Neotropical Bamboos : What the &@#$ is Gregarious Monocarpy?

<v Speaker 1>Okay, welcome to the crime page, but botany doesn't podcast.
<v Speaker 1>Today on a podcast we have doctor Lynn Clark, who
<v Speaker 1>studies the neotropical bamboos, which I was absolutely blown away by.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I'm repeatedly blown away by whenever I encounter
<v Speaker 1>them in South America. They're major components. The genus Chiskeay
<v Speaker 1>is a major component of many of the habitats in
<v Speaker 1>southern Chile. I mean, I was in these ricaria forests
<v Speaker 1>where Chiscale was just forming, just forming, this almost monoculture
<v Speaker 1>mixed in with Alstromeria and the understory of these giant
<v Speaker 1>Ericarria trees colloquially known as monkey pozles, I can't stand
<v Speaker 1>a name, but anyway, And then I've seen them in
<v Speaker 1>Brazil as well in the Atlantic Forest and they're everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>And then more recently, I saw the genus Guadua, Guadua
<v Speaker 1>and Gustafoglia in the upper Amazon of Ecuador at about
<v Speaker 1>four thousand foot elevation and they were like ninety feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>So these are really impressive plants. This is a really
<v Speaker 1>impressive clade evolutionary group of plants. So doctor Lynn Clark,
<v Speaker 1>thank you for making time today.
<v Speaker 2>You're very welcome.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So let's I don't know where to start. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>let's talk about I guess just for anybody listening, what
<v Speaker 1>is a bamboo, their grass is. But it's a specific
<v Speaker 1>subfamily of the grass family.
<v Speaker 2>Right, that is correct. They are one of the largest
<v Speaker 2>actually about the third largest subfamily, so they were a
<v Speaker 2>pretty major lineage. And they are the only group of
<v Speaker 2>like major group of grasses to really evolve in association
<v Speaker 2>with forest habitats. And so that's one thing that makes
<v Speaker 2>them very different. So they many of them actually are
<v Speaker 2>competing with trees, and some of them, like the herbaceous bamboos,
<v Speaker 2>have adapted to that understory kind of habitat. And what
<v Speaker 2>the most unique character besides the molecular data that we
<v Speaker 2>have that shows that they are a claye, they have
<v Speaker 2>this very unusual cell type in their leads. It's you know,
<v Speaker 2>the cells in the middle of the leafs that do
<v Speaker 2>the photosynthesis. They have something that we call arm cells,
<v Speaker 2>and they're kind of like it's almost like a big tooth,
<v Speaker 2>you know, because there's lobes on these on these cells.
<v Speaker 2>Very very specific pattern. So that's another clue that yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they all they all had a common ancestor and they're
<v Speaker 2>all related to each other.
<v Speaker 1>So these arm cells, what are they? Is there like
<v Speaker 1>an adaptive benefit? What does it do? As like a
<v Speaker 1>lay person might say, what is what's their the why
<v Speaker 1>they evolve?
<v Speaker 2>Very good question. That's another project I'm doing is we're
<v Speaker 2>looking at these cells across the whole grass family, and
<v Speaker 2>it turns out these are not the only kind that
<v Speaker 2>are lobed. We think it's the way to increase surface
<v Speaker 2>area and so that would maybe make make it more
<v Speaker 2>efficient or more you know, enable photosynthesis to be to
<v Speaker 2>make more stuff and so you know maybe in the
<v Speaker 2>in a forest habitat where a lot of the time
<v Speaker 2>they're shaded, maybe that you know, extra surface area really
<v Speaker 2>helps them do that competition with trees that we were
<v Speaker 2>talking about.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, So
<v Speaker 1>so arm cells, these are specialized cells in the in
<v Speaker 1>the leaf mesaville, which is the tissue between the upper
<v Speaker 1>and lower epidermis, and they've got these you said, lobe
<v Speaker 1>like it looks like a tooth or what.
<v Speaker 2>Is it the Yeah, it's like mostly so they can
<v Speaker 2>be lobed from the lower surface towards the top, or
<v Speaker 2>from the upper surface towards the bottom or both. And
<v Speaker 2>when you if you take a razor blade and you
<v Speaker 2>were to cut one of these leaves in cross section,
<v Speaker 2>they show up. You can see those lobes and it's like,
<v Speaker 2>that's it. That's a bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, yeah, I'm seeing it. The cross section almost looks
<v Speaker 1>like a four leaf clover or something.
<v Speaker 2>It can yeah, yeah, okay, all.
<v Speaker 1>Right, but either way, these are these are probably one
<v Speaker 1>of the theories is they're potentially helping the plant cook
<v Speaker 1>up more sugars from photosynthesis, making them more photosynthetically.
<v Speaker 3>What's the efficient efficient?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there you go. Yeah, anyway, okay, So so that's
<v Speaker 1>the bamboos, And what's the they or the subfamily originated
<v Speaker 1>in where Southeast Asia?
<v Speaker 3>It's thought that's what we.
<v Speaker 2>Think right now. That seems to be the most likely
<v Speaker 2>based on all the evidence that we have.
<v Speaker 1>All right, and so what's the what is molecular clock?
<v Speaker 1>What do we got like an estimation of origin time
<v Speaker 1>here or.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, mostly like thirty five ish to forty million years
<v Speaker 2>ago something in that ballpark?
<v Speaker 1>So like what is that like lady has seen Alega
<v Speaker 1>seine or something.
<v Speaker 2>Hmmm, that's the least scene I'm remember incorrectly or late,
<v Speaker 2>no early.
<v Speaker 1>To double check it was a long time ago, it was.
<v Speaker 1>It was after the comet. Yeah, it was after the
<v Speaker 1>comet took out the dinosaurs, but it was still pretty
<v Speaker 1>far back. So yeah, okay, so in these so because
<v Speaker 1>I mean, most people think of bamboo, they think of Asia,
<v Speaker 1>they think of Panda's what I'm talking about, like non bodanists,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's just like normal labor. But I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I was surprised to find them. I remember where I
<v Speaker 1>was too. I was on a on a nero granitic
<v Speaker 1>knob near one of those. I God, the name escapes me.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a Dutch word for uh, those giant granite
<v Speaker 1>knobs in Brazil. I don't know. Anyway, it's.
<v Speaker 2>Like a sugarloaf mountain things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, God, it's such a granite. I can't remember
<v Speaker 1>the name. Anyway. The point, I was on one of
<v Speaker 1>these and I saw there there's a bunch of really
<v Speaker 1>cool plants there, lithophytic orchids, bromeliads, and this this what
<v Speaker 1>I could tell, was obviously a bamboo, but it had
<v Speaker 1>a much different flavor to it, a much different gestalt
<v Speaker 1>than you know, the invasive Asian ones that get planted
<v Speaker 1>in North American gardens, and I thought, this is really unique.
<v Speaker 1>This is obviously a native what is that? And that
<v Speaker 1>was my first experience with the genus Chiskea. And then
<v Speaker 1>I started seeing them a lot more and paying attention
<v Speaker 1>to them and read up on them and realized, Wow,
<v Speaker 1>this is a huge, a huge clade. When did so
<v Speaker 1>when did the when was there this diverse this dispersal
<v Speaker 1>from Asia where the where the subfamily originated to the
<v Speaker 1>New World.
<v Speaker 2>That's a we would all love to know the answer
<v Speaker 2>to that. And right now, all everything is pointing to
<v Speaker 2>something around twenty twenty two million years ago somewhere, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's a little bit after the bamboos of Ault in Asia,
<v Speaker 2>So we don't know for sure, and we don't know
<v Speaker 2>exactly how that would have happened because there was still,
<v Speaker 2>you know, significant separation among the continents that there would
<v Speaker 2>have been not exactly what we see today, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>still pretty pretty big distances. And somehow they got there
<v Speaker 2>and started diversifying. And there's actually probably were two introductions,
<v Speaker 2>because there's herbaceous bamboos in addition to the woody bamboos,
<v Speaker 2>and one of the earliest lineages of herbaceous bamboos is
<v Speaker 2>in New Guinea. There's one species in one genus there,
<v Speaker 2>and then all the rest of the diversity in that
<v Speaker 2>group is in the New World.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, And you know from looking at DNA that these
<v Speaker 1>are that's obviously part of this other clade. They're related
<v Speaker 1>to the neotropical ones. Yep. Absolutely, that's that's a huge disjunction.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy.
<v Speaker 3>That's like it is nuts.
<v Speaker 2>That's yeah. The closest relative to the one in New
<v Speaker 2>Guinea is are these three endemic genera in Cuba. And yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that was just that blew us away when we first
<v Speaker 2>got that result. It was just a few years ago
<v Speaker 2>we were able to confirm that.
<v Speaker 1>What's the name of the New Guinea species.
<v Speaker 2>It's burgerzio kloa bambusois burgerzi.
<v Speaker 1>How do you spell that? B e r Let.
<v Speaker 2>Me think here, No, it's I have to write it out.
<v Speaker 2>I won't spell it correctly.
<v Speaker 3>C U b u E R b U E r g.
<v Speaker 2>E R s I O c h l o A.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, is this a monotypic genus, yes, okay, so it
<v Speaker 1>should come up. Okay, let me get that just in
<v Speaker 1>case any one listening wants to look it up, which
<v Speaker 1>I recommend people do if they're Yeah, okay bergerzy aklo
<v Speaker 1>of bamboo. Soytis so many obscure plant names in my
<v Speaker 1>Google search history? Yeah wow? Okay, cool? All right, Yeah
<v Speaker 1>this is a And how tall does this thing get? Oh?
<v Speaker 2>I think typically a meter maybe?
<v Speaker 3>Oh wow, okay, about three feet?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but that's like that's like a generally yeah, like
<v Speaker 1>three three feet or less, I think so. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I mean I've never seen it in the fields, much
<v Speaker 2>as I would like to. But the herbaceous bamboos are
<v Speaker 2>done generally speaking, much smaller, and they they look more
<v Speaker 2>like I mean they they have some fairly tough stems,
<v Speaker 2>but they're not very big. And most of them are yeah,
<v Speaker 2>no more than a meter two meters tall at the most.
<v Speaker 2>And there's actually the smallest bamboo is a herbaceous bamboo
<v Speaker 2>and it's only about two to three centimeters tall.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow? What is that?
<v Speaker 2>It's called radi ella vanessi.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, spelling again, okay, yep.
<v Speaker 2>R A D D D D E l e e
<v Speaker 2>l l A rady ella and vanessi uh is v
<v Speaker 2>a and like vanessa with an e on the end.
<v Speaker 1>VANESSI, oh Vanesse, okay, And where's where's this native to?
<v Speaker 2>This one is native to? I think, uh it's Brazil.
<v Speaker 1>God man, I had no idea there was. Yeah. I
<v Speaker 1>looked up some of the bamboosdi like the native BAMBUSSORTI.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, this thing's tiny. Jesus. Yeah, I looked up
<v Speaker 1>some of the native bambusori in South America and I
<v Speaker 1>was blown away at the diversity. There's quite a bit.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I been there twenty million years at least,
<v Speaker 1>so it makes sense they would have diversified. But I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know there were so many different genera.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there is so use if I can give you
<v Speaker 2>some numbers. So for the alyri e, we're up to,
<v Speaker 2>oh is it twenty four genera total? And I think
<v Speaker 2>and Bergerzio kloa and so minus stats. So you got
<v Speaker 2>about twenty three genera and about one hundred and forty species.
<v Speaker 2>And then for the woody bamboos we are at six.
<v Speaker 2>We're in the twenties as well, twenty three or four
<v Speaker 2>and about four hundred and sixty species.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, so twenty four genera and four hundred and sixty species.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, So these are.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, these are these are huge components of the
<v Speaker 1>ecosystems of South America. The I do want to bring
<v Speaker 1>up too, We've mentioned like the herbasi species and woody
<v Speaker 1>species monocots, since bamboos and monocot don't produce, don't produce
<v Speaker 1>you know, secondary marastimes. They don't have lateral marastimes, so
<v Speaker 1>they don't produce, they don't produce wood what, But they're
<v Speaker 1>they're obviously very structurally sturdy and tough. And you know
<v Speaker 1>what most people call bamboo wood? What what is that?
<v Speaker 2>Technically, so it's it is all produced by the primary growth,
<v Speaker 2>so by the apelical mirros stem of any given shoot.
<v Speaker 2>But it is actually chemically as these plants start to grow,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the new shoot comes out of the ground,
<v Speaker 2>it's still very soft because it has to elongate obviously,
<v Speaker 2>and then they start pretty much from the base. Once
<v Speaker 2>they've started that growth and they're reaching their full height,
<v Speaker 2>they start lignifying. And so lignin is the chemical that
<v Speaker 2>makes wood wood. When we're talking about a tree, the
<v Speaker 2>cells that are in the middle of the stem become lignified,
<v Speaker 2>and so it's kind of the same with the bamboos,
<v Speaker 2>lignin is deposited in those cell walls, and so the chemically,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it has kind of the same origin as
<v Speaker 2>would it's just the way the marastims make the cells.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay different. So it's just it's it's the same compound.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's it's lignin, but it's not produced by
<v Speaker 1>it's not as produced by a secondary mariston, by a cambium.
<v Speaker 1>So because I mean, yeah, all monocots, except for what
<v Speaker 1>is dressina, and a handful of them just basically grow
<v Speaker 1>up and down. They don't grow out. That's why palm
<v Speaker 1>trees get so tall and skinny. For anybody listening, remember that.
<v Speaker 1>So I've said it like nine thousand times, but I'll
<v Speaker 1>keep saying it so anyway, But so, how many grass
<v Speaker 1>species do this? How many members of the family Poesi
<v Speaker 1>actually produce lignan besides the bamboos. Are they the only
<v Speaker 1>subfamily that you know of?
<v Speaker 2>No, there's definitely some other members that make that have
<v Speaker 2>lignified stems. So think about the reeds, you know, that's
<v Speaker 2>the ones you know, like musical instrument reads actually come
<v Speaker 2>They're not from bamboo. They come from members of the
<v Speaker 2>reed subfamily and there's a few other grasses scattered around,
<v Speaker 2>you know, especially some of the tropical ones, but they
<v Speaker 2>can make lignified stems.
<v Speaker 3>What's the reed subfamily A run Denoi they.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, yeah, like a runding area.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, all right, son Dons.
<v Speaker 1>Is the oh yeah, yeah, bad invasive, especially down here
<v Speaker 1>on the Rio grand.
<v Speaker 2>That's that's frag Mighty's. Frag Mighty's is the bad one.
<v Speaker 1>A Rondo's pretty invasive though, too, right. That's not a
<v Speaker 1>North American native, No.
