and walked a couple of miles up the hill
<v Speaker 2>to get to the paramot. And on the way there
<v Speaker 2>is where we saw the most fungal diversity. And so
<v Speaker 2>there were kind of like these little patches of forest,
<v Speaker 2>and being so high elevation, it wasn't very tall trees.
<v Speaker 2>They were like a little bigger than shrubs, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>maybe twenty feet tall. Most of them, but you can
<v Speaker 2>still get under there and have a lot of leaf litter.
<v Speaker 1>And there was a groundcover though too. There was that
<v Speaker 1>there was a rose family member which was let me
<v Speaker 1>see if I can pull it up really quick, I forget.
<v Speaker 1>It looked like a little almost like in Aquina with
<v Speaker 1>these kind of peltate leaves, but it was acting like
<v Speaker 1>a groundcover al camia or bagiolata or al camilla or baguolata.
<v Speaker 1>There was so much good shit, I mean it was.
<v Speaker 2>It took us.
<v Speaker 1>It took me six hours to go two miles out
<v Speaker 1>and two miles.
<v Speaker 2>Back, and that was going fast.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that was like not taking as much time as
<v Speaker 1>I would have liked to look at everything and observe
<v Speaker 1>and take notes and observe it, and shit, what the
<v Speaker 1>fuck else, let's see what else did we see? That
<v Speaker 1>whole habitat was nuts. There was so much air casey, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>tons of air casey. There was a siretto stemma. There
<v Speaker 1>was diister rig or dice, yeah, dister rig what is it?
<v Speaker 1>Let me get somebody. I'm gonna fuck these up. I'm
<v Speaker 1>like trying to hold too much.
<v Speaker 3>In Iceterigma as one of the most beautiful flowers that
<v Speaker 3>we see down at low elevations and.
<v Speaker 1>Pet yeah, and most of them are epiphytes. We saw
<v Speaker 1>those Dieisterigma near the river here. That was I mean
<v Speaker 1>it was like a ten foot long pendant.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, just like hanging down with tiny white berries.
<v Speaker 1>The notable thing about it is unlike most air casey flowers,
<v Speaker 1>that's only had four corolla lobes, not five. There was
<v Speaker 1>Gultheria mrsinoides up there, Gultheria erect the vaccinium I think
<v Speaker 1>it was Flora bundum. There was a really cool epify.
<v Speaker 1>Half the ship is epiphytic, if not more, even in
<v Speaker 1>the parama. All the all the airicacious stuff, all the
<v Speaker 1>air casey down here is epiphytic. Up there, there were
<v Speaker 1>a couple of shrubs and then a few epiphytes. But
<v Speaker 1>some of these epiphytes had big woody, uh tuberous roots
<v Speaker 1>even though they were epiphytes still, which was crazy. You
<v Speaker 1>just see like this will looked like a big base
<v Speaker 1>ball sized gull hanging off of this vining thing that
<v Speaker 1>was not even a vine. It was like it's like
<v Speaker 1>literally like a shrub that's growing on another tree, but
<v Speaker 1>it's growing kind of leggy uh spherro sperm and bucks
<v Speaker 1>of folium with the bright purple little blueberry fruits was
<v Speaker 1>growing down below. But most of this stuff is adapted
<v Speaker 1>to hummingbird pollination. I was not expecting so many members
<v Speaker 1>of Eric Casey up here. It was fucking nuts. There
<v Speaker 1>was that azarella to pedunculata that was abundant as a
<v Speaker 1>groundcover that was growing with the silossope. Let's see what
<v Speaker 1>the hell else? I mean, it's overwhelming. That's why I
<v Speaker 1>like when when you're doing these trips, I feel like
<v Speaker 1>you because you want to use every day to go out,
<v Speaker 1>but you need. For me, I need like a day
<v Speaker 1>off every five days to process stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, to get to do a good job with my photos,
<v Speaker 2>I need as much time as I spend out in
<v Speaker 2>the field in front of the computer just to process
<v Speaker 2>all the photos, get everything up identified and uploaded. And
<v Speaker 2>you never really have that much time because we're usually
<v Speaker 2>out for six to eight hours every day and you
<v Speaker 2>don't have six to eight hours on the computer in
<v Speaker 2>the evening, so it all piles up. But that's okay.
<v Speaker 2>What I do now is every time I see something interesting,
<v Speaker 2>I'll always take a quick cell phone photo and then
<v Speaker 2>I'll make the igh naturalist observation right there, right right
<v Speaker 2>while I'm standing there. You don't forget, Yeah, that way,
<v Speaker 2>I don't forget. And then you have that notes field,
<v Speaker 2>so I can add a whole bunch of notes. And
<v Speaker 2>you know, if you just take pictures of something, you're
<v Speaker 2>gonna forget what it tasted like, what it smelled like,
<v Speaker 2>the nearby trees, the textures, all anything that doesn't come
<v Speaker 2>through in the photo. You're gonna forget all that stuff.
<v Speaker 2>But if I make the observation right there, then you know,
<v Speaker 2>you put all that in the notes. And then if
<v Speaker 2>I never get back to my pictures to process the
<v Speaker 2>photos off my camera, I still have like a cell
<v Speaker 2>phone quality, you know image. And it's also really nice
<v Speaker 2>because you don't have to spend any time at the
<v Speaker 2>end of the day. Just as soon as you get
<v Speaker 2>back to cell phone service, it all just uploads out.
<v Speaker 1>Do you ever what if in crashes or something while
<v Speaker 1>you're uploading, like you had one hundred things in the
<v Speaker 1>queue to upload, and they don't get it. They don't get.
<v Speaker 2>That has not happened to me since that day that
<v Speaker 2>we went out and saw that and Celia Revenge, I
<v Speaker 2>was with you. Yeah, I had like that was one
<v Speaker 2>of my most prolific days. I think I had one
<v Speaker 2>hundred and forty I actually observations, and it kept going
<v Speaker 2>slower and slower and slower, and I lost all them.
<v Speaker 2>I still have all of the photos and my Google
<v Speaker 2>Google Photos, but they don't have GPS tags on them,
<v Speaker 2>I don't think. So it's just like I don't think
<v Speaker 2>I'll ever go back and up.
<v Speaker 1>Do you use Google Photos but then you also use
<v Speaker 1>something else I've used to because.
<v Speaker 2>I used to have a Pixel but now I switched
<v Speaker 2>to Samsung. But I do, and I think I'm full
<v Speaker 2>on my Google storage space. And they want like a
<v Speaker 2>lot of money for them, uh you know, like like
<v Speaker 2>more more than one hundred bucks a year for the
<v Speaker 2>next next tier up. I think I give them like
<v Speaker 2>twenty bucks a year now, which is reasonable. But I
<v Speaker 2>think all to do is going and delete on my
<v Speaker 2>videos a lout of my Google Photos and then I
<v Speaker 2>can use it again. But I really like Google Photos
<v Speaker 2>because you can search it really well, Like you can
<v Speaker 2>search for certain places. You can search for dates. Oh,
<v Speaker 2>it's amazing people and the places.
<v Speaker 1>So the places thing is so because I'll never remember
<v Speaker 1>dates but I'll remember a place and then I can
<v Speaker 1>just zoom maps. Yeah, phenomenal, but yeah, it's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of money and I don't use all the ship all
<v Speaker 1>the space that I have either.
<v Speaker 2>Worth it though, But if I used to delete all
<v Speaker 2>my videos because I don't I don't really need my
<v Speaker 2>videos on my Google Photo. But if I delete that,
<v Speaker 2>I'll have a ton of room and then I can
<v Speaker 2>just have all my.
<v Speaker 1>Back Blaze was the other thing you recommend it though.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the black Blaze is really cool. I did a
<v Speaker 2>lot of research on backup solutions, but you know, unless
<v Speaker 2>you back up your data regularly, you don't really own
<v Speaker 2>your data, you know, one dropped hard drive or fire
<v Speaker 2>or away from losing all your data. So back Blaze
<v Speaker 2>it's really cool. Zipping incident exactly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, live in a Bay area or LA, and it's
<v Speaker 1>a big thing about back Blaze.
<v Speaker 2>You know, costs seven dollars a month. And then this
<v Speaker 2>program just runs in the background on your computer and
<v Speaker 2>whenever you have Internet, it's just uploading anything that's changed
<v Speaker 2>in the background. So you know, if you have to
<v Speaker 2>make a presentation you don't save, it doesn't matter. It's
<v Speaker 2>automatically uploaded there and like this time I went over.
<v Speaker 2>We went to that remote research station. You know, it's
<v Speaker 2>kind of way out in the jungle, that place.