<v Speaker 2>It's not, but it's really much more tropical. Frank nineties
<v Speaker 2>is the one that gets further north.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm well, we get a rundo
<v Speaker 1>down here, but I mean I'm basically it was like
<v Speaker 1>one hundred and five the other day, so in mid March. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean I think that, you know, that's an anomaly.
<v Speaker 1>Normally it's in the nineties, but one oh five. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so but this would nonetheless, like when someone's getting caned,
<v Speaker 1>that's it's probably with the bamboo species. Yeah, okay, like
<v Speaker 1>when that kid got caught spray painting in Singapore twenty
<v Speaker 1>five years ago. I remember that because I was yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was like a lesson is you know, I was
<v Speaker 1>still a juvenile then and that was like a lesson.
<v Speaker 1>I remember my mom being like, you know, so you
<v Speaker 1>go pull this shit over there in Singapore cane you
<v Speaker 1>but uh anyway, But but I mean these some of
<v Speaker 1>the like when I was looking at Guadua, and I mean,
<v Speaker 1>some of these things are like, god damn, they're huge. Man,
<v Speaker 1>Like the cane, what would be the cane is like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, some of them were like ten inches wide
<v Speaker 1>like these stems. It was insane. Yeah, massive, but.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah over ninety feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's so crazy. What The thing that I'm curious about,
<v Speaker 1>too is what I find odd about a lot of
<v Speaker 1>the bamboos and also really cool and unique for grasses,
<v Speaker 1>is that they've got these lateral buds that they can
<v Speaker 1>form these lateral shoots out of their main stems. How
<v Speaker 1>do you explain that physiologically? Because you look at like
<v Speaker 1>big blue stem or some of our native peririe they
<v Speaker 1>don't do that obviously. What's going on there with the
<v Speaker 1>these like Guadua. You know, you'll get this ninety foot
<v Speaker 1>tall shoot and then at the nodes you'll get these
<v Speaker 1>secondary branches that come out that are covered in spines.
<v Speaker 1>What is that exactly, So.
<v Speaker 2>When it goes back to thinking about how they're actually
<v Speaker 2>growing and competing with trees, because that's what the woody
<v Speaker 2>bamboos are doing. And so you know that new shoot
<v Speaker 2>that comes out of the ground when it's ready to go,
<v Speaker 2>it's you know, covered with those they are highly modified
<v Speaker 2>leaves that sort of wrap around and help keep it
<v Speaker 2>from falling over until it gets dignified. So they come
<v Speaker 2>out of the ground and they go they grow all
<v Speaker 2>the way up to their full height in a few months.
<v Speaker 2>The rate varies depending on where they are and how
<v Speaker 2>much water there is, but some of them have been
<v Speaker 2>measured at growing like over three feet a day elongating,
<v Speaker 2>so that's really the Chinese have a folk saying, don't
<v Speaker 2>hang your hat on a bamboo shoot, because you won't
<v Speaker 2>get it back. So they they will elongate all the
<v Speaker 2>way up, and of course the energy for that is
<v Speaker 2>mostly coming from the mother plant, you know, the stored
<v Speaker 2>all this up and getting that plant all the way up.
<v Speaker 2>But then they have to make leaves, and so that's
<v Speaker 2>what those buds do. They make the branches that have
<v Speaker 2>the foliage leaves so they can do the photosynthesis, and
<v Speaker 2>once they start they can extend those out and then
<v Speaker 2>they're on their own. Basically they can start photosynthesizing, and
<v Speaker 2>even if they're still connected to the mother plant, they're
<v Speaker 2>physiologically you know, supporting themselves.
<v Speaker 1>And when you say mother when you say mother plant,
<v Speaker 1>I mean this is we should mention. These things form
<v Speaker 1>massive colonies. I mean, how big can so they're spreading,
<v Speaker 1>They've got rhizomes spreading underground, and then those rhizomes essentially
<v Speaker 1>send up new massive shoots. I mean, these things. I
<v Speaker 1>stood next to one. It was tall on me, it
<v Speaker 1>was like six and a half feet tall. Looked like
<v Speaker 1>a giant asparagus just shooting out of the ground that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, And this is like a month ago. That
<v Speaker 1>thing is probably thirty feet tall.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. That's what they do. And yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they they have these, you know, I mean it imagine
<v Speaker 2>the life cycle of a bamboo. At some point it
<v Speaker 2>starts with a seed and grows and that shoot is
<v Speaker 2>very tiny, but each successive shoot that comes off of
<v Speaker 2>that is a little bit larger. And they keep doing
<v Speaker 2>that until they get to whatever their mature diameters is
<v Speaker 2>supposed to be for that species. And then and it
<v Speaker 2>can take like five years from the growth is you know,
<v Speaker 2>the germination of that seed for the plant to get
<v Speaker 2>to that point, okay, and then it'll you know, and
<v Speaker 2>then it keeps the Each rhizome can throw off usually
<v Speaker 2>two or three new shoots per season, and then yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they just keep growing and doing that year after year
<v Speaker 2>after year without flowering. And then this is this is
<v Speaker 2>another one of these mysteries. They count, they somehow count,
<v Speaker 2>and so when that cycle is reached for that species,
<v Speaker 2>each species can have its own flowering cycle. They basically
<v Speaker 2>all no, it's time and they convert to a reproductive
<v Speaker 2>merrist them and they start making the flowers and they
<v Speaker 2>basically have sex once and they die. That's what monocarpy means.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so their monocarpic like a go, I want to
<v Speaker 1>get to the flowering. The flowering uh part of this
<v Speaker 1>whole conversation, which I mean that alone is weird as hell.
<v Speaker 1>But these so I was I was going to say,
<v Speaker 1>because obviously, you know, monocts don't produce uh, secondary growth,
<v Speaker 1>They just grow up and down, not out. But these
<v Speaker 1>these bamboos, in the case of Guadua this you know,
<v Speaker 1>Amazonia one can get fucking ten inches. Yeah, I mean
<v Speaker 1>ten inch a ten inch wide shoot ninety feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>But I was gonna, I was gonna wonder, like when
<v Speaker 1>the seed germinates, how does it get that big? So
<v Speaker 1>basically it's the first you know, individual that comes up,
<v Speaker 1>the first stem that comes up is just what you
<v Speaker 1>would expect to get from a relatively small seed compared
<v Speaker 1>to the mother plant. And then it just keeps sending
<v Speaker 1>out rhizominously new shoots that subsequently get bigger, until you've
<v Speaker 1>got this massive you know, what's the diameter of a
<v Speaker 1>sewer pipe almost shoot? And so how big can these
<v Speaker 1>colonies get? Like, what's the biggest one you've seen?
<v Speaker 2>Oh boy, there's sometimes it's hard to know, you know,
<v Speaker 2>what a plant is inside of a colony because they
<v Speaker 2>can be so intermixed. Guattawa, there's a couple of different
<v Speaker 2>species involved. But the ones in the Amazon, you know,
<v Speaker 2>they've done some studies where there's you know, I think
<v Speaker 2>it's one hundred and sixty thousand square kilometers or something
<v Speaker 2>that's covered by these groves of these huge bamboos, and
<v Speaker 2>you know, they've done lands at images to kind of
<v Speaker 2>calculate how much there is, and it's just insane how
<v Speaker 2>much territory they cover.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, but that's not one individual plant, is that?
<v Speaker 2>No, No it's not. And that's but how many plants? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's really hard. Sometimes if it's a strict clumper, you
<v Speaker 2>can go in a particular place and you can kind
<v Speaker 2>of get an idea. You know, you can assume that
<v Speaker 2>each clump is one individual. And even that may not
<v Speaker 2>be absolutely true. If you had two seedlings germinate close
<v Speaker 2>to each other, you know, maybe they're intermixed in a
<v Speaker 2>single clump. Yeah, but the most part that's you know,
<v Speaker 2>you got to start somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>But these get fucking big. I mean, this is this
<v Speaker 1>is like rivaling a quaking aspen grove. I mean this
<v Speaker 1>is like yeah, this I tell you man, this when
<v Speaker 1>I saw this species, the Guadua and Gusta Folia, that
<v Speaker 1>really I was like, Okay, this is pretty this is insane.
<v Speaker 1>This is wild. I mean, And can you imagine what
<v Speaker 1>those root systems look like underground? Like if you had
<v Speaker 1>like X ray vision and you could just look underground
<v Speaker 1>at the massive fibrous roots of like a like one
<v Speaker 1>hundred and sixty thousand square kilometer, Yeah, it's it's nuts.
<v Speaker 1>They The thing that's I noticed too, like these they've
<v Speaker 1>got these hairs on them when they're when they're popping it.
<v Speaker 1>Like that's like that six and a half foot tall
<v Speaker 1>shoot that I saw. You top, you touch that sheath
<v Speaker 1>because they've got these you know, leaflike or these sheath
<v Speaker 1>like leaves that come up from the nodes and can
<v Speaker 1>be like eighteen inches toll in some cases in prot
<v Speaker 1>the new shoot, and they've got these like rusty hairs
<v Speaker 1>on them and almost feel like a cat tongue or
<v Speaker 1>like shark skin or something. What are what are those?
<v Speaker 2>And they stick in your skin? Some of those are
<v Speaker 2>they're they're sharp, they're nasty, they're irritating, and so we
<v Speaker 2>you know, if you're if you're actually collecting one of these,
<v Speaker 2>are studying it, you've got to wear ways were long
<v Speaker 2>sleeves and you know those the long gloves, gauntlet gloves,
<v Speaker 2>and I've gotten them, you know I've had after collecting
<v Speaker 2>his guadala, I usually have to take a my Swiss
<v Speaker 2>army knife and just kind of gently scrape along my
<v Speaker 2>arms because as many of those hairs out as possible.
<v Speaker 1>So these there's other like rivaling, like like Opunthius, like
<v Speaker 1>they're rivaling prickly pairs like in there glockets the what
<v Speaker 1>do you think was eating these things? Because those those
<v Speaker 1>lateral branches they get have those mean ass spines. And
<v Speaker 1>I remember I was asking my friend Alex, who's a herpetologist,
<v Speaker 1>when I was done and one I was like, you guys,
<v Speaker 1>get any bamboos is before I saw Guadua, and he's like,
<v Speaker 1>just those huge ones with the spines. And I was like, chisca.
<v Speaker 1>I thought it was just SKay. I didn't know there
<v Speaker 1>was this much diversity in BAMBOOSORTI and I was like,
<v Speaker 1>just SKay, it doesn't have spines. But then when I
<v Speaker 1>saw and he was complaining about it, was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we get stuck by him all the time. And then
<v Speaker 1>when I saw him, I realized, God, these are like
<v Speaker 1>really mean spines. This is this implies something in this
<v Speaker 1>thing's evolutionary past was chewing on it. I mean, probably
<v Speaker 1>a multitude of things, but I mean I imagine, you know,
<v Speaker 1>giant sloths too, were at some point a big pain
<v Speaker 1>in the ass for this lineage for this genus.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean that could have been part of what
<v Speaker 2>was going on, because yeah, and you know whether that
<v Speaker 2>actually how much that deters you know, that kind of herbivy.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, if you have a fairly big animal like that,
<v Speaker 2>maybe that's you know, but we also there's some ideas
<v Speaker 2>that you know, some of these guadawa's especially there's some
<v Speaker 2>in the in the Amazon, for so we kind of
<v Speaker 2>divide them into some different groups. There's sort of the
<v Speaker 2>big tall erect ones and then Gustafolio is definitely in
<v Speaker 2>that group. There's some smaller, kind of more arched ones
<v Speaker 2>that actually grow out in the savannahs that are not
<v Speaker 2>you know, they've adapted to a more highlight environment and
<v Speaker 2>low tree you know, they're they're out there. And then
<v Speaker 2>there's some that we call tree killers because they actually
<v Speaker 2>grow up and lean on the trees and they'll shade
<v Speaker 2>them and essentially kill them. And the thorns could actually
<v Speaker 2>help them, you know, in that sense hooking their clingers,
<v Speaker 2>they're hooks. So that's another possible advantage than having thorns
<v Speaker 2>could give a plant.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, so there might have been too, you know,
<v Speaker 1>adaptive benefits selecting for thorns, you know, in the environment.
<v Speaker 2>So also one of the things think of the way
<v Speaker 2>those branches. You probably saw this for the branches, especially
<v Speaker 2>on the lower notes, they're kind of sticking out kind
<v Speaker 2>of straight, and they end up kind of entwining with
<v Speaker 2>each other, and so there's there may be kind of
<v Speaker 2>a support function that helps somehow, you know, if there's wind,
<v Speaker 2>you know, we've speculated that that could also be another
<v Speaker 2>advantage to.
<v Speaker 1>Having supporting the main plant, or just holding the branches
<v Speaker 1>up so they can collect more light or.
<v Speaker 2>What sort of like each other. You know, they're they're
<v Speaker 2>sort of intertwined with each other, and so it kind
<v Speaker 2>of keeps the whole colony from just getting blown over.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh yeah, that makes sense. God, there's Yeah, they're sore.
<v Speaker 1>But either way, there's a lot going on here. It
<v Speaker 1>sounds like and it's not just as simple as you
<v Speaker 1>know what. That makes me wonder too, what what have
<v Speaker 1>you seen or you know, encountered feeding on these things?
<v Speaker 1>I mean not just I mean both like macro erbivores
<v Speaker 1>and micro orbivores, insects, etc. We're just talking about guadaway here.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not even getting into chiscaia yet, but I mean,
<v Speaker 1>are there like wooly monkeys hitting these things slows insects?
<v Speaker 1>Are there specifist insects that use them as host plants or.
<v Speaker 2>What absolutely especially Guado is like an amazing example of this.
<v Speaker 2>So there are associated vertebrates, invertebrates, there are some that
<v Speaker 2>are thought to have actually evolved to be associated with
<v Speaker 2>the bamboos, and so you get there's a number of
<v Speaker 2>I think where to start because there is so much
<v Speaker 2>going on here, so sort of think about how these
<v Speaker 2>develop when a new shoot comes up. It's not uncommon
<v Speaker 2>for if numoned wasps to overposit. You know, they'll punch
<v Speaker 2>on through because Guadawa is hollow. Almost all the species
<v Speaker 2>are hollow, and they'll overposit. And in these Amazonian ones,
<v Speaker 2>they also generally have water, a little bit of water.
<v Speaker 2>They're in the internodes, and so you'll get things like
<v Speaker 2>these losts. You'll get various kinds of different dipternes, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like mosquito type. Yeah, you know, relatives and things. So
<v Speaker 2>what can happen is the ichnomnon can actually start the
<v Speaker 2>process of making this little opening.
<v Speaker 1>Wait, wait really quick, I want to mention how you
<v Speaker 1>spell this, because these fucking wasps look so cool.
<v Speaker 3>Ic h amazing and eu M O.
<v Speaker 1>N I D they look insane. God, they're so cool.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, yeah, I mean that's why when you think about
<v Speaker 2>what it's going to take to punch through even on
<v Speaker 2>a new shoot of a guada, they can do it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean this as hard as how it literally
<v Speaker 1>feels like PVC pipe.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and they can do it. So they will overpose it.
<v Speaker 2>The shoot grows, you know, and the plant starts to
<v Speaker 2>branch out and everything, and then woodpeckers will come along
<v Speaker 2>and they can tell there's actually a specific pattern. I've
<v Speaker 2>seen this numerous times now on these hollow bamboos. It's
<v Speaker 2>like these little square or rectangular holes all in a row,
<v Speaker 2>and what they're doing is they're pecking into that internode
<v Speaker 2>to get whatever is living inside. So they're going to
<v Speaker 2>eat those insects. But once the hole is there and
<v Speaker 2>there's water, then things like the dipterrins, the mosquitoes come in.
<v Speaker 2>They can lay their eggs in there. You know, over time,
<v Speaker 2>those holes can get enlarge. There's actually so you get
<v Speaker 2>this whole little ecosystem inside each internode.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's like a giant uh. It's like those bee
<v Speaker 1>houses people put in their gardens, but it's got a
<v Speaker 1>higher diversity of insects. And I can imagine I mean
<v Speaker 1>these especially when you've got thousands of these giant stems.
<v Speaker 1>This is kind of unrelated to bamboos, But have you
<v Speaker 1>noticed I was. I was kind of astounded when I
<v Speaker 1>was in the Amazon how few mosquitoes there were. I
<v Speaker 1>thought it would be hell, but there weren't. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I got bit a couple of times, but there weren't
<v Speaker 1>that many. And then I realized that, you know, I
<v Speaker 1>listened at night to all the frogs and realized, oh,
<v Speaker 1>there's probably a number of things frogs included eating these things,
<v Speaker 1>and that's why there's not many mosquitoes. Has it been
<v Speaker 1>your experience or have you been eaten alive up there?
<v Speaker 2>So most of the time I'm not mostly working in
<v Speaker 2>the Amazon because Ciskeia is actually up in the mountains, right,
<v Speaker 2>So I tend to do most of my field's work
<v Speaker 2>up in the mountains. And I'm guessing that, you know,
<v Speaker 2>if you're actually out in the Amazon, Yeah, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>the times I've been to the Amazon on it hasn't
<v Speaker 2>been bad. But there's so much human influence too, because
<v Speaker 2>and then humans get in there and start affecting the
<v Speaker 2>quality of the ecosystem, then all those things that eat
<v Speaker 2>the insects tend to start disappearing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, exactly. Mosquitoes tend to be Mosquitoes tend to be
<v Speaker 1>worse around developed areas, especially the invasive species of mosquitos.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they're like, they're like coyotes. They they benefit
<v Speaker 1>They're like coyotes and crows and pigeons, they benefit off
<v Speaker 1>human right presence. But anyway, okay, well sorry for that.
<v Speaker 1>I just I just was wondering. Yeah, I forgot you
<v Speaker 1>just scay is not really in the Amazon. But okay, anyway, okay,
<v Speaker 1>so going back to this, is there what other cool
<v Speaker 1>ecologies are there with guadawa that you've noticed.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so so this was kind of like apartment living
<v Speaker 2>for all these critters. And then you get frogs in there,
<v Speaker 2>you get you know, but those leaf shes, those those
<v Speaker 2>on the new shoots, you know that are on the
<v Speaker 2>brand and so on. That's a wonderful shelter for lots
<v Speaker 2>of invertebrates. So you get them. Then you get fuliage
<v Speaker 2>gleaning birds that come in. There are snakes. There are
<v Speaker 2>ants because there's ants that live in these innernodes. Too.
<v Speaker 2>Done my share of ant dancing. Cut that thing open
<v Speaker 2>and you don't realize it, and it's like, oh my God,
<v Speaker 2>these things pour out.
<v Speaker 3>Oh god, it.
<v Speaker 2>Can be pretty entertaining to try to get away from them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, ants live in a lot of the hollow stems.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, there was another genus. I forgot this. I've
<v Speaker 1>been I've been editing a book and you know, so word,
<v Speaker 1>I've had so many words going through my head the
<v Speaker 1>last few weeks. I've forgotten a lot of genes. But
<v Speaker 1>there's a very common genus of Amazonian tree and polygonacy
<v Speaker 1>that's got you know. It's one of like thousands of
<v Speaker 1>plants that have mutualist relationships with ants that live inside
<v Speaker 1>of it. They live in the hollow stems. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so the ants will live inside the stems of guad what.
<v Speaker 2>They can do that or they'll just you know, build
<v Speaker 2>their nests around it. Either way. There's this I've never
<v Speaker 2>actually seen one. I've I've always wanted to. But these
<v Speaker 2>big rats they're beautiful. Actually, I've seen pictures of them.
<v Speaker 2>I think there's three species. It's like this Amazonian rat
<v Speaker 2>and they're native. They they will go up and they
<v Speaker 2>basically nest in the guadaluas. They'll chew off the top
<v Speaker 2>of the of the growing point and that causes the
<v Speaker 2>plant to send out a bunch of branches at that point,
<v Speaker 2>you know, because it's they kill the april goal growth
<v Speaker 2>and so they make their nests up there, and so
<v Speaker 2>they will actually you know, live in these bamboo growths
<v Speaker 2>and they're not really eating the bamboo, they're eating other stuff.
<v Speaker 2>But it's a big alter, you know. So in addition
<v Speaker 2>to food, there's the shelter aspect for a lot of
<v Speaker 2>these critters that are associated with the bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Amazon bamboo rat that to Lomas back to Linus
<v Speaker 1>is a species of spiny rat from the Amazon basis.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I imagine if you're a rat and you
<v Speaker 1>get like a plat, you know, you kill the the
<v Speaker 1>appical marestem of one of these giant bamboos, and then
<v Speaker 1>it of course shoots out all these h you're saying,
<v Speaker 1>it shoots out lateral branches. Then from that node. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's like a platform you got like an osprey. Now
<v Speaker 1>you know, you really got it made. If that's you know,
<v Speaker 1>if that's a platform way up there, you just got
<v Speaker 1>to worry about hawks and stuff.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, jaguar is not going to get you up there.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's it's so these are like major components of
<v Speaker 1>the ecosystem as you would expect them to be since
<v Speaker 1>they're so dominant. I mean, these these massive bamboo colonies. God,
<v Speaker 1>I could spend I could spend months down there just
<v Speaker 1>observing and making notes and learning about stuff. There's so
<v Speaker 1>much going on, it's insane.
<v Speaker 2>Apparently there's butterflies that have been talking to a guy
<v Speaker 2>in Florida at the University of Florida, and he studied
<v Speaker 2>the little blue butterflies and there seem to be you know,
<v Speaker 2>like endemic species forms associated with these these guadawa colonies
<v Speaker 2>and things, and so yeah, there's just a ton of
<v Speaker 2>biodiversity that is associated with all this bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, I mean they're they're huge. Are they like
<v Speaker 1>a They're not a pioneer species, right, they need you'd
<v Speaker 1>like primary forest cover.
<v Speaker 2>Hmmm. Actually, I think most so, most bamboos, they're not
<v Speaker 2>necessarily colonizers in that sense, but many of them are
<v Speaker 2>able to persist or even spread in secondary settings. So
<v Speaker 2>there's undoubtedly some of them that are really dependent on
<v Speaker 2>a primary forest kind of kind of habitat. So it
<v Speaker 2>varies from species species how they're going to behave in
<v Speaker 2>that situation.
<v Speaker 1>Does guadawa do you get that in the in the
<v Speaker 1>lower Amazon, like the actual flood plain area. To I
<v Speaker 1>imagine it's is it the same species or is it
<v Speaker 1>something different?
<v Speaker 2>There's different species. There's some species that are actually very
<v Speaker 2>closely associated with the river systems, and they can even
<v Speaker 2>withstand flooding for part of the year. I mean, I've
<v Speaker 2>seen them growing in water, which is not what I
<v Speaker 2>normally expect for a bamboo. And then there's other ones
<v Speaker 2>that that would not be able to tolerate that that
<v Speaker 2>they're kind of more in the the forest itself. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and then you get these ones that are in the savannahs.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, God, that would be cool to see. I
<v Speaker 1>love savannahs, man. I mean I like forests, you don't
<v Speaker 1>get me wrong, but I just I tend to like
<v Speaker 1>the you know, more open, sunny and exposed areas. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>and lastly, we'll move on from this genus and get
<v Speaker 1>to the today's hot topic. But the guaduas. Do you
<v Speaker 1>know any is there any place in North America that's
<v Speaker 1>growing them like any botanic gardens. I mean, you'd have
<v Speaker 1>to have a glasshouse the size of a fucking tense
<v Speaker 1>story building the house one, But do you know of
<v Speaker 1>any Have you seen any in North America like plant
<v Speaker 1>it out?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the main place is Florida, not surprisingly. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>there's a I'll give a shout out to Tropical Bamboo.
<v Speaker 2>It's the nursery in West Palm Beach and they they
<v Speaker 2>have an amazing setup where they grow lots of the
<v Speaker 2>asiatic ones too, but they have some guadawas that are
<v Speaker 2>you can just sort of walk down the roads and
<v Speaker 2>you get that sense of it's like almost like being
<v Speaker 2>in a cathedral, you know, where you've got these big
<v Speaker 2>arching things overhead. And so they have three or four
<v Speaker 2>five species now I don't remember the exact number, but
<v Speaker 2>they are really that's the main place, you know, Southern Florida.
<v Speaker 1>So when in Miami, hit up what is it West
<v Speaker 1>Tropical Bamboo.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, it's called Tropical Bamboo Tropical Business. Yeah, okay,
<v Speaker 2>and it's West Palm Beach.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, all right, wonderful locks hatchies. But yeah, so.
<v Speaker 1>You're going down to Florida, you're going down to Miami
<v Speaker 1>and it's definitely put that on the map along with
<v Speaker 1>the botanic or not. What is that fair Child that've
<v Speaker 1>been there before?
<v Speaker 2>Fairchild is the oh the one in Coral Gables and
<v Speaker 2>that's beautiful. Yeah, and they have a lot of bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>I saw hippo maine down there. That the toxic u
<v Speaker 1>for a tree. I'm really getting like pre dementia here.
<v Speaker 1>I'm having trouble remembering. Remember, someone's have to go to
<v Speaker 1>Someone's gonna have to take care of me when I'm
<v Speaker 1>ten years you know, ten years from now. I just
<v Speaker 1>got too many names in my in my head. I
<v Speaker 1>can't believe I forgot the name of that polygonaceous Amazonian tree.
<v Speaker 1>It's such a critical component of the egoism's there anyway. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>So moving on from Guadawa to Chisca, which is your
<v Speaker 1>area of expertise, Let's talk about this genus. Let's talk
<v Speaker 1>about distribution, how many species in it, different clades, you know,
<v Speaker 1>subclades in the genus, et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So, as I mentioned before, this is my favorite
<v Speaker 2>thing because I've been working on this group for a
<v Speaker 2>long time and right now we have a little over
<v Speaker 2>two hundred named species. So it's the biggest genus of
<v Speaker 2>the most specious genus at bamboos worldwide.
<v Speaker 1>Actually year, holy shit.
<v Speaker 2>And we're not done. I'm working on half a dozen
<v Speaker 2>new species right now. But in the last couple of
<v Speaker 2>years I've had a project. This is my grad student
<v Speaker 2>has also been working on this on the Guadala side
<v Speaker 2>of things in Bolivia, and so I finally made it
<v Speaker 2>to Bolivia last year, and I've been corresponding with a
<v Speaker 2>couple of the botanists down there, and I met with
<v Speaker 2>one of them. We were in La Pause for about
<v Speaker 2>a week and I'm just going through their herbarium and
<v Speaker 2>looking at all the plants. This is not even getting
<v Speaker 2>out in the field, just seeing what people have already documented.
<v Speaker 2>And so I was able to confirm there's like seventeen
<v Speaker 2>or eighteen named species there of just Ciscaia, but there's
<v Speaker 2>another sixty five at least that do not have names.
<v Speaker 2>They're different species. These are not you know, this is
<v Speaker 2>like we just did a quick pass through and it's like, no,
<v Speaker 2>these guys are different.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my god, undescribed just just they were. They were
<v Speaker 1>just lumped in with other stuff, or they weren't named.
<v Speaker 1>Someone just was like, it's a just skea. We don't
<v Speaker 1>know what species. We'll get through it later.
<v Speaker 2>And it was just kea sp. Just kea sp. On
<v Speaker 2>the labels and so I started, you know, doing some numbers,
<v Speaker 2>calculating in my head because Bolivia, that's Bolivia, and then
<v Speaker 2>there's Peru, which is also it's actually larger land masks wise,
<v Speaker 2>and you've got that huge north south axis along the andies.
<v Speaker 2>And so I'm estimating that there's probably and knowing what
<v Speaker 2>I know about some of the new species that still
<v Speaker 2>remained to be described in Brazil or even there's still
<v Speaker 2>a couple in Mexico. There's one in Costa Rica for
<v Speaker 2>crying outlets. We've done so much work there and there's
<v Speaker 2>still a new one. So I'm estimating there's an one
<v Speaker 2>hundred and forty or so new species. Interesting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's wild. It's so crazy that you can go
<v Speaker 1>into an erbarium and find I mean, there's just there's
<v Speaker 1>so much, there's so much left to be studied, like everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>you know, everywhere, I mean just from herbarium records alone,
<v Speaker 1>not even going out in the field. How are you?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this is and I'll be honest, I told
<v Speaker 1>you this before. I kind of avoid I was grassblind.