<v Speaker 3>Because you can't even drive up to it and park there,
<v Speaker 3>like you drive you drive up and you still got
<v Speaker 3>a hike like fifteen to twenty minutes, and there were jungle.
<v Speaker 1>Were to get Sarawia species there, which is the Kiwi
<v Speaker 1>family act in eighty Ac were so cool, fucking delicious fruits.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. But when we were at Sumac, you know, I
<v Speaker 2>wanted to give a presentation, but I didn't bring my
<v Speaker 2>laptop with me, so I was able just to log
<v Speaker 2>into my back Blaze account and download any file that
<v Speaker 2>was on my laptop. So I was able to download
<v Speaker 2>my Mushroom photography presentation and I was able to give
<v Speaker 2>the photography talk, you know, at that remote research station.
<v Speaker 1>So when you're basically when we're going out and doing
<v Speaker 1>all this field work, we're just collecting massive amounts of
<v Speaker 1>data and then but it still has to be processed,
<v Speaker 1>turned into barium labels or photos or uploaded that even
<v Speaker 1>like just putting dumb shit on social media so people
<v Speaker 1>can see it and get excited about it. That's still
<v Speaker 1>important at the end. Of the day do you how
<v Speaker 1>much time do you save? Like basically, you go out
<v Speaker 1>on these trips, which is I'm sure is the same
<v Speaker 1>for me, collect a shit ton of data, and then
<v Speaker 1>when you get back, you're processing it for the next
<v Speaker 1>few months, like just going.
<v Speaker 2>Well more often I just going on another trip and
<v Speaker 2>it never gets processed. But you know, a lot of times,
<v Speaker 2>what I'll do is if it turns out to be
<v Speaker 2>something really cool, either an expert comes along and recognize
<v Speaker 2>it and it was like, wow, this is these are
<v Speaker 2>like the only photos of this organism, then I'll go
<v Speaker 2>back and be like, oh, I do have pictures from
<v Speaker 2>that time, because I take all my photos and just
<v Speaker 2>put them in the lightroom, and that way I can
<v Speaker 2>search by date and in final name and all this
<v Speaker 2>differ stuff. So I can just be like, oh, okay,
<v Speaker 2>I have a few hundred photos of this and process
<v Speaker 2>my images and then you know, I've been using that
<v Speaker 2>label making program and I just printed about three hundred
<v Speaker 2>labels for all the fungry that we collected on here.
<v Speaker 1>We've got to tell people about that too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so that you know, it's a Python program that
<v Speaker 2>I wrote almost a year ago now, and I keep
<v Speaker 2>like refining it and making it better. But what I
<v Speaker 2>did just now.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, I tell everybody what it is. It's images that
<v Speaker 1>mushroom observer dot org forward slash labels.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so images dot mushroom observer dot org slash labels is.
<v Speaker 2>The is called a flask front end. And so the
<v Speaker 2>program I wrote is really a Python program that you
<v Speaker 2>call from the command line.
<v Speaker 1>What is Python?
<v Speaker 2>Python's a programming language. But in this case, I made
<v Speaker 2>this little front end for it so it can be
<v Speaker 2>on the web server. So you don't need to know
<v Speaker 2>the command line. You don't have to know any programming
<v Speaker 2>or anything. You just go to this web page and
<v Speaker 2>you type in the I Naturalist number and as soon
<v Speaker 2>as you type it in, then it comes up on
<v Speaker 2>your screen and it shows you what kind of organism,
<v Speaker 2>whether it's a plant or you know, the name of
<v Speaker 2>the organism and the person who observed it. So if
<v Speaker 2>you mistype one of the numbers, you'll notice right away
<v Speaker 2>because you won't recognize the name the user name on there.
<v Speaker 2>But you can just type in, you know, up to
<v Speaker 2>like one hundred different I Naturalist numbers on there and
<v Speaker 2>then hit print labels. And what it does is it
<v Speaker 2>goes into the I Naturalist website using the API, and
<v Speaker 2>it downloads all this information about it. So it downloads
<v Speaker 2>the scientific name, the GPS coordinates, the GPS accuracy, who
<v Speaker 2>observed it, all the observation notes, and then it encodes
<v Speaker 2>the I Naturalist URL in theo QR code and makes
<v Speaker 2>a really nice professional looking printed label.
<v Speaker 1>So the label, the obarium label ends up having a
<v Speaker 1>QR code on it.
<v Speaker 2>They all have QR codes. And recently I got a
<v Speaker 2>QR code scanner and they're only like twenty bucks on Amazon,
<v Speaker 2>and you just plug it into the USB port and
<v Speaker 2>then you just point the skin. You know, it's the
<v Speaker 2>same thing, same exact thing people use when they're checking
<v Speaker 2>out at a store, and you pointed it to QR
<v Speaker 2>code and it basically types in the number. The scanner
<v Speaker 2>is basically just an extra USB keyboard and so it
<v Speaker 2>types in the you know, the I natural STRL and
<v Speaker 2>hits enter. So if you've got a whole bunch of
<v Speaker 2>these labels and you want to make a spreadsheet with
<v Speaker 2>everything you have, all you got to do is point
<v Speaker 2>the scanner at every bag and press the trigger and
<v Speaker 2>you can just make you know, really accurate spreadsheet you know,
<v Speaker 2>in just minutes instead of having to type in all
<v Speaker 2>those numbers.
<v Speaker 1>My question, so if you're's like a lot of bondists,
<v Speaker 1>if you use it, So this is dependent on I'm
<v Speaker 1>using I naturalis, which everybody should do in the first way.
<v Speaker 1>Like all I'm friends with people that shit on it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why. It's stupid.
<v Speaker 2>It's like it's they just don't understand.
<v Speaker 1>They just don't understand. Like I use it for myself.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not posting for other people. I mean I'm posting
<v Speaker 1>for other people so they can learn or so that
<v Speaker 1>they can have a record or they can have a
<v Speaker 1>photograph of flower morphology. I'll even you know, edit photos
<v Speaker 1>with text showing what part, Like I did that with
<v Speaker 1>that with that fragment Pedium puerci, Like what's the stigma,
<v Speaker 1>what's the anther, what is the staminode, et cetera. In
<v Speaker 1>case anyone's curious, like what the fuck am I looking
<v Speaker 1>at in this complex flower? But uh, but I use
<v Speaker 1>it for my I mean it's it's so useful. It's
<v Speaker 1>such a fucking educational tool and you can map what
<v Speaker 1>you've got. But a lot of people will obscure their coordinates,
<v Speaker 1>like I do with everything because I'm in a lot
<v Speaker 1>of places I don't want people whatever you know, and
<v Speaker 1>then I'll let you or like mad or someone else
<v Speaker 1>be able to look at my location data. If you're
<v Speaker 1>doing that and creating an urbarium file, but your location
<v Speaker 1>data is obscured, could you still create a file or
<v Speaker 1>like a word document and then just go in there
<v Speaker 1>and put the location data in for the herbarium label.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. In fact, you can download your own data, and
<v Speaker 2>so if you export ther naturalist data as a CSV,
<v Speaker 2>then it just lows right into Excel and since you're
<v Speaker 2>the user or that's downloading the data, then you can
<v Speaker 2>see all your own obscured coordinates. So you can you
<v Speaker 2>can do it that way.
<v Speaker 1>How do I translate and Excel file into like a DOCU?
<v Speaker 1>Because I do I print on my REBARM labels on
<v Speaker 1>Google Docs.
<v Speaker 2>So the way I do it is I just download
<v Speaker 2>only the IGH Naturalist observation number and then I feed
<v Speaker 2>that into my program that makes the labels, and that
<v Speaker 2>that's a good way to do it. But you know
<v Speaker 2>the other thing you can do is download. When you
<v Speaker 2>download your data from IIG Naturalists, you can choose what
<v Speaker 2>fields and so you can choose to have like coordinate
<v Speaker 2>scientific name, common name if you're into those, all sorts
<v Speaker 2>of different.
<v Speaker 1>Uh in notes too, Like if you get notes on
<v Speaker 1>the observation, that's another good thing to do. If you
<v Speaker 1>make in observations on our naturalists make notes what elevation?
<v Speaker 1>What was the habitat? Like we were the sympatric plant species,
<v Speaker 1>that kind of thing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, absolutely so.
<v Speaker 1>But if I use your program and I download it,
<v Speaker 1>then what can I what do I get? I get it?