<v Speaker 1>I'm guilty of it for a long time up until
<v Speaker 1>a few years. I still am because the the you know,
<v Speaker 1>they're wind pollinated. The flowers aren't the easiest to study
<v Speaker 1>because they're small and they're not very showy, and that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, But then you get into like the big
<v Speaker 1>blue stems and some of the cool prairie grasses or
<v Speaker 1>the desert ones, and there's some really beautiful things out there,
<v Speaker 1>and also a lot of there's a lot of When
<v Speaker 1>I was in California, there's god, there's so many invasive
<v Speaker 1>European grasses that you're just kind of like, eh, but
<v Speaker 1>but you know, how would you because generally with most plants,
<v Speaker 1>you need a reproductive structure to figure out how they
<v Speaker 1>differ from each other. Looking at the ciskeias, what traits,
<v Speaker 1>what character traits are you looking at to figure out, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>this is different from this, et cetera, et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>That's a great question, and it's actually it's kind of
<v Speaker 2>like working a jigsaw puzzle because people will collect these plants,
<v Speaker 2>and a lot of people they know about this weird
<v Speaker 2>flowering behavior. So if they see a bamboo in flower,
<v Speaker 2>build grab a piece of it. But what they don't
<v Speaker 2>do is then make a complete vegetative collection. And so
<v Speaker 2>that's been a lot of my work is going back
<v Speaker 2>to these places where somebody collected a flowering thing, and
<v Speaker 2>then I can collect the vegetative samples, and then we
<v Speaker 2>have to sort of put them together to get the
<v Speaker 2>complete picture. And it turns out in Tiskeia, Ciskeia is
<v Speaker 2>unique in one respect among all plants, not just not
<v Speaker 2>just grasses or bamboos. They have one big bud at
<v Speaker 2>the node, which is like most of the other bamboos,
<v Speaker 2>they do the same thing and they'll just have one.
<v Speaker 2>But Ciskeia, in addition to the one big bud, has
<v Speaker 2>two to many, sometimes a couple one hundred of little buds,
<v Speaker 2>and those can be associated closely with the big bud,
<v Speaker 2>or they can go all the way around the stem.
<v Speaker 2>So these are truly independent little buds. And the little
<v Speaker 2>buds give rise to the branches that have the leaves
<v Speaker 2>on them, and so it's kind of like Shiskeia is
<v Speaker 2>doing a you know, separation of functions because the big
<v Speaker 2>bud recreates the main stem, so they can rebranch and
<v Speaker 2>lean on trees or do whatever they're going to do,
<v Speaker 2>and then the little buds make the leafy branches. But
<v Speaker 2>it turns out that that pattern of how many little
<v Speaker 2>branches and where they're located and is almost species specific.
<v Speaker 2>And so if I have that, and then I have
<v Speaker 2>the leaves, and I have the flowers plus the bracts,
<v Speaker 2>the special things that are on the new shoots. We
<v Speaker 2>call them calm leaves, but.
<v Speaker 1>They look like sheaths or what are they?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they look like sheaths, but they're actually a modified leaf.
<v Speaker 2>So they usually have a little blade on them. It's
<v Speaker 2>a big sheath and a little blade, but you don't
<v Speaker 2>always see it, you know, it can fall off whatever.
<v Speaker 2>But that combination, so I don't I have described new
<v Speaker 2>species without having the flowering structures.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. And these buds these there are buds at the
<v Speaker 1>note and you said there's like a big bud for
<v Speaker 1>that to recreate the appical maristime if the top is
<v Speaker 1>damaged and they got lateral buds too or what is it?
<v Speaker 2>Okay, Yeah, they have these little tiny they're small, much
<v Speaker 2>smaller than the big bud most of the time, and
<v Speaker 2>I call them subsidiary buds, but they they produce the
<v Speaker 2>leafy branches.
<v Speaker 1>So and these are diagnostic. These are like absolutely megod
<v Speaker 1>diagnostic for anyone listening. So like Chiskea, you'll get like
<v Speaker 1>a main stem. It looks like a bamboo. And then
<v Speaker 1>at the nodes you get you get these much smaller
<v Speaker 1>stems that shoot out laterally, just like guadua, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but they're not spiny. Uh and it's I've noted man.
<v Speaker 1>I saw one in an Alersee forest, a temper rainforest
<v Speaker 1>in southern Chile. I don't know what species of chiscay
<v Speaker 1>it was. That was definitely outside of my realm. But
<v Speaker 1>by the way, after this, if you could go to
<v Speaker 1>my eye now, I'll send you a link to my
<v Speaker 1>I Nashros if you can, I identify best you can
<v Speaker 1>any of the chiskeuas. But I saw one and it
<v Speaker 1>had this They looked almost like hairs, and I realized
<v Speaker 1>they were lateral buds that were just really thin and
<v Speaker 1>just emerging from one of the nodes like not hairs,
<v Speaker 1>but it looked like a these weird spiny, almost hair
<v Speaker 1>like protrusions. And they were just lateral lateral shoots coming
<v Speaker 1>out of one of the They look so peculiar and cool.
<v Speaker 2>They look weird and they are cool, so that it
<v Speaker 2>could be either that they were these lateral branches or
<v Speaker 2>sometimes they will also make there'll be little root buds
<v Speaker 2>in there, oh wow. And so sometimes they, especially if
<v Speaker 2>they're growing under fairly humid conditions, they will actually make
<v Speaker 2>these little roots coming out of the stems. And sometimes
<v Speaker 2>those can be really sharp and pointy and be like
<v Speaker 2>root spines. But most of the time they're just kind
<v Speaker 2>of hanging out there. I mean, if the calm gets
<v Speaker 2>the stem gets kind of knocked over. I've seen this
<v Speaker 2>happen that, you know, those like that, whatever node hits
<v Speaker 2>the ground, the big bud can sort of start growing up.
<v Speaker 2>It bends itself to go straight up, and the roots
<v Speaker 2>will actually start growing and become like part of the
<v Speaker 2>root system.
<v Speaker 1>So they can root themselves basically just like.
<v Speaker 2>A apparently they can.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, these were green, so I think there were
<v Speaker 1>probably shoots. But I mean, who know, can the roots
<v Speaker 1>be photosynthetic too, or are they green when they first were?
<v Speaker 2>They can they can? Oh wow, that's what people don't
<v Speaker 2>think of roots as being able to do that, but
<v Speaker 2>they actually can.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, just like I mean, well some just like
<v Speaker 1>some orchid roots, like you know, there's there's some there's
<v Speaker 1>some orchids that I think don't even produce don't even
<v Speaker 1>produce shoots. They just have photosynthetic roots like some of
<v Speaker 1>these weird epiphetic I saw one in South Florida somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, okay, so this so just SKA occupies a
<v Speaker 1>diversity of habitats, I mean temper rainforest up to very
<v Speaker 1>high high dry what's like the most drought tolerant just
<v Speaker 1>skea like from the most arid climate that you know of.
<v Speaker 2>So it's actually there's some species in Mexico that there's
<v Speaker 2>one in particular I'm thinking of. They it's from kind
<v Speaker 2>of western Mexico and it kind of goes all the
<v Speaker 2>way down. It's also found in western northwestern Costa Rica
<v Speaker 2>and those are in dry forests and they can withstand
<v Speaker 2>a dry season. They may, you know, kind of curl
<v Speaker 2>up and not look very happy, but but they are
<v Speaker 2>very drought tolerant.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know they came up to Mexico. That's crazy, man.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, there's the northernmost Tiescaia is in uh Durgo, I.
<v Speaker 1>Think, And these are what are they growing like pine
<v Speaker 1>oak a gave forests or what.
<v Speaker 2>Some of them are in pine oak forests, some of
<v Speaker 2>them are in these like dry forests on the western side.
<v Speaker 2>They can be in like a lot of the diversity
<v Speaker 2>is in Vera Cruz, and so you've got kind of
<v Speaker 2>temperate or not temperate, but like semi deciduous tropical forests.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, verya cruise obviously much more rainfall, you know, wetter climate,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, I can imagine they'd be there. I just man,
<v Speaker 1>that's crazy, though, Western myst what elevation are the ones,
<v Speaker 1>these western Mexican ones that.
<v Speaker 2>Those don't get too high. They're around fourteen hundred meters
<v Speaker 2>two maybe up to two thousands somewhere. They're you know,
<v Speaker 2>I mean the mountains there are just not that high. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you know, certainly in central Mexico you've got some that
<v Speaker 2>are quite a bit higher. And there are bamboos that
<v Speaker 2>there are ciscaos that will go up to over three
<v Speaker 2>thousand meters in those systems.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>But the highest elevation ones that are in the Andes,
<v Speaker 2>and they're over four thousand meters.
<v Speaker 1>Wait, hold on with these Mexican ones, so they're not
<v Speaker 1>they don't go too low. They're not like lowland species,
<v Speaker 1>like you're not going to find them growing with like
<v Speaker 1>columnar cacti with you.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no, generally not Cisco's are almost all growing
<v Speaker 2>above one thousand meters in elevation. There's a few that
<v Speaker 2>get down to you know, almost to sea level in
<v Speaker 2>certain habitats, but the ass majority or are mid to
<v Speaker 2>high elevation.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, but but the the most diversities in the Andes,
<v Speaker 1>would you say.
<v Speaker 2>I would say between like the northern well, yeah, the
<v Speaker 2>Andes because like I was just talking about with Peru
<v Speaker 2>and Bolivia, I mean, it's insane the amount of species
<v Speaker 2>there that we don't even have names for. So really
<v Speaker 2>all along the Andes and then the Atlantic Forest of
<v Speaker 2>Brazil has a lot of species.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, God, Insulburg, that was the name I was
<v Speaker 1>thinking of. Sorry, you know, I'm probably on a spectrum,
<v Speaker 1>that's how that's of my brain works. But uh, Insulburgh, Granite, Insulburg,
<v Speaker 1>that those are Those are some precious forests. Man, Jesus,
<v Speaker 1>they were there were they were burning last year, I guess,
<v Speaker 1>and they're not accustomed to fire at all.
<v Speaker 2>No, No, it's it's kind of scary, but yeah, some
<v Speaker 2>of those are absolutely beautiful places.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. These but these just cases, I mean, God, the
<v Speaker 1>thing that was so cool about them was that they're
<v Speaker 1>just I mean, some of them have like really glaucous
<v Speaker 1>blue leaves. You know ericaria forests, they're growing in a
<v Speaker 1>lersae forests. I didn't. I had no idea. I've been
<v Speaker 1>in the Fitzroyal Cooper soorties the Alerses for fifteen years.
<v Speaker 1>I was growing a bunch for San Francisco Botanical Garden.
<v Speaker 1>When I used to spend a lot of time there,
<v Speaker 1>I had no idea they shared habitat with a bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, these these things are fucking everywhere, man. So
<v Speaker 1>what's what's the country with the most diversity in the
<v Speaker 1>genus that you know of, like Bolivia or Brazil or what?
<v Speaker 2>Right now? If you look at just number described I
<v Speaker 2>think Brazil would would get the NOD. But if you
<v Speaker 2>look at if you count describe species plus the probable
<v Speaker 2>number of undescribed ones, it's going to be Peru or Bolivia.
<v Speaker 1>And they come. Are there any in the upper Amazon
<v Speaker 1>of Peru and Bolivia? Are they a little bit higher
<v Speaker 1>than that?
<v Speaker 2>They're mostly higher than that. Yeah. Once you and when
<v Speaker 2>you're in those systems, you've got to be up at least,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like fifteen hundred meters in elevation before you'll
<v Speaker 2>start seeing ciskeayas.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Okay, so these and in terms of ecology, what's
<v Speaker 1>going on here? How many other organisms that do Chiskeaa
<v Speaker 1>species associate with that you know of.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, again it's we don't even have a really
<v Speaker 2>good idea that Cisquio's in these forests. You know, as
<v Speaker 2>soon as there's a tree fall or you know, somebody
<v Speaker 2>cuts part of it down, if there's ciscaos there, they
<v Speaker 2>tend to grow in and so there's a huge amount
<v Speaker 2>of biomass uh and sometimes it's almost impenetrable because it
<v Speaker 2>is these are smaller, they get entangled. They're just like,
<v Speaker 2>you can't get through this. So there's birds, there's a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of bamboo specialist birds that track chiscaa's that are
<v Speaker 2>you know, that's their habitat. There's a ton of insects,
<v Speaker 2>you know, different groups of insects, different groups of birds.
<v Speaker 2>Then say for guadawa because obviously you're at higher elevations
<v Speaker 2>and so on. But we don't even have a good accounting.
<v Speaker 2>There's been very little work on the ecology of Ciscaia.
<v Speaker 1>Are they're not hollow inside like the guadawas are? Are they?
<v Speaker 2>No? These are solid?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Yeah, when we were when we were going through
<v Speaker 1>some of these habitats, I kept having nightmares of these things,
<v Speaker 1>like poking me in the eye because you'll see dead
<v Speaker 1>branches everywhere, like the colonies alive and thriving, but like
<v Speaker 1>maybe the shoot died and you could see how they
<v Speaker 1>must have made excellent arrows too.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, absolutely you could use them for yeah, not
<v Speaker 2>for flutes, but for a lot of other things. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So I'm really interested in this monocarpic thing and the
<v Speaker 1>fact that I mean they it'll take thirty years for
<v Speaker 1>some of them to flower. Can you explain that a
<v Speaker 1>little bit more, because I mean it's it's a very
<v Speaker 1>weird reproductive strategy. But I guess when you've got the
<v Speaker 1>ability to produce clonal offsets and these massive colonies, it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't matter. I mean, you can help ensure your survival
<v Speaker 1>and you can wait longer before producing seeds. But what's
<v Speaker 1>going on here? Some of them take thirty years to flower,
<v Speaker 1>and what do the flowers look like? And I assume
<v Speaker 1>they're just wind pollinated like most grasses, right, That's.
<v Speaker 2>What we think, Although we know that there are insects
<v Speaker 2>that will that do visit bamboo flowers and also other
<v Speaker 2>grass flowers, so they may be there may be some
<v Speaker 2>insect assistance, you know, in scattering the pollen, but fundamentally
<v Speaker 2>they seem to be wind pollinated. I think it's it's
<v Speaker 2>kind of tied together because if you're going to grow
<v Speaker 2>in a place like a forest and you're competing with trees,
<v Speaker 2>it's going to take a lot of energy to do that,
<v Speaker 2>and so you spend you know, there's there's a certain
<v Speaker 2>amount of time that you're going to spend an energy
<v Speaker 2>doing that competition and establishing yourself and growing, and then
<v Speaker 2>you know, once that happens, once you start getting that
<v Speaker 2>these longer time periods between flowering, it's really important that
<v Speaker 2>everybody flower at the same time or else, you know,
<v Speaker 2>one plant can flower, but that pollen may go to waste,
<v Speaker 2>or you may only be you know, producing self fertilized seed,
<v Speaker 2>which over the long run is not going to be
<v Speaker 2>the best thing. So there's also going to be a
<v Speaker 2>pressure to have a group flowering, you know, where everybody's
<v Speaker 2>blooming at the same time. You can do the cross pollination,
<v Speaker 2>but it may take so much energy to do that
<v Speaker 2>conversion that that essentially exhausts the plant. And so they've
<v Speaker 2>done on their pollination, they produce their seeds, and they
<v Speaker 2>just die because there's so there's nothing left in there.
<v Speaker 2>And so, you know, there's been some there's different ideas
<v Speaker 2>out there about this. That's kind of my favorite is
<v Speaker 2>that it's more related to the competition with trees and
<v Speaker 2>the amount of energy that it takes, you know, to
<v Speaker 2>both do that vegetative growth and then to switch over
<v Speaker 2>to reproductive mode. But there's been some ideas like they're
<v Speaker 2>avoiding predators, either predators of the shoots or predators of
<v Speaker 2>the seed especially, But you know, at some point, if
<v Speaker 2>you are doing this flowering like every ten years, that's
<v Speaker 2>a pretty yeah. I mean, you're going to avoid most
<v Speaker 2>of them, the melian predators, most mammals, most small mammals
<v Speaker 2>have a shorter lifespan than that. So it doesn't make
<v Speaker 2>sense to me necessarily that that's the driving there. You know,
<v Speaker 2>the longest known cycle in these bamboos is one hundred
<v Speaker 2>and twenty years.
<v Speaker 1>One hundred and twenty something will grow for one hundred
<v Speaker 1>and twenty years before it flowers.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, that's the Japanese timber bamboo Jesus. There are records,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it was cultivated by monks, in the monasteries there.
<v Speaker 2>So there's written records of these cycles in every one
<v Speaker 2>hundred and twenty years boom they had to. So the
<v Speaker 2>you know, the thirty to forty year cycles in the
<v Speaker 2>South American bamboos don't seem quite as daunting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, or nothing compared to it. Yeah. Philostacky's bamboo soidis
<v Speaker 1>is also known as Madaki, the giant timber bamboo. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so what the seeds, Well, I got a couple questions.
<v Speaker 1>First off, the seeds of these things, the grains are
<v Speaker 1>probably a huge food source, is I mean, that's just
<v Speaker 1>sco When it does produce seed, I imagine it produces
<v Speaker 1>a lot of them, and a lot of them get eaten.
<v Speaker 2>That's what we think. Yes, very likely. There are a
<v Speaker 2>lot of birds that will track the bamboo flowering. The
<v Speaker 2>small mammals so and the ones that don't germinate immediately,
<v Speaker 2>they don't really have a long dormancy period. So if
<v Speaker 2>the birds don't get them, and if they don't germinate,
<v Speaker 2>they probably get eaten by fungi.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so they don't last too long. Probably. No, there's
<v Speaker 1>not like a seed bank of chisca seed in most
<v Speaker 1>of the habitats no.
<v Speaker 2>And I think for most bamboos are this is another
<v Speaker 2>This would be another great ecological study. I've seen at
<v Speaker 2>least in a couple of places what I would characterize
<v Speaker 2>as a seedling bank. So the seedlings germinate and they
<v Speaker 2>can sit there in the understory for a while and
<v Speaker 2>you know it's not light enough, they can they act
<v Speaker 2>like the little herbaceous bamboos. They're just growing there. You know,
<v Speaker 2>as soon as an opening occurs, treefall, whatever, boom, they
<v Speaker 2>can start growing like they're you know, like they're supposed
<v Speaker 2>to be to get to their mature size. So I
<v Speaker 2>think there's actually a phenomenon there that just nobody has
<v Speaker 2>really spent much time looking at. And that's the idea
<v Speaker 2>of a seedling bank instead of a seed bank.
<v Speaker 1>Like a like coast redwoods, which yeah, could they can
<v Speaker 1>tolerate shade and then they wait for an opening. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they're growing kind of leg even then they wait for
<v Speaker 1>an opening and then they can put on seven feet
<v Speaker 1>a year. Yeah, that's a cool. That's a really cool theory.
<v Speaker 1>So it's like germanatum now and they can just hang
<v Speaker 1>in there, don't worry about it. And then if you know,
<v Speaker 1>in a decade there's an opening, they'll take off exactly.
<v Speaker 1>That's a really cool strategy. I'm confused about this, this monocarpeting.
<v Speaker 1>Do again, I mean, like agaves do it. Part of
<v Speaker 1>the reason a gave is so good for tequila is
<v Speaker 1>because it's got this giant heart that's basically a storage
<v Speaker 1>bank of sugar. And why do they do that so
<v Speaker 1>that they can produce this massive, you know, mellow, dramatic
<v Speaker 1>inflorescence that's in some cases thirty feet tall And there's
<v Speaker 1>no way that that thing's not going to get pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>It's so big and out there and so full of sugar.
<v Speaker 1>But of course the catches. Now you've spent all your
<v Speaker 1>sugar and you got to die. But that's why a
<v Speaker 1>lot of agaves evolved, the ability to produce clonal offsets
<v Speaker 1>from the base. Where with chisca, where is it? Where
<v Speaker 1>is it storing all this energy? And what I mean,
<v Speaker 1>why does it take so much energy? I mean, what
<v Speaker 1>are the is it like a is the is it
<v Speaker 1>the flowering just so massive and impressive that it's such
<v Speaker 1>a large expenditure of energy or what? So? Where is
<v Speaker 1>it storing it? And why is it require so much energy?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we think that probably a lot of that storage
<v Speaker 2>is happening in the rizone system. You know, the underground
<v Speaker 2>parts in Chiskea specifically because it's solid. I think you've
<v Speaker 2>got the stems there too. You know, most other bamboos
<v Speaker 2>are not going to be solid, so going to be
<v Speaker 2>more a rhydown things. But literally, when they're ready to flower,
<v Speaker 2>every single growing point switches over into reproductive mode. It's
<v Speaker 2>not like they just make a couple of shoots. You know,
<v Speaker 2>like every single branch sends out an inflorescence and so
<v Speaker 2>that does take a lot of energy to you know,
<v Speaker 2>have this big flush of growth to make this new
<v Speaker 2>all these new structures. Yeah, everything, everything, they're reproductive.
<v Speaker 1>That's pretty cool. Okay. So I can imagine like one
<v Speaker 1>main shoot can have thousands of wind pollinated flowers on.
<v Speaker 3>Them, yep.
<v Speaker 2>And the flowers are they're small, they look like you know,
<v Speaker 2>grass flowers, and most of them produce fruits or grains
<v Speaker 2>that look a lot like you know, a grain of
<v Speaker 2>rice or something like that. There are some bamboos that
<v Speaker 2>make fleshy fruits, which are fascinating. There's it's not a
<v Speaker 2>huge number of them, but that that phenomenon seems to
<v Speaker 2>be kind of more associated with the like more rainforesty,
<v Speaker 2>you know, lower elevation, more humid forests, and we assume
<v Speaker 2>that that's you know, for animal dispersal.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's crazy. What is is it like a berry?
<v Speaker 1>Does it or does it just have an arrow attached
<v Speaker 1>to it or what.
<v Speaker 2>It's actually the there's so there's some Asiatic bamboos that
<v Speaker 2>do this and some New World ones and they can
<v Speaker 2>there's a couple of different ways they can do it,
<v Speaker 2>but essentially, yeah, the the outer part of the the
<v Speaker 2>the paracrp, you know, the ovary wall would have been
<v Speaker 2>the ovary wall becomes fleshy.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's crazy. That's wild man. To think of a
<v Speaker 1>grass doing that.
<v Speaker 2>It's really bizarre. There's some like the there's the one
<v Speaker 2>uh in the from the Atlantic forests of Brazil. They
<v Speaker 2>look like olives, look like little green olives hanging on
<v Speaker 2>you know about the size of olives.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, that's crazy. What's it? You need a genius
<v Speaker 1>name really quick? Sorry, I have to get any rupty.
<v Speaker 1>What's the genus thing? So I could look this up?
<v Speaker 1>You know?
<v Speaker 2>Oh, so that one is al vimea A l v
<v Speaker 2>I M I A.
<v Speaker 1>M is in mary el Vimia. Okay, yes, okay, keep going.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry.
<v Speaker 2>Oh and ol Meca O l m e c A.
<v Speaker 2>There's a couple of species of ol Mecca in Mexico
<v Speaker 2>that make even bigger, kind of more roundy, rounded, kind
<v Speaker 2>of fleshy fruits. There's even a guadawa that does it.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's wild, man. This is like the Ian Malcolm moment.
<v Speaker 1>You know, like life uh finds a way. It's you
<v Speaker 1>got a niche to exploit. You can get some bird
<v Speaker 1>or something that help you disperse your seeds. It's gonna happen.
<v Speaker 2>So mm hmm. I like to think of monkeys dispersing
<v Speaker 2>these guys, but I don't know if that's true, but
<v Speaker 2>it seems like it would be big enough to get
<v Speaker 2>their attention.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's man. I saw one of those common wooly monkeys,
<v Speaker 1>which are not so common anymore. I guess there's only
<v Speaker 1>like ten thousand left in the world. But uh, we
<v Speaker 1>went to this, We went to like this indigenous village
<v Speaker 1>and there was like this couple in there that had
<v Speaker 1>found one that, like its parents had been killed, and
<v Speaker 1>they named it Pepe and it was super friendly and
<v Speaker 1>you know, fucking adorable and super mischievous and like hanging
<v Speaker 1>out with us. It was pretty funny. It was cool
<v Speaker 1>to see it, but I imagine, yeah, that was that
<v Speaker 1>was going on too.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, So exactly life finds the way. These guys are
<v Speaker 2>just amazing.
<v Speaker 1>So the uh so when they so whence scay of flowers?
<v Speaker 1>It's like a huge event. And I guess you can
<v Speaker 1>gauge how big an individual plant, like an individual clonal
<v Speaker 1>colony might be, you know, one that's all the same
<v Speaker 1>phenotype what. But the thing that's more mysterious and confusing
<v Speaker 1>is how and yeah, if you you know, if that,
<v Speaker 1>if that colony flowers and there's not another in another
<v Speaker 1>phenotype or another you know, individual flowering, how does it?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, then it's just kind of not screwed, but
<v Speaker 1>there's a reduction in genetic diversity. It's just self plony.
<v Speaker 1>How do they and that's not ideal? How do they?
<v Speaker 1>How do they trigger each other to flower? Like? How
<v Speaker 1>is there some sort of communication? Shouldn't use that word,
<v Speaker 1>but basically what it is where they're able to flow?
<v Speaker 1>Or is there not? Is it just chance?
<v Speaker 2>So it I mean it is genetically controlled in some way.
<v Speaker 2>We don't know how because there's been enough you know,
<v Speaker 2>I've seen this myself where we've dug up plants. I'm
<v Speaker 2>thinking of like one in particular in Mexico. It was
<v Speaker 2>in on the volcan Perote in Sara Cruz, and I
<v Speaker 2>knew it was a new species. It was a bizarro thing,
<v Speaker 2>but it hadn't flowered. But we went back every chance
<v Speaker 2>I got, and we finally the deforestation there was, you know,
<v Speaker 2>clearly going to threaten it. So we dug up plants
<v Speaker 2>and moved them to a local botanical garden outside of Halapa,
<v Speaker 2>and in January of ninety three, I got a report
<v Speaker 2>from somebody down there. It's like it's finally blooming. And
<v Speaker 2>the plants that were in the garden loomed at exactly
<v Speaker 2>the same time as the ones on the mountain. They
<v Speaker 2>were obviously counting, you know, exactly the same way. C
<v Speaker 2>There's other reports, like there was a guy back in
<v Speaker 2>the I think, and he would have gone there exactly,
<v Speaker 2>but he went to Jamaica and he dug up there's
<v Speaker 2>a bamboo a ciscaia, there's basically one species of ciscaya
<v Speaker 2>that's found in the Caribbean, and he dug it up
<v Speaker 2>and took it back to q Gardens in England and
<v Speaker 2>it lived there. And when the mother population flowered and
<v Speaker 2>died in Jamaica, the one in England flowered and died
<v Speaker 2>as well, exactly the same.
<v Speaker 1>So they're they're counting. It's I mean, there's obviously they're
<v Speaker 1>not communicating across the Atlantic Ocean. There's not like hormones
<v Speaker 1>being exuded from the roots that are. They're just counting.
<v Speaker 3>That's yep.
<v Speaker 2>And I think it must be associated with the marristems
<v Speaker 2>at the growing point in some way. You know, it's
<v Speaker 2>not unusual when you see, like if you're in a
<v Speaker 2>preserve and you've got all these bamboos and somebody's cutting
<v Speaker 2>a pass and so they're they're using their machete and
<v Speaker 2>they're cutting them ones right next to the pathway that
<v Speaker 2>the others inside the forest or in other spots are
<v Speaker 2>not being cut. Those ones will often flower out of
<v Speaker 2>synchrony with the rest of the population. So I think
<v Speaker 2>that you know, there's like more cell divisions happening that
<v Speaker 2>encourages them that they think they've they're older than they
<v Speaker 2>actually are, so.
<v Speaker 1>Cutting them changes that it kind of messes up their
<v Speaker 1>counting rhythm.
<v Speaker 2>It may it seems, but you know, we've never done
<v Speaker 2>an experiment actually do to really see if that's you know, so, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we don't know. This is one of those things we
<v Speaker 2>really do not know how they count that.
<v Speaker 1>I mean that that seems like, you know, instead of
<v Speaker 1>going to Mars, we should find stuff like this up.
<v Speaker 1>You know, this is like, I mean, I'm done for
<v Speaker 1>going to Mars. I don't want to live there. But
<v Speaker 1>you catch my point. I'm just saying there's so much
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I am smacking the face of every day,
<v Speaker 1>like how there's so much about the life on this planet,
<v Speaker 1>the other life forms, the living machine that we don't
<v Speaker 1>know yet. But I mean that that alone is pretty
<v Speaker 1>It's very mysterious. It's very cool. How does a plant,
<v Speaker 1>if it is counting, how does it do that? And
<v Speaker 1>I assume, I mean, that's a I could see how
<v Speaker 1>that theory is workable too, because if the seeds don't
<v Speaker 1>last long and they you get these masked events where
<v Speaker 1>there's tons, there's tons, you know, hundreds of thousands of
<v Speaker 1>seeds being produced, and you know they're all germinating at
<v Speaker 1>the same they don't last that long. They're probably all
<v Speaker 1>you know, one stand that population will all be the
<v Speaker 1>same age, you know, they're all they all germinated the
<v Speaker 1>same year or the year after, and so I can
<v Speaker 1>see how that would work. Then then it's just a
<v Speaker 1>matter of counting. But you know, God, like, if it
<v Speaker 1>is counting, like, how how does it know when to
<v Speaker 1>stop counting? And how do the other individuals next to
<v Speaker 1>it know when to stop counting?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's it's it's encoded in thes somehow, and that's
<v Speaker 2>you know. I like to say that cicadas are the
<v Speaker 2>bamboos of the insect world. Yeah, but they must be
<v Speaker 2>doing something very similar because how do they know?