<v Speaker 2>So all my program does. It takes only the observation number,
<v Speaker 2>and so you just give it the observation number and
<v Speaker 2>it makes the label based on that, and what it
<v Speaker 2>gives you is an RTF file, which is called a
<v Speaker 2>rich text file, and you load that into Microsoft Word
<v Speaker 2>or Microsoft kind of sucks. So it's better to use
<v Speaker 2>like Libre Office, the free open source version of it,
<v Speaker 2>but either way they both work the same. And then
<v Speaker 2>it loads up these nice labels and then you can
<v Speaker 2>just edit that just like you're editing any any document.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I'll still get all the text that you have,
<v Speaker 1>all the.
<v Speaker 2>Text you can, like you can change anything before you
<v Speaker 2>hit print.
<v Speaker 1>Oh cool, okay, great, damn, that's wild. Like but if
<v Speaker 1>you're obscuring location data, then I'll have to go in
<v Speaker 1>and put the.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so if you're obscuring location data, then it goes
<v Speaker 2>in and then it's whenever it prints out the latitude
<v Speaker 2>longitude on your labels, it gives you a plus or
<v Speaker 2>minus just the accuracy, and if you hit obscurer, then
<v Speaker 2>that plus or minus is always twenty thousand meters. And
<v Speaker 2>so you know, if you don't obscure it, it'll say
<v Speaker 2>like plus or minus six meters or you know, whatever
<v Speaker 2>the accuracy is on your GPS coordinates, but yeah, it'll
<v Speaker 2>be twenty thousand meters. So if you obscure it, I
<v Speaker 2>could probably change it so it uses an at API
<v Speaker 2>key instead of going in there anonymously. And that way,
<v Speaker 2>if you run it as a certain user, you could,
<v Speaker 2>you know, have it grab there and you.
<v Speaker 1>Could give that user access to your location data. Is
<v Speaker 1>that how it would work or how would it?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>I think so, I think like you can. I know,
<v Speaker 2>if I go to one of your observations and you've
<v Speaker 2>obscured it, I still see the exact coordinates because you've
<v Speaker 2>put my username in there to trust me with the coordinates,
<v Speaker 2>and so you know, right, now it's just grabbing the
<v Speaker 2>data as an anonymous user, but I could have it
<v Speaker 2>log in with like my uh, you know, my username,
<v Speaker 2>and then it would probably would be able to grab
<v Speaker 2>the exact coordinates, which is real nice because you you know,
<v Speaker 2>when you have a something for herbarium, you want to
<v Speaker 2>be able to see exactly.
<v Speaker 1>It's such a great tool though, because I mean, it
<v Speaker 1>saved so much time for creating your barriers.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, Like I just made one hundred and seventeen
<v Speaker 2>labels and just a couple of minutes. And what I
<v Speaker 2>did is I just searched all of the fungi that
<v Speaker 2>I found in Ecuador in the past two weeks, and
<v Speaker 2>it just real quick gave me a list of one
<v Speaker 2>hundred and seventeen I naturalist observation numbers, and I just
<v Speaker 2>pasted that into the script and it made the labels,
<v Speaker 2>and in just a couple of minutes, I had all
<v Speaker 2>of the labels. And you know, that would have taken
<v Speaker 2>me hours to handwrite it out, and I probably would
<v Speaker 2>have made a couple of mistakes and numbers, and it
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't have had all my notes and the locations. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>that would take days if I had tried to write
<v Speaker 2>all that out by hand.
<v Speaker 1>And all this stuff that we're collecting, this will all
<v Speaker 1>go to Rosa at the herbarium in Keto.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so everything that we're collecting gets saved and goes
<v Speaker 2>to the in a bio or barium in Quito, and
<v Speaker 2>so yeah, I gets saved forever there. And we're going
<v Speaker 2>to do some DNA bar coding on it too. So
<v Speaker 2>we're going to a nanopore flow cell and a whole
<v Speaker 2>bunch of PCR primers and you know, you can sequence
<v Speaker 2>like nine hundred and sixty mushrooms with with one nanopore
<v Speaker 2>flow cell. And actually got some primers in the mail
<v Speaker 2>just a couple of weeks ago. It's a new one
<v Speaker 2>called g I T S seven. So it's an i
<v Speaker 2>TS primer, but the G means global and so it's
<v Speaker 2>really good for fungi that are really hard to sequence,
<v Speaker 2>but it's also really good for plants. So you can
<v Speaker 2>see the I S. Yeah, you can see with the
<v Speaker 2>I TS gene of plants really well with that primer.
<v Speaker 2>And so you could do the same nanopore protocol that
<v Speaker 2>we're doing for fungi and just you know, sequenced tons
<v Speaker 2>of play.
<v Speaker 1>But you would just get that would just get the it.
<v Speaker 2>S only its that would be a separate PCR. Well
<v Speaker 2>you can do is something called multiplex PCR. So instead
<v Speaker 2>of just putting two primers in there, you can put
<v Speaker 2>a whole pool of primers and then you're amplifying a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of genes at once, and that that could work
<v Speaker 2>to get you uh you know, because with fungi, you
<v Speaker 2>sequence the its gene and just thought one gene can
<v Speaker 2>identify more than ninety nine percent of fungi to species
<v Speaker 2>and it does a really good job of separating the
<v Speaker 2>species out. You know, one percent of the time you
<v Speaker 2>won't really you know, you have like two fungi with
<v Speaker 2>the same it won't won't be enough resolution. But it's
<v Speaker 2>amazing how well it does work. But for plants it's
<v Speaker 2>a lot more complicated. You kind of have to do
<v Speaker 2>like four or five genes to get that kind of resolution.
<v Speaker 2>With plants, gives ITS works. You know, it'll at least
<v Speaker 2>gets you to species group one hundred percent of the time. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but to really get species level of resolution, you got
<v Speaker 2>to do matt K and TRN now and a couple
<v Speaker 2>other ones. But you know, you can do this all
<v Speaker 2>at home. You just need a PCR machines and primers
<v Speaker 2>and pipets and a couple of chemicals.
<v Speaker 1>Nobody is doing what you're doing though with plants. Who's
<v Speaker 1>not in academia? Like everyone who's sequencing plants isn't you know,
<v Speaker 1>is an academia. No one's doing it from this. I
<v Speaker 1>got to hate this fucking word citizens saience doing it
<v Speaker 1>from like a citizen science background with plant material?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, or these days we say can be any science
<v Speaker 2>because we don't care if you're a citizen or not.
<v Speaker 1>Right, I mean I'm not even Yeah, I mean it's
<v Speaker 1>just a stupid word.
<v Speaker 2>It's like I think of like I just call it science,
<v Speaker 2>big citizen.
<v Speaker 1>It's like this night, I get this fucking imagery in
<v Speaker 1>my head like some angry fucking boomer, you know, whining
<v Speaker 1>about something inconsequential.
<v Speaker 2>No, I think I think the right word for it
<v Speaker 2>is just regular science though, because I mean science. The
<v Speaker 2>word science doesn't mean that you're getting paid to do
<v Speaker 2>it or something, or that you have a piece of paper.
<v Speaker 1>You and I both have.
<v Speaker 2>No piece of a kind of degree science.
<v Speaker 1>You and I have no piece of paper. I never
<v Speaker 1>even got a fucking any kind of college anything.
<v Speaker 2>No no, I didn't go to college either.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, well that brings me up. I mean, creating this program,
<v Speaker 1>it's I want to talk about something else we do
<v Speaker 1>really quick if we want to really quick ten minutes
<v Speaker 1>when almost fucking again. But everyone's talking shit on AI,
<v Speaker 1>and I get that there's it's going to be used
<v Speaker 1>for terrible things. Partially, there's a lot of terrible things,
<v Speaker 1>but there's also You're one of the few friends that
<v Speaker 1>I have who's like, really sees a lot of potential
<v Speaker 1>in it and is always talking about, you know, potential
<v Speaker 1>uses that I never hear people other people, other friends
<v Speaker 1>of mind talking about because I think they just don't know,
<v Speaker 1>they don't see it. But you're very schooled in tech
<v Speaker 1>and and all this shit, and you're kind of like,
<v Speaker 1>who I go to for this kind of stuff? What
<v Speaker 1>is your I guess talk about that. What's your opinion
<v Speaker 1>on some of the benefits of AI that can that
<v Speaker 1>people should be trying to use it for?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Well, you know, like anything AI is terrible and
<v Speaker 2>awesome at the same time. You know, the terrible part
<v Speaker 2>is like those stupid AI generated images that are flooding
<v Speaker 2>social media.