<v Speaker 1>Does every get well with cicadas? I mean that's the
<v Speaker 1>peculiar thing too. Like seventeen years, thirteen years, like those
<v Speaker 1>are solid numbers. I wonder if it's like that with
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the bamboos, some of them.
<v Speaker 2>You know, we actually don't know the flowering cycles for
<v Speaker 2>most of the species, which is another ridiculous thing, but
<v Speaker 2>it's it can be very hard to It's not like
<v Speaker 2>you can get a grant, you know, to like go
<v Speaker 2>back every thirty years and.
<v Speaker 1>Check something, especially not now in the United States. Right
<v Speaker 1>now we're trying to make our population dumber, so they're
<v Speaker 1>better consumers and we can give tax cuts to billionaires.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah that's wow.
<v Speaker 3>Sorry, go on, yeah, no, I hear you.
<v Speaker 2>So, you know, we we often rely on these herbarium
<v Speaker 2>collections that go back, you know, several hundred years in
<v Speaker 2>some cases, and so we can try to estimate approximately,
<v Speaker 2>you know, when was this thing flowering, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>how often and so on, and so we can get
<v Speaker 2>a rough idea. But unless you can pinpoint. You know,
<v Speaker 2>most of these species do have multiple populations, and you
<v Speaker 2>can certainly get a little bit of drift between populations.
<v Speaker 2>If they're geographically separated enough. They may may not cross
<v Speaker 2>pollinate when they do flower. But you know, we have
<v Speaker 2>some records of basically seedling to seedling, so we know
<v Speaker 2>for some species with high confidence that you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>about this amount of time. But because they take you know,
<v Speaker 2>the flowering process in any of these standards can take
<v Speaker 2>over a year, sometimes two years, from the time they
<v Speaker 2>first start to produce the flowers and then they're out
<v Speaker 2>there for a while and then pollination and so on,
<v Speaker 2>and by the time they produce the seeds, it can
<v Speaker 2>be over a year. Yes, and so there's a you know,
<v Speaker 2>a little wiggle room there as far as calculating the dates.
<v Speaker 1>Do all bamboos do this? I mean, do all bamboo
<v Speaker 1>species generally take a while to flower? Like they're all
<v Speaker 1>relatively I want to say long live, but I mean
<v Speaker 1>some can be one hundred and twenty years old obviously,
<v Speaker 1>but some, I mean, do all of them do this?
<v Speaker 1>Like they take like between ten to one hundred and
<v Speaker 1>twenty years, depending on the species, to flower.
<v Speaker 2>Most of the woody bamboos, yes, the herbaceous bamboos actually
<v Speaker 2>mostly just bloom every year, so they don't have There's
<v Speaker 2>a few species of herbaceous bamboos that seem to do
<v Speaker 2>the same gregarious monocarpy. And there are some woody bamboos
<v Speaker 2>that will bloom fairly frequently and not die.
<v Speaker 1>You said gregarious monocarpy, Like what what do you What
<v Speaker 1>do you mean? Gregarious means like like happy and drunk
<v Speaker 1>or what is it?
<v Speaker 2>The means no group, it's like the whole group, all
<v Speaker 2>of them at the same time. Yeah, that's the term
<v Speaker 2>in the literature, is gregarious monocarpy. Monocarpy is one thing
<v Speaker 2>because that means an individual plant will die after flowering,
<v Speaker 2>like those agaves yeah, but they don't all all the
<v Speaker 2>members of one species all flower and die at the
<v Speaker 2>same time.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, that's the that's the weird.
<v Speaker 1>That's the weird, Like where the gave is always assumed
<v Speaker 1>like okay, it's only you know, for if a if
<v Speaker 1>a gave that doesn't produce offsets, that just relies on pollination,
<v Speaker 1>that's obviously a setback because you've got to be in
<v Speaker 1>I just assume you've got to be in a large population,
<v Speaker 1>like a whole hillside that's covered in numerous individuals, and
<v Speaker 1>not all of them are going to be flowering at
<v Speaker 1>the same time, but you know, ten or twenty mite
<v Speaker 1>and that's going to be good enough. But with this,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, yeah, I realized if smaller populations, that's going
<v Speaker 1>to be impacted. If it's not producing clonal offsets and
<v Speaker 1>it's just it's it's all a gave or monocarpic, then yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you're sol If the population is small, there's a reduction diversity.
<v Speaker 1>But I guess with these chesscas it's a it's a
<v Speaker 1>little bit different. There's something else going on.
<v Speaker 2>There's something else going on, but you know, most of
<v Speaker 2>these populations you're going to have multiple individuals so at
<v Speaker 2>a minimum, most of the time you're going to get
<v Speaker 2>the cross pollination at least between individuals of the same population.
<v Speaker 2>But the other amazing thing is we know almost nothing
<v Speaker 2>actually about their reproductive biology. Are they self compatible? So
<v Speaker 2>can one can the pollen from one individual actually fertilize
<v Speaker 2>the stigmas of the same ends? We have no clue.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I was the thing though really quick. Sorry with
<v Speaker 1>the like the mono back to the monocarpy thing, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>will the whole population of chiskeaya's often be all flowering
<v Speaker 1>at the same time, or will only like a quarter
<v Speaker 1>of it be, because that's what I imagine it is
<v Speaker 1>with the gave's, like you know, with these no offsetting,
<v Speaker 1>but monocarpet gaves, I always imagine that's not the whole
<v Speaker 1>population that flowers, because you know, they're not communicating somehow,
<v Speaker 1>there's not like hormones or whatever. But with these chiskeaya's,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, is it generally like the whole population since
<v Speaker 1>it's probably an even aged stand, or is more likely
<v Speaker 1>to be they in their counting they they will flower
<v Speaker 1>at the same time or is it just a few
<v Speaker 1>will be or what? What have you noticed? What? What
<v Speaker 1>do you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so there is some variation among species, but most
<v Speaker 2>of the time, yes, if it's time for it to flower,
<v Speaker 2>all of them in that population will flower at the
<v Speaker 2>same time.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's so it's not hit or missed. It's like
<v Speaker 1>everybody's doing it.
<v Speaker 2>Everybody's doing it. That's the gregarious part.
<v Speaker 3>God, that's absolutely.
<v Speaker 1>So fucking just based on counting too.
<v Speaker 3>That's so it seems weird.
<v Speaker 2>They know, they know, they just they have this mechanism
<v Speaker 2>that tells them. But we also know that you know,
<v Speaker 2>for example, in Ciskeia, the higher in elevation that you go,
<v Speaker 2>the less the cycle seem to be shorter for one thing,
<v Speaker 2>and then also they tend to lose their gregarious part
<v Speaker 2>of it. So you can find, you know, some percentage
<v Speaker 2>of the population, maybe only five or ten percent, isn't
<v Speaker 2>flower at any given time, and so individual clumps might
<v Speaker 2>flower and die, but everybody's you know, on a different cycle.
<v Speaker 2>The best example of that, I don't know if you've
<v Speaker 2>been to Costa Rica, but if you go up on
<v Speaker 2>the Inner American high Way up to ser A Mountain
<v Speaker 2>of Death up there, the highway goes right right up there.
<v Speaker 2>You know, they got antenna towers now and everything. But
<v Speaker 2>there's a dominant Ciskeia in the habitat there. It's called
<v Speaker 2>soup parmo, and that behaves exactly that way. It's always
<v Speaker 2>got some plants and.
<v Speaker 1>Flower What is that? Is that just the cold temperature?
<v Speaker 1>Do you think that probably impacts that causes that or
<v Speaker 1>what do you think it could be?
<v Speaker 3>It could be.
<v Speaker 2>It's I I don't know, there's so many I can
<v Speaker 2>think of a lot of different you know, because the
<v Speaker 2>you have a sort of a day night cold warm cycle.
<v Speaker 2>The higher you go, it gets really yeah, you know, summer,
<v Speaker 2>every day, winter, everything, right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's the paramo, Yeah, totally, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So it could be something to do with that. It
<v Speaker 2>could be. I think about the sun. You've got much
<v Speaker 2>stronger insulation up there than you do at lower elevations.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, but.
<v Speaker 1>There's still I mean, they're still obviously monocarpic, right like
<v Speaker 1>ol traske monocarpic.
<v Speaker 2>As best we can tell.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, yeah, okay, yeah, cool. I've never seen them flowering,
<v Speaker 1>so maybe i'll get a maybe I'll get a chance
<v Speaker 1>to actually see one. In flower God, there was a
<v Speaker 1>species I don't know which one it was. We were
<v Speaker 1>at like six or seven thousand feet in southern Chile
<v Speaker 1>and these like relatively barren volcanic slopes, not barren, but
<v Speaker 1>they you know, it was it was stressful up there.
<v Speaker 1>You could tell we were near these hot springs, well
<v Speaker 1>that's hot springs. They were like geothermal areas that smelled
<v Speaker 1>like hydrogen sulfide. But I just remember looking across on
<v Speaker 1>this other hill, like three hundred yards away, and there
<v Speaker 1>were these massive colonies of chiskeaa in the center, and
<v Speaker 1>then with a ring of the one of the ramnaci
<v Speaker 1>members like this shrub like subshrub, ramnacious thing. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if it's a colletia or what surrounding them, but
<v Speaker 1>these ciscaa's just had multiple stems. It was really beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it looked like a garden setting, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like someone had intentionally planted it. But that was remarkable.
<v Speaker 1>I forgot that, Yeah, I forgot how out of place
<v Speaker 1>that seems to see in that kind of habit that
<v Speaker 1>it was like this subalpine you know, southern Chile. It's
<v Speaker 1>just fucking nuts. And then they're growing up in the
<v Speaker 1>Paramo and in you know, arid montane areas of Bolivia.
<v Speaker 1>To do you get many from like the arid montane
<v Speaker 1>regions of Bolivia.
<v Speaker 2>Not so much the arid parts because there is you know,
<v Speaker 2>even though there are some very drought tolerant ciscaos, there
<v Speaker 2>is a limit, you know, and they just don't typically
<v Speaker 2>get into the really driest part.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, everybody's got theirs with the arid parts of
<v Speaker 1>the andes. I think that really tests drought tolerance. Man. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>for sure. What are most are any polyploid? Are most
<v Speaker 1>of them polyploid? Are they diploid? What's going on there?
<v Speaker 2>Oh, they're all They're all polyplids. All the neotropical woody
<v Speaker 2>bamboos are tetraploids.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so they got four sets.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they got four sets.
<v Speaker 3>Damn. Okay, So that's their basis.
<v Speaker 2>Bamboos are diploids.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. So and that kind of is key to them there.
<v Speaker 1>That's kind of like a clue to them being these
<v Speaker 1>being two separate clades.
<v Speaker 2>It is definitely one of the one of the clues.
<v Speaker 1>But you said that some of you said some of
<v Speaker 1>the herbaceous ones have hybridized with the woody ones or
<v Speaker 1>am I did I mishear you?
<v Speaker 2>So what we think is that going back to that,
<v Speaker 2>you know, thirty million years ago or thirty five million
<v Speaker 2>years ago, that there was a herbaceous ancestor and a
<v Speaker 2>woody ancestor, and so that this one lineage had probably
<v Speaker 2>already started down the pathway to becoming you know, woody.
<v Speaker 2>But the genomics show pretty clearly that they crossed with
<v Speaker 2>each other. So there was a herbaceous ancestor crossed with
<v Speaker 2>one of the woody ones, and that gave us you know,
<v Speaker 2>the like the paleotropical the old World tropical bamboos. It
<v Speaker 2>looks like there were at least two woody ancestors that
<v Speaker 2>crossed with each other and that gave rise to the
<v Speaker 2>temperate woody bamboos. And I actually think that there was
<v Speaker 2>another cross between one of those species and the herbaceous ones,
<v Speaker 2>and that gave rise to the neotropical bamboos. But the
<v Speaker 2>neotropical and paleotropical woody bamboos, they for the most part,
<v Speaker 2>it's really hard, you know, like if I just showed
<v Speaker 2>you a couple of them randomly chosen, you would have
<v Speaker 2>a very hard time figuring out how those two clades
<v Speaker 2>could be different. So it seems to be largely kind
<v Speaker 2>of a genomics thing, because that paleotropical woody bamboo group
<v Speaker 2>is actually hexaploid or higher. So they had even another thing,
<v Speaker 2>some other chromosome doubling thing happened in their ancestry. So
<v Speaker 2>they're hexaploids. The neotropicals are tetraploids, and so that at
<v Speaker 2>that genetic level they are really different.
<v Speaker 1>And so we know they had different I mean the
<v Speaker 1>tetraploids and diploids and hexaploids. I mean, these would all
<v Speaker 1>theoretically they shouldn't be able to hybridize though.
<v Speaker 2>Right once they get to that point, it would be
<v Speaker 2>a lot more difficult. And of course we figure that
<v Speaker 2>all the original ancestors, which probably were all diploid, no
<v Speaker 2>longer exists, you know, they they've probably gone extinct, certainly
<v Speaker 2>at least for the woody bamboos. There are no diploid
<v Speaker 2>woody bamboos, so at least in that lineage they went away.
<v Speaker 2>And but they still can do it. You know, if
<v Speaker 2>another if you had a tetraploid and a tetraploid, they
<v Speaker 2>can hybridize.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, no problem.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, Cisco's do it all the time.
<v Speaker 1>God, I was gonna say, I've.
<v Speaker 2>Documented some of these and if they're if they're in
<v Speaker 2>bloom at the same time, they can cross than for
<v Speaker 2>the temperate bambooths they can. There seem to be no
<v Speaker 2>genetic barriers once you get past the flowering cycle.
<v Speaker 1>Well, you said you've caught insects on these things. Sometimes
<v Speaker 1>what are they probably doing just harvesting pollen or what
<v Speaker 1>the flowers?
<v Speaker 2>So, yeah, this is something we've been trying to Like
<v Speaker 2>the forests, like the olyary, these herbaceous stamboos have very
<v Speaker 2>the pollen has a lot of texture on the surface,
<v Speaker 2>just as you would expect if maybe they were going
<v Speaker 2>to be insect pollinated, they could be a little a
<v Speaker 2>little spiky things. Generally, grass pollen is fairly smooth. So there,
<v Speaker 2>you know, we're not sure there's but there's never been
<v Speaker 2>a demonstrated strictly insect pollination event that people have done
<v Speaker 2>some of these experiments. So what we think is that, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they're probably over there, these insects are crawling around and
<v Speaker 2>they're probably harvesting the pollen, and at this as they're
<v Speaker 2>doing that, they're you know, helping to kick it out
<v Speaker 2>of the anthers, and we don't think they're actually like
<v Speaker 2>traveling from one flower to the next and really pollinating,
<v Speaker 2>although that could happen, you know, I mean, but I
<v Speaker 2>don't think that's the main mechanism mm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>From many of these flowers, you know, they'll the the
<v Speaker 2>answers come out first, and then once they've withered, then
<v Speaker 2>the stigmas will come out or vice versa.
<v Speaker 3>So oh so they're protandrius then they can be yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, because I've seen I've seen bees on ambrosia,
<v Speaker 1>which is when pollinated before harvesting pollen really quickly. Earlier,
<v Speaker 1>you had said that when you brought up a plant
<v Speaker 1>that I said it's invasive, was that a Rundinaria gigantea
<v Speaker 1>or a Rundo donax.
<v Speaker 2>So, yeah, so a rundin area gigantea is a woody bamboo.
<v Speaker 1>And that's nice. I think I confuse that with the
<v Speaker 1>Rundo donax. My apologies.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's what so, and I mean a lot of
<v Speaker 2>people do because a roundinidy it's like, of course it's
<v Speaker 2>a run anaria, but no, so arundo danax and fragmighties
<v Speaker 2>are reeds, and that's a rundanoity E lineage. A runding
<v Speaker 2>area is a temperate woody bamboo native to the southeastern US.
<v Speaker 2>And there's three other species now of a rundin area,
<v Speaker 2>So we actually have four native bamboo species in the
<v Speaker 2>southeastern US.
<v Speaker 1>And so but and you're saying this isn't a different
<v Speaker 1>subfamily now it's not considered part of Bamboos sodi or
<v Speaker 1>because I still has it in bamboo sodi.
<v Speaker 3>But are they just a rending area?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, a rundon area, Yes, is bambusoid Okay? And
<v Speaker 2>what but it's it's the origin of the name that
<v Speaker 2>confuses people for the undenoit e. Oh, because yeah, I'm
<v Speaker 2>confused now all right, Okay, Now a rundanoiity e is
<v Speaker 2>named for arundo.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh.
<v Speaker 2>But when you you can't say a rundoity e, so
<v Speaker 2>they add an i n in there to make it according.
<v Speaker 1>To oh, okayization, So earlier? Did you say arundo earlier?
<v Speaker 1>Or was it a round? I'm having like a geriatric moment.
<v Speaker 1>You got to forgive me here, this was.
<v Speaker 2>I think, Yeah, is a reed?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Arrondo's a reed. And I don't think there's are
<v Speaker 1>there any arundo that are native to North America. I
<v Speaker 1>don't like, no, no, Okay, so that is yeah, that's
<v Speaker 1>the invasive, that's the big one, all right, So but
<v Speaker 1>that's that's a different Okay, that's again, that's the cluster
<v Speaker 1>fucking confusion man Arundo and a Rundin area. A Rundin
<v Speaker 1>area is subfamily Bambusti Arundo, the big invasive. Uh like
<v Speaker 1>you see him on the Rio Grand at like Big
<v Speaker 1>Ben National Park or down where I live in South
<v Speaker 1>Texas right at like twenty six degrees latitude fucking everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>But okay, thank you and my apologies. Okay, I want
<v Speaker 1>to talk about before we before we dip out some
<v Speaker 1>of the the you United States species of bamboo soidy.
<v Speaker 1>You know, if you pull up Bambu soidi on i
<v Speaker 1>nationalists and go to United States, you get a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the invasive ones, which is not surprising. But then
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple members like a Rundon area Gigantia that
<v Speaker 1>are native here. Do you know much about those if
<v Speaker 1>you studied them or what's going on there?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so I've I've done some work on them. I
<v Speaker 2>had a grad student who did his PhD that on
<v Speaker 2>that group, and so he's the real expert and he
<v Speaker 2>actually works at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. His name
<v Speaker 2>is Jimmy Triplett. But we did do some field work.
<v Speaker 2>He did a lot of field work there in the
<v Speaker 2>southeastern US. And originally there were two species known, the
<v Speaker 2>river cane, which is a Rendinaria gigantea, and which kaine,
<v Speaker 2>which is a Rendonaria tecta. And that one is not
<v Speaker 2>quite as widespread. It's more limited to kind of the
<v Speaker 2>coastal plain and kind of swampy areas, like if you
<v Speaker 2>ever go to the Dismal Swamp, you know, on the
<v Speaker 2>border with Virginia North Carolina, it's going to be one
<v Speaker 2>of the main understory plants, and it's in really swampy places.
<v Speaker 2>And Gigantea is much bigger distribution. It gets in like
<v Speaker 2>the very southern part of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, actually over
<v Speaker 2>into Texas. So if you go to East Texas you
<v Speaker 2>can find native populations of a runding area gigantea, which.
<v Speaker 1>Is a true a true bamboo. It's in the and
<v Speaker 1>these are I mean, these have got to be these
<v Speaker 1>formed massive? Is this this was cane break? Right? Is
<v Speaker 1>that what they referred to as.
<v Speaker 2>Camber exactly exactly? And sure the cane break.
<v Speaker 1>They grew along rivers and they I mean they were
<v Speaker 1>like form their own ecosystem too. They were huge and
<v Speaker 1>dominant components each of these biomes. So yep, and did
<v Speaker 1>they exactly what was the what was the Are there
<v Speaker 1>monocarpic too or what's going on there?
<v Speaker 2>So a rendnera gigantea apparently individual populations kind of show
<v Speaker 2>the monocarpic thing, but as a species, it does not
<v Speaker 2>flower and die like across the whole part of its distribution.
<v Speaker 2>So it has you know, there's people who've been trying
<v Speaker 2>to track this and look at it, and you there's
<v Speaker 2>there seem to be cohorts that bloom and die at
<v Speaker 2>different times. So monocarpic but not gregarious.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So so but you said some populations are not monocarpic, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know it, We don't really know. It looks like maybe
<v Speaker 2>there are some that that kind of you know what.
<v Speaker 2>And all the information I've seen is that yes, when
<v Speaker 2>a plant of a rundinery edge identity of flowers and
<v Speaker 2>you know, goes through the cycle, is going to die.
<v Speaker 2>But it may not even be like the whole population.
<v Speaker 2>There may be even within a relatively restricted geographic area
<v Speaker 2>you might get cohorts and so it's complicated.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, man, all this you're telling me, I mean what
<v Speaker 1>I've learned today is yeah, man, it's pretty like it's
<v Speaker 1>very mysterious. They're reproductive cycles. The how long do they
<v Speaker 1>normally live before flowering? Like, assuming they are monocarpic, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>a runding area is not something I mean, is it
<v Speaker 1>like chesca? Like you're if you go into a place
<v Speaker 1>where they're dominating, you're probably not going to see them flowering.
<v Speaker 1>You're not going to see.
<v Speaker 3>Spikelets most of the time.
<v Speaker 2>That's probably true. They I think their cycles are more
<v Speaker 2>trying to remember because I just saw somebody give a
<v Speaker 2>talk on this in October, trying to remember. I think
<v Speaker 2>even he was kind of struggling to define what a
<v Speaker 2>cycle was. Yeah, but it's at least twenty years. It's
<v Speaker 2>probably closer to forty.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, Jesus, I mean so still, yeah, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>out there. How many other true bamboo bamboosoids are there?
<v Speaker 1>Native bamboosoids are there in North America, well, in the
<v Speaker 1>United States of say so.
<v Speaker 2>In the United States, Yeah, they're they're not. In Canada,
<v Speaker 2>they're not, you know, I mean Obviously there's other tropical
<v Speaker 2>bamboos in Mexico, but around an area is a member
<v Speaker 2>of the temperate woody bamboo clade. And so the four
<v Speaker 2>species that we have in North America are the only
<v Speaker 2>representatives of that clade that are native to North America.
<v Speaker 2>All the rest of them are from China and Japan
<v Speaker 2>pretty much that that area, plus some of them are
<v Speaker 2>native to high mountains in like India, Sri Lanka, Africa.
<v Speaker 2>But the the four species we have, two of them
<v Speaker 2>have been described in the last twenty years.
<v Speaker 1>And this is what was this one of your students
<v Speaker 1>was working on, like splitting them out of Yeah, where'd
<v Speaker 1>they split them out of? Gigantea or attecta or what?
<v Speaker 2>Well, you know, those are the two that everybody recognized,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, they have their common names. And we
<v Speaker 2>were talking to these spotanists in North Carolina and we
<v Speaker 2>kept hearing about this thing called hillkane. It's like hillcane. Well, okay,
<v Speaker 2>what's hillcane? And so we went one of these guys
<v Speaker 2>went with us and we went to the western part
<v Speaker 2>of North Carolina and pulled up in front of a
<v Speaker 2>population of it, and Jimmy and I are looking at
<v Speaker 2>each other. It's like, this is a new species. This
<v Speaker 2>is different.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy. Nobody had worked on it before. No, God,
<v Speaker 1>it shows you how plant I mean, I think that's
<v Speaker 1>a lot. I encounter that a lot too, like just
<v Speaker 1>regular plant lins like, oh, it's just cane, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like someone walks, but it's just a cane.
<v Speaker 2>But the locals knew that it was different. I mean
<v Speaker 2>it had the name. Yeah, and you know this thing
<v Speaker 2>is like three feet tall, it's deciduous, it grows higher
<v Speaker 2>up in the mountains. It's actually deciduous, leaves new every year.
<v Speaker 1>You know what's the species? Hillcane?
<v Speaker 2>Is? What a runding area Appalachiana.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, that's cool. That's a cool name. Appalachian runding area.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>And what was the other one?
<v Speaker 2>The other one Jimmy just published it a couple of
<v Speaker 2>years ago. And that one is a runding area. Let
<v Speaker 2>me see what did he call it? Alibam Is it alabamensis?
<v Speaker 2>I think it's alabamns's got.
<v Speaker 1>All about I need to get there. There's some cool
<v Speaker 1>There's so much cool stuff there mm hmmm, lots.
<v Speaker 3>Of diversity, yep.
<v Speaker 2>And this one probably we knew there was some weird
<v Speaker 2>things out there from the field work he did that
<v Speaker 2>it's like it's not really Gigantea and it's not really tecta.
<v Speaker 2>And he finally got around to, you know, doing some
<v Speaker 2>of the genetic analyzes and that sort of was like,
<v Speaker 2>oh that is that's different. You know, it has a
<v Speaker 2>hybrid origin probably between Gigantea and Tecta. But it's stable,
<v Speaker 2>it's been here a while, and it's different.
<v Speaker 1>Does it does it look different or is it kind
<v Speaker 1>of like a cryptic species like you need get it's
<v Speaker 1>hard without molecular analysis or what So he.
<v Speaker 2>Came up with some some characters that you can actually
<v Speaker 2>use to identify it and separate it out. But it
<v Speaker 2>was that reciprocal illumination process that you know, they some
<v Speaker 2>of them looked a lot like tectas, some of them
<v Speaker 2>looked in between. And then okay, you do the genetic
<v Speaker 2>analysis and it's like, oh, this is a this is
<v Speaker 2>a different clade within ourundon area. And then you go
<v Speaker 2>back and take another look and it's like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's got morphologically it looks a bit different in this
<v Speaker 2>way or that way. Yeah, And so going back and
<v Speaker 2>forth like that, we finally figured it out.
<v Speaker 1>That's cool. Yeah, okay, So so the cities of Birmingham, Montgomery,
<v Speaker 1>Columbus in Atlanta formed like this little semi rhombus, and
<v Speaker 1>it basically grows in within the boundaries of that. You
<v Speaker 1>get a couple of populations southwest of Birmingham, but it's
<v Speaker 1>mostly Yeah, that's man, that is such a cool region.
<v Speaker 1>I really need to get there. There's a lot of
<v Speaker 1>good stuff there. Lastly you would uh, well, not lastly.
<v Speaker 1>I always say that, and then there's like ten more questions.
<v Speaker 1>But what you said there was deforestation you would seen
<v Speaker 1>in Verkus and you were collecting one of the just
<v Speaker 1>gay is what was it? What was Was it just
<v Speaker 1>deforestation for agriculture or was it logging or what?
<v Speaker 2>It kind of starts out mostly as deforestation, at least
<v Speaker 2>in that region. They'll start off by going into areas
<v Speaker 2>and burning trees to make coal for fuel. And as
<v Speaker 2>these little pathways get more used and you know, then
<v Speaker 2>people will come in. They may do some logging, it
<v Speaker 2>depends on the area, but then you just start getting
<v Speaker 2>over time they will just start using it more and more,
<v Speaker 2>and then they'll start running cattle in there, and yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it ends up then mostly being converted to pasture for
<v Speaker 2>cattle or yeah, used for agriculture.
<v Speaker 1>So this isn't even like multinational companies like you'd see
<v Speaker 1>in like Southeast Asia are parts of Brazil. It's just
<v Speaker 1>it's just regular old what people do. Yeah, yeah, that's brutal. God,
<v Speaker 1>there's so Yeah. I don't think it's ever. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if it's ever gonna stop unless there's Yeah, you'd
<v Speaker 1>need like a paradigm shift, like a whole sea change
<v Speaker 1>in the way people view things for it to stop.
<v Speaker 1>But I mean, I just did a podcast with a
<v Speaker 1>friend who was talking about explaining these like really sleazy
<v Speaker 1>you know, World Bank funded development scheme not development schemes,
<v Speaker 1>but natural resource extraction schemes and Laois where they've Laois
<v Speaker 1>has lost like a fifth of its forest in the
<v Speaker 1>last twenty or thirty years. It's like it's it's insane.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, I believe deaficult behavior, Like wait, where do
<v Speaker 1>you think this is going to go? Like you guys
<v Speaker 1>can't keep doing this, you know, But it's mostly corrupt
<v Speaker 1>politicians and then large companies basically exploiting people like cutting
<v Speaker 1>like you know, going into an area, cutting the forest down,
<v Speaker 1>turning the villagers into employees that they pay shit wages
<v Speaker 1>and then you know, good old predatory capitalism. Anyway, So
<v Speaker 1>with with you, how did you get you're you're you're
<v Speaker 1>in Iowa right, You're at the Iowa State or what university?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Mine at Iowa State University. I've been here a
<v Speaker 2>long time. I actually did my PhD here and then
<v Speaker 2>the year I retired or sorry, the year I graduated,
<v Speaker 2>my professor retired and I ended up getting his job.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, that's cool.