<v Speaker 1>Or AI entire AI Instagram profiles where the whole profile
<v Speaker 1>is fake.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's not real. Yeah, that just kind of waste
<v Speaker 2>people time and it's kind of annoying. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>it used to be people would like, you know, write
<v Speaker 2>web pages, and now they can just have AI do it,
<v Speaker 2>So it fills the web with just this garbage that's
<v Speaker 2>kind of regurgitated for a million other sources, so that stuff.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it's kind of annoying, but it's also pretty
<v Speaker 2>easy to avoid. You know, in the next few years,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people's jobs are going to be redundant
<v Speaker 2>because of AI. And it's already happened to a lot
<v Speaker 2>of jobs, but you know, in the next few years,
<v Speaker 2>there'll probably be a lot of unemployed people out there.
<v Speaker 2>So we're going to definitely need some sort of new
<v Speaker 2>paradigm now that AI can do. You know, at least
<v Speaker 2>half of people's jobs for us, How are people going
<v Speaker 2>to make a living when they you know, when there's
<v Speaker 2>so many unemployed people because AI has taken all their jobs.
<v Speaker 2>So that's kind of interesting, and that's happening faster and faster,
<v Speaker 2>and there's nothing anybody can do stop that. But I
<v Speaker 2>think there's a lot of really cool things AI can
<v Speaker 2>do as well. One thing that I really like is
<v Speaker 2>if you like so you go on I Naturalists and
<v Speaker 2>it gives you like a guess of three different species,
<v Speaker 2>and you click on all three of them, and they
<v Speaker 2>all look pretty similar, but you're like wondering, like, well,
<v Speaker 2>what's the difference. You can go to like chu GPT
<v Speaker 2>or perplexity or claud or any of these AI things
<v Speaker 2>and say what are the physical differences between these different species,
<v Speaker 2>and it'll spit out a list of all the differences
<v Speaker 2>that you can use to tell the species apart.
<v Speaker 1>So what information is it referencing? A key?
<v Speaker 2>So these have indexed all of the publicly available information
<v Speaker 2>on the Internet, so they basically just downloaded the whole Internet.
<v Speaker 2>And actually recently Google got caught. They were they went
<v Speaker 2>to lib gen and they downloaded all of lib gen.
<v Speaker 2>So they basically pirated every book that's never been up
<v Speaker 2>and used that to train the AI. And they tried
<v Speaker 2>to keep it secret, but it came out because they
<v Speaker 2>got subpoenaed and it came out in the depositions and
<v Speaker 2>stuff that they did not And so.
<v Speaker 1>That would be a good I mean, that would be
<v Speaker 1>cool if it wasn't Google. Like some kid did that, but.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, but they're selling it, so they're basically taking
<v Speaker 2>all this information that people wrote and then they're stealing
<v Speaker 2>it and selling it for profit. And that's uh, you know,
<v Speaker 2>piracy on a large corporate scale like that death unethical.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and it's and it's not like they're making the
<v Speaker 1>information free or they're doing you know, they're yeah, they're
<v Speaker 1>they're selling it.
<v Speaker 2>They're kind of free, but they're off of this so
<v Speaker 2>they're very much profiting off of it. So definitely kind
<v Speaker 2>of unethical. But it also means that you can like
<v Speaker 2>ask it all these questions and it will answer, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it can tell you the difference between two different species
<v Speaker 2>of some obscure genus you've never heard of before.
<v Speaker 1>So like chand GPT or deep seek or what would you.
<v Speaker 2>Mean all of those? Yeah, deep Seek is kind of cool.
<v Speaker 2>That's that new Chinese one that everyone's freaking out about.
<v Speaker 2>And the reason that it's cool is because it shows
<v Speaker 2>you it's it's steps when it's thinking, so it tells
<v Speaker 2>you what it's thinking about, and that's kind of cool
<v Speaker 2>for because it's like, you know, it's tea makes a mistake,
<v Speaker 2>which happens pretty often you'll you have no insight into
<v Speaker 2>why it made that mistake. Both deep seek you can
<v Speaker 2>read it look into its thinking process and you see, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I see where it went wrong. And then you can
<v Speaker 2>refine your question to like explain a little bit more
<v Speaker 2>and you know, I kind of like put it back
<v Speaker 2>on the right track. But you know, these all of
<v Speaker 2>these chot bots are really good for programming stuff. Like
<v Speaker 2>if you write a thousand lines of code and you
<v Speaker 2>run it and it just errs out because there's some
<v Speaker 2>some some curly bracket missing. You can spend ninety minutes
<v Speaker 2>looking for that missing curly bracket, or you can just
<v Speaker 2>paste that code into chat chpt and ask it where's
<v Speaker 2>the mistake and it'll just tell you in a couple
<v Speaker 2>of seconds, like where the mistake is. And it can
<v Speaker 2>also just write programs some scratch truck. If you've got
<v Speaker 2>a whole bunch of hig naturalist data, it can like
<v Speaker 2>you can just say, like here, take this eg naturalist
<v Speaker 2>data and put it into this form and you can
<v Speaker 2>just like have a process set and just do all
<v Speaker 2>sorts of stuff. So really powerful for doing stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>What are some other because you would mentioned a few
<v Speaker 1>other uses to what are some of the uses that
<v Speaker 1>people like you.
<v Speaker 2>And one other thing that I really like this AI
<v Speaker 2>stuff for is for recipes because it's index like every
<v Speaker 2>cookbook and every recipe on the internet, and it knows
<v Speaker 2>what flavors go together. So one thing I did is
<v Speaker 2>I just went through my kitchen and I just went
<v Speaker 2>through my cupboards and just in order read all of
<v Speaker 2>my ingredients and my cupboard, my fridge and my freezer
<v Speaker 2>and told CHPT to remember it. And then when I
<v Speaker 2>want to cook something, I can say like, what's the
<v Speaker 2>most delicious thing that I can make with the ingredients
<v Speaker 2>of my cupboard, and it'll like suggest like three or
<v Speaker 2>four like really awesome dishes. And then you know, I
<v Speaker 2>can be like, oh, I just got this new ingredient.
<v Speaker 2>You know what's a really delicious thing that I can
<v Speaker 2>make from this ingredient? And it'll like kind of go,
<v Speaker 2>you know, knows exactly what I have in my cupboards
<v Speaker 2>and knows what spices I have, and it'll make a
<v Speaker 2>recipe based on that. And then if I'm like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I'm out a flower, what kind of substitute, It'll be like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>you can substitute these other things. And then if it's
<v Speaker 2>like sometimes I'm like, Okay, make a recipe. It's so
<v Speaker 2>delicious that it would win a world class cooking competition
<v Speaker 2>for this dish, and it'll like spice it up with
<v Speaker 2>all these other things, and I'll take like half these
<v Speaker 2>congestions and I'll be like, damn, this is good. You know,
<v Speaker 2>is exactly what.
<v Speaker 1>Recipe that's like A that's like a PG. I would
<v Speaker 1>probably be a maybe I could probably think of some
<v Speaker 1>heinous shit there. Oh yeah, be ridiculous shit. What about
<v Speaker 1>like for educational purposes, because I mean the thing I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>this is going to be used for terrible ship, no doubt.
<v Speaker 3>Just like like a lot of guardrails on it.
<v Speaker 2>Like if you ask it like you know, how to
<v Speaker 2>make a bomb, or you know, ask it to say
<v Speaker 2>something racist, it'll be like, no, I'm not doing in general.
<v Speaker 2>With deep Seek, they didn't put those guardrails in. They
<v Speaker 2>put different guardrails. So if you ask you Seek like
<v Speaker 2>what happened in tannam and Square, it'd be like, I
<v Speaker 2>don't think I want to discuss that today. But if
<v Speaker 2>you ask it like how to make a bomb, it'll
<v Speaker 2>tell you exactly, but exactly how to do that.
<v Speaker 1>But with Ai though, I mean the point is, though
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna the corporate overlords will no doubt use it
<v Speaker 1>for some terrible things. What are some but there's also
<v Speaker 1>this benefit while the ship is thinking that it can
<v Speaker 1>be used for autodidactic purposes and yeah, imation.
<v Speaker 2>And the one that I use most often is just Perplexity,
<v Speaker 2>And that's another one of those free chot bots. But
<v Speaker 2>it's really good. It's like really really relevant information. They're
<v Speaker 2>like current stuff, so you can say, like how much
<v Speaker 2>rain or like what part of what's the place within
<v Speaker 2>fifty miles that got the most rain in the past week,
<v Speaker 2>and then you know where to go to find the
<v Speaker 2>most mushrooms because it knows current stuff. But it's really
<v Speaker 2>good at just explaining stuff to you. So like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>three years ago, if I ever had a question, like
<v Speaker 2>I'm just you know, just walking around our one, some
<v Speaker 2>thought pops into my head. I'm like, oh, I wonder
<v Speaker 2>like this or that I would have googled and then
<v Speaker 2>you go to a page and then try to find
<v Speaker 2>your answer on that web page. But now I just
<v Speaker 2>ask Perplexity my question and it answers it. But then
<v Speaker 2>it's got all these little references, so you can see
<v Speaker 2>where I got it. It'll show you links and then
<v Speaker 2>you click on the original sur especially if it says
<v Speaker 2>something you're like, I don't I don't believe that.