<v Speaker 2>Cool, it's pretty great.
<v Speaker 1>It worked out great. How so you, I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>guess being in Iowa, like it's well, it's probably not
<v Speaker 1>too cold there right now because of it.
<v Speaker 2>You know, the Midwest, we're gonna have a blizzard tomorrow.
<v Speaker 1>Oh lovely. Okay, well the Midway, the Midwest doesn't really
<v Speaker 1>get winters too much anymore. I've noticed. I still go
<v Speaker 1>visit my mom in Chicago and she's like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I didn't start snowing until like late December, early January.
<v Speaker 2>It assisted. I mean, in the time I've been here,
<v Speaker 2>we've gone from being at like zoned for uh for
<v Speaker 2>A to five B or something thing. I mean, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we still hat winter, but it's been a lot more
<v Speaker 2>up and down. Yeah, Like today's going to be seventy
<v Speaker 2>degrees and tomorrow we're having three to six inches of snow.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, God, that's crazy. It's crazy. I remember like last
<v Speaker 1>January in Chicago, was they had like they were having
<v Speaker 1>sixty degree days or fifty or sixty degree days. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's so undeniable. All the oil company pr in
<v Speaker 1>the world is would still have a hard time convincing
<v Speaker 1>everyone just open.
<v Speaker 2>Your eyes and look and you'll see.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So what you're in is Ioway stayed in like
<v Speaker 1>the eastern part of the state, or western part of
<v Speaker 1>the state, or.
<v Speaker 2>Where we're kind of right almost right in the middle.
<v Speaker 1>What was the habitat? Was the habitat just prairie back
<v Speaker 1>in the day, like prairie slowly becoming more arid as
<v Speaker 1>you go west.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, basically before European settlement there was like seventy to
<v Speaker 2>eighty percent of Iowa was tall, rest and yes, getting dryer,
<v Speaker 2>shorter as you go to the least part.
<v Speaker 1>That must have been incredible. I tell people too. I
<v Speaker 1>Mean someone asked me the other day, like they're like,
<v Speaker 1>what's your favorite part of the world to go look at? Plants.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, well, there's hyperdiverse areas, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>South Africa or Brazil, but I mean, really, any place
<v Speaker 1>where there's still native plant covers totally fascinating. Even if
<v Speaker 1>there's not a lot of diversity, there's probably going to
<v Speaker 1>be a couple of cool endemics or lineages that are
<v Speaker 1>restricted to that biome. And then I was I used
<v Speaker 1>IOA as an example. I was like, fucking Iowa was
<v Speaker 1>probably incredible five hundred years ago, Like probably you know,
<v Speaker 1>you think of it now and you think of like
<v Speaker 1>you know, high you know, big lane freeways with mode margins,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and and like plastic signs for the come
<v Speaker 1>and go or whatever, you know, gas station, But it
<v Speaker 1>must have been absolutely stunning some of those tall grass prairies.
<v Speaker 1>There are there any left, Yeah, there.
<v Speaker 2>Is, But you know, Iowa is actually the most highly
<v Speaker 2>altered state in the Union. There's about two percent of
<v Speaker 2>more or less native vegetation cover left. But there's a
<v Speaker 2>couple of places you know that there are preserves. There's
<v Speaker 2>less than one tenth of one percent of actual native
<v Speaker 2>prairie left. Yeah, I mean it's you know, but there's
<v Speaker 2>a lot of efforts to reconstruct prairies. The biggest single
<v Speaker 2>contiguous area of Native prairie is in the Lost Hills
<v Speaker 2>in the western part.
<v Speaker 3>That sounds cool, Lost Hills loss.
<v Speaker 2>L o E s s oh Okay, I.
<v Speaker 1>Was thinking the Okay Lost Hills is in California, Lowess Hills, Okay.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And this is you know, through connected with the
<v Speaker 2>process of glaciation and when they were seated, you know,
<v Speaker 2>you get these winds blowing dust and you get accumulation
<v Speaker 2>of these very fine particles and that's what these hills
<v Speaker 2>are actually composed of.
<v Speaker 1>God.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, they're not like super high, but it's a
<v Speaker 2>very unusual substrate.
<v Speaker 1>You get any endemics or not endemics, but like specialists
<v Speaker 1>and like plant specialists on that kind of substrate or what.
<v Speaker 2>Not. That many that I'm aware of, but there are,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I mean, it's one of these things that
<v Speaker 2>the lust is actually very stable. It's pretty fertile, but
<v Speaker 2>so is the rest of you know, at least the
<v Speaker 2>northern two thirds of Iowa. But it's it's a special
<v Speaker 2>kind of drains. It's got more dry adapted things than
<v Speaker 2>you would find out for because of the drainage. It's
<v Speaker 2>just much better drained than a lot of the other parts.
<v Speaker 1>So it's like a it's almost like a dune almost
<v Speaker 1>like it's like a more arid micro site or more
<v Speaker 1>arid sites surrounded by more music stuff. That sounds pretty cool,
<v Speaker 1>right there.
<v Speaker 2>A lot as calcareous, yeah, because most of Iowa is
<v Speaker 2>actually alkalin's that you know, limestone underneath, but this one is, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>this is it's going to be a little bit more acetic,
<v Speaker 2>but it's better drained, and so you're going to get yeah,
<v Speaker 2>more dry adapted stuff.
<v Speaker 1>So what made you what made you want to get
<v Speaker 1>into bamboos?
<v Speaker 2>Hm hmmm. So this was one of those serendipitous things.
<v Speaker 2>I grew up in northern Virginia and I had the opportunity.
<v Speaker 2>My dad had studied botany, so he sort of set
<v Speaker 2>me on the path. He got me interested in plants.
<v Speaker 2>But when I was in high school, I had a
<v Speaker 2>chance to work at the US National Herbarium during the summers,
<v Speaker 2>just as a volunteer. They didn't even have a formal
<v Speaker 2>interim program at the time. But and the guy that
<v Speaker 2>I worked with, his name was Tom Soderstrom. He worked
<v Speaker 2>on bamboo. He did other grasses too, but he was
<v Speaker 2>mostly working on bamboos, and so I showed up in
<v Speaker 2>the summer and he put me to work on the
<v Speaker 2>bamboo collections, you know, like labeling, sorting them out, just
<v Speaker 2>getting everything in order, the slide collections. And I was like,
<v Speaker 2>this is cool. You know, bamboos are fantastic. And so
<v Speaker 2>I did that for a couple of summers, and then
<v Speaker 2>he and one of the other colleagues there that you know,
<v Speaker 2>we went to lunch and they're like, oh, hey, you
<v Speaker 2>want to keep going on this, you should go to
<v Speaker 2>Michigan State University. There's a guy there and he's really good.
<v Speaker 2>He works with undergrads, you know. So I ended up
<v Speaker 2>going to Michigan State and worked with this guy name
<v Speaker 2>was John Demon and then you know, I was always
<v Speaker 2>going back and forth home, so I was always visiting,
<v Speaker 2>working into herbarium there. And then when it was time
<v Speaker 2>to go to grad school, same thing. We kind of
<v Speaker 2>went to lunch and they're like, oh, you need to
<v Speaker 2>go work with Richard Pohle out at Iowa State University.
<v Speaker 2>So I did, and the rest is history.
<v Speaker 1>But what about this lineage of plants though? Because these
<v Speaker 1>are the stories I like hearing, because like I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm into everything now I'm fascinated by everything that's growing
<v Speaker 1>and forming an ecology and has an evolutionary story. But
<v Speaker 1>I like asking people, you know, who specialize in one thing,
<v Speaker 1>what got them so pad Like, what do they see
<v Speaker 1>in that one thing that gets them so passionate about
<v Speaker 1>it and gets them so jazz and that they're thinking
<v Speaker 1>about it, you know at night, Like when I was
<v Speaker 1>first getting into plants, I was really into the native
<v Speaker 1>California cypruses, and I would go to sleep at night
<v Speaker 1>thinking about these weird habitats, these things grow on the
<v Speaker 1>weird soil, Like why are they not more widespread? Why
<v Speaker 1>are they so restrict? Did that kind of thing? What
<v Speaker 1>was it? And I can think of plenty about bamboos,
<v Speaker 1>But for you, what was it that they got? You?
<v Speaker 1>Their fast growth rate, how they formed these colonies, how
<v Speaker 1>long lived they are? What was it?
<v Speaker 2>I think it was actually, I mean part of it
<v Speaker 2>initially was, you know, I have all these wonderful mentors
<v Speaker 2>and they were just you know, it was exciting to
<v Speaker 2>sort of share something with folks who were so enthusiastic
<v Speaker 2>about these plants. But when I first came here to
<v Speaker 2>work with doctor Pohl, he had a project he was
<v Speaker 2>working on a publication on a treatment of the grasses
<v Speaker 2>of Costa Rica. So after my first year in grad school,
<v Speaker 2>I went down with him to Costa Rica to do
<v Speaker 2>field work and just getting out there. I remember before
<v Speaker 2>we left, he's like, you need to learn how to
<v Speaker 2>drive afore wheel drive stick shift. I'm like, okay. So
<v Speaker 2>somebody one of the other grad students taught me and
<v Speaker 2>we got down there and we had our Toyota land
<v Speaker 2>Cruiser and we were driving to the first field site
<v Speaker 2>and we get to a certain point. It was all
<v Speaker 2>paved road and I was thinking, oh, this isn't to
<v Speaker 2>your dad. And we pull up and all of a sudden,
<v Speaker 2>he's like, okay, you drive now. So I got in
<v Speaker 2>there and you know, and started and it turned into
<v Speaker 2>this god awful dirt road. He saw what he was doing,
<v Speaker 2>he knew what he was doing, but it was like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and I did it. I was able, So
<v Speaker 2>I was kind of proud of myself. But we got
<v Speaker 2>up there and then we were in this cloud forest
<v Speaker 2>and there's the bamboos and it was just so you know,
<v Speaker 2>the discovery because there were so many new species and
<v Speaker 2>just being in the field and being able to look
<v Speaker 2>at them, and you know that all kind of just
<v Speaker 2>went like, Okay, this is what I was meant to do.
<v Speaker 2>You know, in so many beauty full places like those paramos,
<v Speaker 2>like the soup paramos, Yeah, cloud for it, I was
<v Speaker 2>just like, oh, this is it. I know what I
<v Speaker 2>want to do.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's so overwhelming with diversity, and you're I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's what gets me is when I'm in those places,
<v Speaker 1>I look at everything growing around me, and it just
<v Speaker 1>it all feels so mysterious, so mysterious, and I don't
<v Speaker 1>want to say foreign because it's you almost feel like
<v Speaker 1>you're at home. Yeah, You're like, this is what I
<v Speaker 1>was meant to do. But there's just so many questions
<v Speaker 1>to answer to. You know, how does this, how does
<v Speaker 1>this associate with this? Why is this doing this? How
<v Speaker 1>did this get here? You know, how did it evolve?
<v Speaker 1>What else it related to? Where? You know, it's a
<v Speaker 1>it's really fucking magnificent. It's like such a it's such
<v Speaker 1>a joy, and it's such a distraction from like how
<v Speaker 1>droll at times and ugly the human world can be
<v Speaker 1>and just you know, biophilia just being just.
<v Speaker 3>So interested exactly with life.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, that's pretty good.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you're there, you're looking at your plants, and
<v Speaker 2>all of a sudden a two can flies overhead or something,
<v Speaker 2>and just all the surprises and all the discovery that
<v Speaker 2>you can do.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was it Chasca you were going to see
<v Speaker 1>in Costa Rica. Yes, what elevation was it?
<v Speaker 2>Uh, that was about I'm gonna say it was about
<v Speaker 2>twenty twenty two hundred meters something like that.
<v Speaker 1>It's like almost seven thousand feet about.
<v Speaker 2>Pretty close. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, wow, it's cool. Well, thanks a lot for being
<v Speaker 1>down to do this. I appreciate it. I'm trying to
<v Speaker 1>think if there's any questions I forgot to ask you,
<v Speaker 1>but I think I think we got most of them.
<v Speaker 2>So we covered a lot of stuff. Yeah, that's been
<v Speaker 2>fun because you gave me a chance to talk about
<v Speaker 2>my favorite things.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's it's wild. It's cool. There's such a
<v Speaker 1>cool story there. You think how these things got here?
<v Speaker 1>It was probably the bre raft from Asian, like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>twenty million years ago.
<v Speaker 2>It's certainly one possibility. Although bamboos don't like salt water
<v Speaker 2>very much, there's really no that I'm aware of. There's
<v Speaker 2>no like really salt like you know, coastal adapted things
<v Speaker 2>like that. So you know, we we speculate about that,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, was it birds?
<v Speaker 1>Was it?
<v Speaker 2>Did they hoped in some way? You know? Yeah, they
<v Speaker 2>like they didn't do it all in one fell swoop.
<v Speaker 2>I still I tend to go with birds, but I
<v Speaker 2>like even that that birds preams like what they're not
<v Speaker 2>going as these things sitting their feathers for you know,
<v Speaker 2>a trip of well, yeah, a thousand miles.
<v Speaker 1>That and most migration, most migration patterns are north to south.
<v Speaker 1>There's very few that go across I mean, I don't
<v Speaker 1>think there's any that go across the Atlantic the Pacific
<v Speaker 1>at lower latitude. Certainly at higher latitudes there's less distance
<v Speaker 1>between land masses, so it's not as much of a
<v Speaker 1>big deal. But yep, yeah, I think about it. I
<v Speaker 1>wonder if there's you know, extinct birds that maybe were
<v Speaker 1>doing you know, east west flights across large bodies of
<v Speaker 1>water or who knows. Man, it's it's.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah exactly, I mean, that's where it is. It's it's
<v Speaker 2>great stories we can tell that we don't really know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it leaves so much to imagination. Man, It's it's
<v Speaker 1>fun to think where some.
<v Speaker 2>Of those questions come from. And that's that's the part.
<v Speaker 2>It's like there's no shortage of questions to ask and
<v Speaker 2>things to discover.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Well, hopefully someone figures out the reproductive cycles and
<v Speaker 1>strategies of ciscaia and you know the gregarious monocarpy and
<v Speaker 1>how that's how that works and if they are counting
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 2>You know exactly, that would be so cool cool.
<v Speaker 1>All right, well, doctor link Clark, thank you so much,
<v Speaker 1>and yeah, until next time.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, thanks, YenS, great talking to you.
<v Speaker 1>Bye you too. Bye.