<v Speaker 3>You can click on the source and then and then
<v Speaker 3>you're like, oh.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, this is some like woo woo web page written
<v Speaker 2>by some fake doctor. This is ridiculous and that. But
<v Speaker 2>or you can be like, oh damn, this is a
<v Speaker 2>reputable source.
<v Speaker 1>So the but because Google will do that too. Now
<v Speaker 1>sometimes if you ask it something, but it's using Gemini,
<v Speaker 1>which is and it's not every time where you Google something,
<v Speaker 1>it'll get you.
<v Speaker 2>Done so much of Google. But if you get tired
<v Speaker 2>of that and you don't want Google to give you
<v Speaker 2>that AI summary, all you have to do is put
<v Speaker 2>a swear word into the question and then it doesn't
<v Speaker 2>do any of the AI stuff and you get the
<v Speaker 2>old school will starts yourself.
<v Speaker 1>Why does it only give you AI on some questions
<v Speaker 1>and not on others?
<v Speaker 2>It just does it when it thinks it know it's
<v Speaker 2>the answer.
<v Speaker 1>Mm hmmm. Yeah, it's weird. So what would you recommend
<v Speaker 1>then for people if they want to use AI or
<v Speaker 1>fuck around with it and see what the Some of the.
<v Speaker 2>Better it's kind of good to use all of them.
<v Speaker 1>Experiment with the deep seek or any of these.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Like the other day I was I had this
<v Speaker 2>like long eye Naturalist r L, and it was this
<v Speaker 2>big long ur L to find all the psilocybin mushrooms.
<v Speaker 2>So you have like two hundred species of psilocybin mushrooms
<v Speaker 2>in the world. So I made this long r L
<v Speaker 2>where I could just point it in any country or
<v Speaker 2>any state, any like, you know, any given air if
<v Speaker 2>part of the world, and it would show me all
<v Speaker 2>the psilocybin mushrooms. But you know it's all in this
<v Speaker 2>the you know, with species without species and to Dakota
<v Speaker 2>all that. I wrote a Python script using AI just
<v Speaker 2>to like, you know, write this real quick script for
<v Speaker 2>me and something that would have taken me an hour
<v Speaker 2>to code and debug. You know, it did it in seconds.
<v Speaker 2>But I asked chut GPT and Perplexity and deep Seek
<v Speaker 2>just to write the script to give them the same
<v Speaker 2>prompt and chant GPT. It just did not work. In
<v Speaker 2>Perplexity did not work, and with the deep seque it
<v Speaker 2>just worked on the first try. But it was real
<v Speaker 2>nice because it just takes apart the URL tells me
<v Speaker 2>exactly what it's looking for and lets me edit it
<v Speaker 2>really easy, And that would have taken me, you know
<v Speaker 2>forever to try to like look all that stuff up.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, I was basically making sure that all
<v Speaker 2>of the psilocybin mushrooms, even the ones that were recently discovered,
<v Speaker 2>were in my URL. And and yeah, so but in
<v Speaker 2>any case, Yeah, the different ais will do different things,
<v Speaker 2>and it's best to use all of them. Another one
<v Speaker 2>that people don't really talk about very much is called Claude,
<v Speaker 2>and that one is really good for coding, but it's
<v Speaker 2>also really good for like just like therapist type stuff.
<v Speaker 2>So if you just like have a problem with somebody
<v Speaker 2>and you can be like am I the asshole or
<v Speaker 2>are they the al solely ass claud and it'll give
<v Speaker 2>you like a really well thought out, like nuanced response.
<v Speaker 2>Fuck it, they must. I don't know how they did it.
<v Speaker 2>They must have trained it on like all of this stuff,
<v Speaker 2>but like.
<v Speaker 1>It'll give you some insight. Maybe it'll give.
<v Speaker 2>Really good insight. And just like if you would like
<v Speaker 2>hired like a really expensive therapist to you know, go
<v Speaker 2>over your problems with, it'll like give you an answer
<v Speaker 2>like on power better than that and it'll explain like, well,
<v Speaker 2>maybe you were kind of like in the wrong and
<v Speaker 2>this power and you should probably like explain this a
<v Speaker 2>little better and apologize for this. But on the other hand,
<v Speaker 2>this this thing, you know, they were definitely and you
<v Speaker 2>got to set your boundary there. But in any case,
<v Speaker 2>it's it's really cool if you ever have a problem
<v Speaker 2>with like another person, just it's just go into Claude
<v Speaker 2>and explain what happened to Claude and it'll give you, like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like a lot of insight and it's like
<v Speaker 2>it's uncannily good.
<v Speaker 1>What do you think? Okay, now now let's talk about
<v Speaker 1>the dark shit, because this is all cool stuff. But
<v Speaker 1>like the flip side of the coin would be not
<v Speaker 1>just job orradication, Like what are some other things I
<v Speaker 1>mean like that this could be used for. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it could be used to create new to devise new
<v Speaker 1>ways to extract money from people, create more of a
<v Speaker 1>capitalist consumer healthscape than we are.
<v Speaker 2>People are always doing that are always doing they've been
<v Speaker 2>doing that ever since the money got invented. Is how
<v Speaker 2>to get more of it? But yeah, I mean, it's
<v Speaker 2>definitely taking a lot of people's jobs. And one thing
<v Speaker 2>is like you know, usually you call up somebody on
<v Speaker 2>the phone and you talk to a real person, but
<v Speaker 2>now a lot of times you're talking to an AI
<v Speaker 2>and they've just cloned the voice of a real person.
<v Speaker 2>And now you can just clone anybody's voice, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>you can kind of tell now because there's a little
<v Speaker 2>bit too much of a pause in between, So.
<v Speaker 1>There will be AI where it's almost hard to tell
<v Speaker 1>that it's there already.
<v Speaker 2>Is. Yeah, you can't can't really tell if you're talking
<v Speaker 2>to a real person or not. And you know that's
<v Speaker 2>not really that terrible because you call up a customer
<v Speaker 2>service representative and you know, if it's AI, then they
<v Speaker 2>know like every problem in their knowledge base, which most
<v Speaker 2>of these customer service representatives don't really, but if you
<v Speaker 2>can't talk to a real person, that could get pretty
<v Speaker 2>annoying if it's not really in their knowledge base. So
<v Speaker 2>you know, how it's could be deployed well, or it
<v Speaker 2>could be deployed badly. It just really depends. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's definitely going to take half of the people's jobs.
<v Speaker 2>And what happens if half of the people in the
<v Speaker 2>world are unemployed, that's gonna.
<v Speaker 3>Really up not in a good way, because when you
<v Speaker 3>have half of twice as many workers, then you you
<v Speaker 3>don't have to pay anybody very much anymore.
<v Speaker 2>You got this so much surplus.
<v Speaker 1>Now you have this surplus populist and know you've got
<v Speaker 1>to get rid of themselves. So you got to start
<v Speaker 1>a war, you know, that's the potential.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean, worlds these days don't don't usually kill
<v Speaker 2>enough people to really make a dent in the population.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, maybe you got to invent some sort of
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, there's all sorts of humans are so
<v Speaker 1>good at thinking a terrible shit too. Yeah, we're so
<v Speaker 1>lost as a civilization. I feel like we're just like
<v Speaker 1>flailing with only you know, a handful of religions to
<v Speaker 1>guide us and give us any direction, and even those
<v Speaker 1>I mean obviously gets so thoroughly corrupted and off off
<v Speaker 1>the rails. Okay, well, I guess I guess we can
<v Speaker 1>move on from that topic. But regarding the silosophy, there's
<v Speaker 1>new species that would have been development since philosophy. In
<v Speaker 1>the genus, there's a couple of new species been described,
<v Speaker 1>and then it was it turns out that cyan essens
<v Speaker 1>and azorescans and all these species that were in the
<v Speaker 1>Northwest down to like northern California, Like this cluster of
<v Speaker 1>species is quite likely Australian.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, these things all probably came from Australia in the
<v Speaker 2>last years. You could probably you could go call them
<v Speaker 2>all suburuginosa. But you know, if you for anybody that's
<v Speaker 2>actually hunting Salasa bey in the Northwest, it's pretty easy
<v Speaker 2>to tell apart the Lennii, the Azores sens, the cia sense.
<v Speaker 2>So you know, I think probably they'll end up being
<v Speaker 2>described at the variety level, it all be varieties suburugenosa,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, it's all the same same mushrooms as
<v Speaker 2>however you want to call them. As kind of a
<v Speaker 2>matter of personal part.
<v Speaker 1>With these different varieties, you think they're just ecotypes that
<v Speaker 1>have evolved in the last two centuries or what I
<v Speaker 1>would do, it's.
<v Speaker 2>Really hard to tell how long they've actually how long
<v Speaker 2>ago they've actually evolved. They're definitely I would say it
<v Speaker 2>a little longer, because they're they're definitely different, very consistently different.
<v Speaker 2>And I think mushrooms evolved pretty slowly, Like it takes
<v Speaker 2>a few thousand years for mushroom to evolve, and so
<v Speaker 2>you know, at the very minimum.
<v Speaker 1>For populations to change exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they don't. They don't change too rapidly. But there's
<v Speaker 2>you know, there's there's more and more people are doing
<v Speaker 2>more and more DNA bar coding. There's there's more and
<v Speaker 2>more new species of every genus being discovered. Recently, when
<v Speaker 2>turned up in southern California that people thought with silosabio
<v Speaker 2>Vodio cystidiata, but it turns out that we're calling it
<v Speaker 2>silosip species CO two now and it also turned up
<v Speaker 2>in South Africa. So that's that's another one. It's going
<v Speaker 2>to be published soon. There's there's a ton of new species.
<v Speaker 2>There's bluing cornosibes or what they used to call it
<v Speaker 2>blue or then more recently blueing filly of Tinas. They
<v Speaker 2>got a new genus a few months back, so.
<v Speaker 1>Is that bluing psilocybin yah.
<v Speaker 2>So these are orange bort things and now they're called conasbula.
<v Speaker 2>And there's a few species. I think the ones in
<v Speaker 2>Europe are undescribed, but they call it kind of Sibulis cyanipus.
<v Speaker 1>But it did. But going back to this one in
<v Speaker 1>South Africa and Southern California, a disjunction like that. It's
<v Speaker 1>probably human transport obviously.
<v Speaker 2>Kari, but it's really hard to tell how things are transported.
<v Speaker 2>And also like for wood lovers, one way that they
<v Speaker 2>get transported a lot is just on driftwood. So you know,
<v Speaker 2>a whole storm comes and washes a lot of wood
<v Speaker 2>into the water in Australia, that'll wash up on beaches
<v Speaker 2>all over the world and can move wood lovers like
<v Speaker 2>sit like eight weeks or even longer of being inundated
<v Speaker 2>withsault on. Yeah, it was in the middle of that
<v Speaker 2>of the log. You know, it's pretty protected. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>driftwood is a really good way for fun dried across
<v Speaker 2>the ocean.
<v Speaker 1>So many things have to happen though.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's got to wash up, probably on another storm
<v Speaker 2>wash up and kind of like getting get a good
<v Speaker 2>foothold and in the new place.
<v Speaker 1>Because but with plants, it's I mean the only big
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I guess there's the two methods that dispersal
<v Speaker 1>are birds or which you know normally you can tell
<v Speaker 1>from flight paths, I mean, like migration patterns. Like that's
<v Speaker 1>why there's so many you know, South American and North
<v Speaker 1>American disjunctions. You look at the migration patterns or yeah,
<v Speaker 1>or debris rafts, but you know, most of the lineages
<v Speaker 1>and like whole clades of plants with it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there's exceptions of everything, but for the most part, they've
<v Speaker 1>been restricted to certain continents.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but you know, a hurricane comes, how many pieces
<v Speaker 2>of drift would go into the ocean, probably a million. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and if there's like one in ten thousands of them
<v Speaker 2>actually take hold, that's a lot of introduction, don't just
<v Speaker 2>get But usually when things get introduced, they don't take off.
<v Speaker 2>Like a lot of people will take silosophy spores of
<v Speaker 2>rare species, drop them in mail, and then somebody else
<v Speaker 2>on another continent will cultivate it like in their garden outdoors,
<v Speaker 2>and millions of spores of flying to the environment. But
<v Speaker 2>you mushroom hunters in these areas don't start seeing the species.
<v Speaker 2>Usually occasionally they do. Like there was the Golden oyster
<v Speaker 2>is oyster from China and it started getting cultivated the
<v Speaker 2>United States, and all of a sudden, it's all over
<v Speaker 2>the east coast eastern United States. And it's kind of
<v Speaker 2>one of those things kind of like a raspberry where yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's invasive, but also it's delicious, So it's hard to
<v Speaker 2>be too bad at it, and the jury is really
<v Speaker 2>out as to whether it's bad or how bad it is.
<v Speaker 2>I think it probably does choke out some native species,
<v Speaker 2>but compared to like leveling a forest to make a
<v Speaker 2>parking lot or a shopping mall, I don't think it's
<v Speaker 2>very bad at all with that.
<v Speaker 1>But some invasives can certainly be the.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah no, I'm talking about like invasive mushrooms. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I don't think it's really that bad. But
<v Speaker 2>also it's really hard to tell how bad the invasive
<v Speaker 2>fungi plant pathogens. Of course, they can be terrible because
<v Speaker 2>it's the sudden oak death, the water, which yeah, basically
<v Speaker 2>a lot of those things. Mushrooms are pretty benign by comparison.
<v Speaker 1>Fabola, what is that really invasive one?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the Fava calosera. It's you know, described from Madagascar,
<v Speaker 2>but they call it a ping pong bat and it
<v Speaker 2>looks like a bright, fluorescent orange ping pong padal with
<v Speaker 2>little holes on the other side, beautiful mushroom. It's it
<v Speaker 2>was super common in New Zealand where it's invasive, but
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of hard to be mad at it because
<v Speaker 2>it's such a beautiful photographic subject. But then for the
<v Speaker 2>first time it was found in California, and so this
<v Speaker 2>lady found it posted it on Facebook, and I'm like, hey,
<v Speaker 2>can you show me the spot? And she showed me
<v Speaker 2>where it was. There was this little powerk in San Bruno,
<v Speaker 2>just south of San Francisco, and I went out there
<v Speaker 2>and there was this one coast live oklog that was
<v Speaker 2>covered in absolutely stunningly beautiful favolaci at Calisera and so
<v Speaker 2>I got really nice, focused tacked pictures of it, and
<v Speaker 2>I think it's my top most favorited I naturalist observation
<v Speaker 2>now really. But it's the only time that favalacci has
<v Speaker 2>been found in California.
<v Speaker 1>It's about to be found a lot more.
<v Speaker 2>Probably, yeah, I think.
<v Speaker 3>And we took it and we put it on augur
<v Speaker 3>and it does grow on auger and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 3>You know, I'm not going to introduce it more just
<v Speaker 3>because you know, if it happens, it's going to happen
<v Speaker 3>without my help. But yeah, it probably will take over California.
<v Speaker 1>But it's not pathogenic.
<v Speaker 2>Just I don't think it's too Palpa Johnni. It's just
<v Speaker 2>kind of breaking down wood, turning wood into high quality
<v Speaker 2>soil and it'll probably choke out a few native sapatrophs.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, nothing on the scale of what humanity
<v Speaker 2>does when when they build a new city.
<v Speaker 1>No, totally, but this is humanity. I mean humanity is
<v Speaker 1>the reason it got there too at the same time, so.
<v Speaker 2>It's maybe though nobody I don't think anybody is cultivating that,
<v Speaker 2>so you never really know. It could have come through
<v Speaker 2>a bird, it could have come on drift wood, it
<v Speaker 2>could have come on the bottom of somebody's shoes. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's just different international flights here all.
<v Speaker 1>This stuff for people at the Nine Basin. Like with plants,
<v Speaker 1>it's all the time like, oh well it's they compare
<v Speaker 1>it to you know, it's not as bad as this.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, well it doesn't. That's like an that's a
<v Speaker 1>whole other thing. It's like it it's different with funny
<v Speaker 1>and it's different with this fable lash year. It's probably
<v Speaker 1>not going to be that bad. But I've just seen
<v Speaker 1>so much wreckage, you know, Like what we end up
<v Speaker 1>approaching is like a homogenization of Earth's life forms.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's not good, but it's also really hard to measure,
<v Speaker 2>Like how do you how can you measure how bad
<v Speaker 2>this mushroom is. You know, if it's not killing anything directly,
<v Speaker 2>but it's this mushroom.
<v Speaker 1>No, I'm talking about just invasive.
<v Speaker 2>Invasive plants are a whole different thing than fungi. Like
<v Speaker 2>you know, as far as picking goes, if you pick
<v Speaker 2>a rare plant, then it's gone. You pick a rare
<v Speaker 2>mushroom and it just really helps us spread around it.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, like the invasive species, all the invasive grasses
<v Speaker 2>of choking out so many native how native species, and
<v Speaker 2>it's really obvious you go there and there's just invasive
<v Speaker 2>as far as you can see in the native ones
<v Speaker 2>is barely poking through.
<v Speaker 1>Struggling to survive. That's why they require active management, which
<v Speaker 1>is another thing people are like, oh, well, it's you're
<v Speaker 1>never going to get all of it, and it's well,
<v Speaker 1>if the point isn't they get all of it. It's
<v Speaker 1>like the preserve a little bit of this piece of
<v Speaker 1>the living machine. So until something can adapt and evolve
<v Speaker 1>to maybe exploit the abundance of this invasive which will
<v Speaker 1>happen eventually. It might take five thousand years, it might
<v Speaker 1>take five thousand who knows, But.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we have a little group in elsa rito a
<v Speaker 2>groat a couple times a week and cut the Scotch
<v Speaker 2>broom from the hillside natural area. Oh yeah, that's a
<v Speaker 2>bad one. There's a lot of it out there and
<v Speaker 2>we'll never get all of it. But that's okay. It's
<v Speaker 2>more fun. It's kind of fun just to hang out
<v Speaker 2>with a bunch of people who like nature and free
<v Speaker 2>exercise and so.
<v Speaker 1>And also I compare it to like cancer, Like there's
<v Speaker 1>some cancers you can get that you can live with
<v Speaker 1>and that will be you know, that can you can
<v Speaker 1>keep subdued by medication. Would you tell someone who got
<v Speaker 1>like a leukemia that's managable by medication, You're never gonna
<v Speaker 1>get all of it, don't even try. And I say, well, no,
<v Speaker 1>I can just take this pill and live with it
<v Speaker 1>for another thirty years. It'll be fine. It's yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's it's wild though, but it's it's crazy to
<v Speaker 1>see where this stuff pops up and how much human transport.
<v Speaker 1>It really does kind of place the burden of responsibility
<v Speaker 1>on human shoulders now to maintain and really like steward
<v Speaker 1>some of these rare places that you know, can't compete
<v Speaker 1>with these rare ecoisms and rare habitats that can't compete
<v Speaker 1>with the invasives too much. And I wish there was
<v Speaker 1>more of a program to do that, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>there was more in the popular culture, in the zeitgeist.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. I mean, if everyone who got a gym membership
<v Speaker 2>instead just went out and pulled invasives and cut down
<v Speaker 2>invasive stuff, you know, you get really good exercise, but
<v Speaker 2>it could really make a dad.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, easily, man, or just learn to identify it.
<v Speaker 1>Just like. That's one thing that you do that I
<v Speaker 1>love so much, is like you're so in You're such
<v Speaker 1>a teacher. You're so into educating people and just taking
<v Speaker 1>the time to teach fucking anybody anything about mushrooms or
<v Speaker 1>any other facet of the living world that you know,
<v Speaker 1>you you're knowledgeable about. And you've I think you've inspired
<v Speaker 1>a shit ton of people. I mean, I know you have,
<v Speaker 1>so it's pretty cool. I think you'll probably be doing
<v Speaker 1>this for the rest of your life.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I don't. I don't think i'll stop anytime soon.
<v Speaker 1>Well, there, I could keep talking to you for another few hours.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Is there anything else we should cover
<v Speaker 1>before we dip out here?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I guess one thing we didn't mention is that
<v Speaker 2>I Naturalist Project for our fore So you know, we
<v Speaker 2>just did this week long foray in Ecuador, and we
<v Speaker 2>set up an I Naturalist Project, so everybody who found
<v Speaker 2>anything on this fora goes into the project, and so
<v Speaker 2>you know, we could kind of keeps track of everything,
<v Speaker 2>and so we got let's see, it was three hundred
<v Speaker 2>and twenty six species of plants that we saw, and
<v Speaker 2>that's that's probably mostly Joey just you know, with all
<v Speaker 2>of those, but it's you know, those twenty five people
<v Speaker 2>all kind of combined effort on everything. And you know
<v Speaker 2>this week we had Andy Better, like can identify insects.
<v Speaker 1>He's in a tomology guy. Yeah, for mushrooms. How many
<v Speaker 1>species of funny.
<v Speaker 2>One hundred and seventy three named species of fungiant probably
<v Speaker 2>as many that don't have names.
<v Speaker 1>But a ton that are just down to genus or
<v Speaker 1>family or whatever. Yeah, So what where I guess to
<v Speaker 1>explain what this was? The people who wanted, like you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna because you're gonna be doing this a couple of
<v Speaker 1>times a year. Probably.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So you know, I came to Ecuador first in
<v Speaker 2>twenty twenty and it was so cool that I wanted
<v Speaker 2>to kind of invite people and teach people and be
<v Speaker 2>able to kind of have like a trip that can
<v Speaker 2>bring people down and teach them, show them all about
<v Speaker 2>diversity here, and also like pay for my costs so
<v Speaker 2>I can actually afford to do it. So this is
<v Speaker 2>the third or fourth that I've done in Ecuador. We
<v Speaker 2>did one in Colombia a few months back that was
<v Speaker 2>really cool, and done a few in Mexico. And so
<v Speaker 2>basically we invite the whole internet and you know, people
<v Speaker 2>come and they send us some money and that covers
<v Speaker 2>food and transportation and lodging for a week or ten days,
<v Speaker 2>and then we just plan a trip where we visit
<v Speaker 2>is any cool habitats as possible. This is the first
<v Speaker 2>time that we got so many different experts. So, you know,
<v Speaker 2>we brought Joey down to help us with plants, and
<v Speaker 2>Andy to help us with insects, and we had Alex
<v Speaker 2>and Zane who were reptile and amphibian experts, and so
<v Speaker 2>you know, basically anything that we saw out there in
<v Speaker 2>the forest, we had somebody that was an expert on
<v Speaker 2>those sort of organisms. And you know, it turned out
<v Speaker 2>really cool. The people that come in these trips are
<v Speaker 2>you know, not a random cross section of people, but
<v Speaker 2>you know, the people that know me well enough to
<v Speaker 2>decide that they want to, you know, spend a week
<v Speaker 2>or ten days in some other country with me. And
<v Speaker 2>you know, I knew it would be really cool, but
<v Speaker 2>it ended up being a whole lot cooler than I
<v Speaker 2>thought it would be, you know, partly because it's like
<v Speaker 2>Alex planned it so well and took us to so
<v Speaker 2>many places because you know, he lives down here and
<v Speaker 2>so he's he's a biologist that's been working down here
<v Speaker 2>for years, so he knows so many cool habitats and
<v Speaker 2>he knows the best places. And then a lot of
<v Speaker 2>the experts that we brought in are people that he
<v Speaker 2>introduced me to, and so it's kind of like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of the best people in the whole world
<v Speaker 2>all together on one trip.
<v Speaker 1>So I learned a ship ton about so much. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I I that's kind of what I do on you anyway,
<v Speaker 1>Like I go out someplace, I'm just going to take
<v Speaker 1>it in, note things, you know, and then research later
<v Speaker 1>that night, make notes, take just collect again, just collecting
<v Speaker 1>ship tons of data. But to have people who know,
<v Speaker 1>especially with the reptile stuff, like doing a venom extraction
<v Speaker 1>and you know, learning about the different ecologies of all
<v Speaker 1>the reptiles and amphibians.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I missed that. What kind of snake was the
<v Speaker 2>extracting from boutry?
<v Speaker 3>Oh?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like the size, Yeah, that was.
<v Speaker 2>A viper that we found out there by the cave.
<v Speaker 1>But he's got like a ship ton of venom from
<v Speaker 1>this tiny live Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And that's one of the things that Alex does
<v Speaker 2>for a living is to milk the venom out of
<v Speaker 2>these snakes and then he freeze dries it with a
<v Speaker 2>kind of this like homemade freeze dryer, and then sends
<v Speaker 2>it off for analysis. They do, you know, GCMs analysis
<v Speaker 2>and time of flight analysis and just to figure out
<v Speaker 2>exactly how the proteins work and all of these venoms.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, that that was that was really cool. I
<v Speaker 2>saw him milk a coral snake last time I was here.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's gonna be wow that the teeth are probably tiny.
<v Speaker 2>Barely bite you. I mean, he's been doing it for
<v Speaker 2>a living for a long time, so he's got it
<v Speaker 2>figured out.
<v Speaker 1>Well, how can people learn about this? Did you go
<v Speaker 1>to mycena?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>So the website is mycena dot llc. So we announced
<v Speaker 2>trips on there and we have a mailing list, so,
<v Speaker 2>you know, a real low traffic mailing list. You just
<v Speaker 2>to get a couple of emails a year, but if
<v Speaker 2>you sign up for that, then you'll hear about future
<v Speaker 2>trips or if you follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,
<v Speaker 2>blue sky, you know, any any of those things. I
<v Speaker 2>post about these things a month or two in advance,
<v Speaker 2>and that's that's probably the best way to kind of
<v Speaker 2>keep in touch and know what we're doing next. I'd
<v Speaker 2>really like to do something in Costa Rica. I know
<v Speaker 2>a couple of good mycologists in Costa Rica that might
<v Speaker 2>organize this with. And also Malaysia. I know some amazing
<v Speaker 2>mushroom photographers and Malaysia that are interested in organizing a trip.
<v Speaker 3>So what interests you about Malaysia? Oh, the stuff there
<v Speaker 3>is are so different. You know, one thing that is
<v Speaker 3>tropical still right?
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah.
<v Speaker 3>One thing I like about South America is it is
<v Speaker 3>very different from North America, but it's still the same
<v Speaker 3>land mosk. So it's not so different that it's like confusing.
<v Speaker 3>It's like things are still you know, kind of like
<v Speaker 3>a lot of the same families and lineages, whereas if
<v Speaker 3>you go to Asia, you know, it's not connected at all,
<v Speaker 3>and things are completely different.
<v Speaker 1>They've been separated a much longer period of time.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, And like some of the fungi, they are
<v Speaker 2>just absolutely stunning. You know, stuff that you would you
<v Speaker 2>would never see here, and so I love to go
<v Speaker 2>there and you know, start to figure out all of
<v Speaker 2>that stuff.
<v Speaker 1>From a plant perspective. It's really interesting too, because I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure you would see you see the same ecologies
<v Speaker 1>and the same you see convergence in the same morphology,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the way things look and also the ecologies,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a completely different cast of species.
<v Speaker 3>And even exactly, yeah, you got the same ecological pressures,
<v Speaker 3>so you still kind of have the same sort of
<v Speaker 3>forces shaping the evolution, but completely different lineages. So you're
<v Speaker 3>kind of starting with different, you know, very different starting material,
<v Speaker 3>but getting to a similar place. And that's really interesting
<v Speaker 3>how all those adaptations work.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, well, I guess, uh, I don't know until next
<v Speaker 1>time when I have you on the podcast. Uh, you
<v Speaker 1>go to my scene it at LLC if you want
<v Speaker 1>to learn more about these forays and possibly hook up
<v Speaker 1>for one, and and then what else? Working where else
<v Speaker 1>can people read about your stuff? Just your social media?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you know, if you if you just search for
<v Speaker 2>a name on YouTube, a whole bunch of different videos
<v Speaker 2>come up, and some of them are pretty good. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, generally, I'll make a post and I'll just
<v Speaker 2>put the same post on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn
<v Speaker 2>and blue Sky and all the other ones if I remember, So,
<v Speaker 2>if you just follow me on one of those things,
<v Speaker 2>you can kind of see where I'm at and what
<v Speaker 2>I've been doing. You can even follow me on an
<v Speaker 2>high Naturalist and then you get like a day by
<v Speaker 2>day report from where I am and what I've been finding.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, I Naturalist is really important.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I Naturalist is the most important thing.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>The whole point of I Naturalist is too, is to
<v Speaker 2>bring people closer to nature. And it's really good at that.
<v Speaker 2>Like anytime I see a plant or an insect or
<v Speaker 2>like in that I don't know what it is, I
<v Speaker 2>put it on an I Naturalist, and you know, people
<v Speaker 2>you know will identify it for me. And sometimes it
<v Speaker 2>takes a couple of years before some expert comes along
<v Speaker 2>and they're like, oh, that's super rare or that's a
<v Speaker 2>really odd form of something common. But you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>just really cool to be able to see, you know,
<v Speaker 2>to keep track of all that stuff. And so you know,
<v Speaker 2>I do a lot of identifications on there too, Like, well,
<v Speaker 2>I'm here in Ecuador. I've been identifying all of the
<v Speaker 2>mushrooms that are found in this country and reported to
<v Speaker 2>h naturalists. So you know, identify a couple hundred mushrooms.
<v Speaker 1>Any identifications do you have on your inad? How many
<v Speaker 1>have you done? It looks like three hundred thousands.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's over three hundred thousand now, so I think, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>It's teaching right there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we definitely fifty a day.
<v Speaker 1>We need more experts to use in ashers. When I
<v Speaker 1>was in Brazil, it was such a bummer because no,
<v Speaker 1>none of the botanists especially you've got all that diverse,
<v Speaker 1>those diverse members of asteraci down there, really wild shit,
<v Speaker 1>and none of the people that study those use are
<v Speaker 1>only a few that study those groups go on I
<v Speaker 1>naturalists and see what people have been looking at and logging,
<v Speaker 1>and so because of that, the AI identifications are poor,
<v Speaker 1>and there's just the whole wealth of knowledge that's not you.
<v Speaker 2>Have really good experts identifying stuff on I Naturalists, and
<v Speaker 2>the AI becomes very smart and it's able to like
<v Speaker 2>really nails a lot of time.
<v Speaker 1>Fongy identifications around here were like spot on.
<v Speaker 2>Well, you know, in this part of Ecuador, there's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of biologists because we're the most one of the
<v Speaker 2>most biodiverse parts of Ecuador, and the people around here
<v Speaker 2>that are the biologists around here really care about what
<v Speaker 2>they're seeing, so they're using our naturalists a lot. They're
<v Speaker 2>taking the time to identify everything really well. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of other people really interested in this area,
<v Speaker 2>like Damon Tie has been here and made a lot
<v Speaker 2>of really good observations. And so you know, in this
<v Speaker 2>part of the world, if you take a picture of
<v Speaker 2>something in nature and put it on I Naturalists, it's
<v Speaker 2>very likely that the computer vision is going to be
<v Speaker 2>able to tell you exactly what spaces.
<v Speaker 1>And you're making it better by going if you're if
<v Speaker 1>you're an expert, you're making it better by going on
<v Speaker 1>there and identifying stuff, even if you can just get
<v Speaker 1>it to genus or something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and so it's a really good use of time.
<v Speaker 3>If you got like a free five minutes of time,
<v Speaker 3>and you're pretty good at some sort of thing. You
<v Speaker 3>can go on there and you know, some people will
<v Speaker 3>identify all the aerroids or all the cactus or all
<v Speaker 3>the bees, and so you know, I can flip through
<v Speaker 3>the mushrooms and just you know, flip them real quick
<v Speaker 3>and just like can you know, identify a whole lot
<v Speaker 3>of them very rapidly and it only takes me a
<v Speaker 3>couple of minutes. But it really helps out a lot
<v Speaker 3>of people, and it makes the AI smarter.
<v Speaker 2>And it also is good for me because I get
<v Speaker 2>to see what's out there and then that can be like,
<v Speaker 2>oh wow, it's really it's really good over in this mountain.
<v Speaker 2>I'm going to check that out.
<v Speaker 1>And it brings more attention. It brings more attention to
<v Speaker 1>these organisms.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and you people couragees more people to use our
<v Speaker 2>naturalists when more people are identifying their stuff. And also,
<v Speaker 2>you know, learning these organisms is really the same as
<v Speaker 2>learning a foreign language. I think it uses the same
<v Speaker 2>part of your brain. So if you're identifying stuff for
<v Speaker 2>other people and just using the vocabulary more than it
<v Speaker 2>just like is on the top of your mind, and
<v Speaker 2>it makes it much easier when you see it in person.
<v Speaker 2>Just to remember it because you've identified it, you know,
<v Speaker 2>twenty times for people in the last year.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well man, all right, well we'll do this again
<v Speaker 1>in the next few months. I'll probably just do it
<v Speaker 1>over the phone or something. But unless we're out doing
<v Speaker 1>this again. But thanks for being down to come on
<v Speaker 1>and thanks for all that you do and everybody else
<v Speaker 1>used to have a good risky day. You go. Fuck
<v Speaker 1>you so back.
<v Speaker 2>I have been hustle playing. We have been that outside
<v Speaker 2>looking at.
<v Speaker 1>Passed off that the mole super son outside fin