Ecuador Rantzzzz

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to another episode of The Crime Pays, but by
<v Speaker 1>a dozen podcasts. I'm a little winded. I'm not gonna
<v Speaker 1>lie as we as send through very wet tropical forest
<v Speaker 1>at an elevation of twenty one hundred feet, which you
<v Speaker 1>know you will go up to three thousand feet around,
<v Speaker 1>up to three thousand feet times three, move a decimal
<v Speaker 1>point over it's roughly nine hundred meters, and then we'll
<v Speaker 1>wear like eight hundred, eight hundred and twenty meters elevation.
<v Speaker 1>Got to use the metric always get disappointed of that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, then start paying attention to the metric system
<v Speaker 1>until the last few years. Anyway, spent the first few
<v Speaker 1>days of this little Ecuador work VAKA up in the paramo,
<v Speaker 1>getting mildly hypoxic. But then it's always nice when you
<v Speaker 1>come back down, you have like bursts of energy because
<v Speaker 1>you've been acting. Made it to the higher elevations. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>we were in parano paramo and montane cloud forest. Oh
<v Speaker 1>this is nice. The cyclant they see the Panama hat family.
<v Speaker 1>I'm looking at one climb climbing up a Uh if
<v Speaker 1>it's a dicranopigium or what made a little Excel spreadsheet
<v Speaker 1>with all the observations I had from last year, many
<v Speaker 1>of which had no species level identifications because they're just
<v Speaker 1>they are either undescribed species or there's I couldn't find
<v Speaker 1>anybody who specializes in the genus or family to correctly
<v Speaker 1>identify them, and there's so little information out there. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>I think this is a Dicranopigium, but cyclant. They see
<v Speaker 1>the panama hat family in the screw Pine order Pandinales
<v Speaker 1>entirely neotropical all New World, really weird in fluorescences, and
<v Speaker 1>they got that y shaped uh leaf? What is it
<v Speaker 1>a fucking snake? Shit? Or is it just plenty of
<v Speaker 1>is plastic? But spent the first few days up in
<v Speaker 1>the paramo in the cloud forest, became familiar with the
<v Speaker 1>genus dendro Forbium, which is in Asta Raci. It's like
<v Speaker 1>basically a small of those snoid sanioid E. No it's not,
<v Speaker 1>is it? Is it a subfamily or Sanicioni? I forget anyway,
<v Speaker 1>the snicios A clade in Asta Raci are all over
<v Speaker 1>the world. They do some wild shit, especially you know,
<v Speaker 1>think they turned succulent in Africa and then in here
<v Speaker 1>in the in central and South America. They can become trees,
<v Speaker 1>especially in Mexico's got quite a few members of the
<v Speaker 1>saneoid the Sinicio clade that turn into very large trees.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, this dendro Forbium was phenomenal. It was like
<v Speaker 1>ten meters tall, thirty feet tall, huge fucking panicle of flowers.
<v Speaker 1>What's that? It's Surrowia, I don't know, actinnitty ac kiwi femily,
<v Speaker 1>huge panicles of yellow flowers. Each plant probably had ten
<v Speaker 1>or twenty thousand floorts on it because remember it's astrac
<v Speaker 1>so there are floorrets inside a capitulum which looks like
<v Speaker 1>a single flower, so like ten or twenty thousand, if
<v Speaker 1>not more fluorits. So yeah, I took an herbarium cutting,
<v Speaker 1>but I can only take like a little section of
<v Speaker 1>because I'm fitting these things in tiny notebooks. That's how
<v Speaker 1>I do all my collections. Then I'll drop it off
<v Speaker 1>at the herbarium later before I leave, and so i'll
<v Speaker 1>you know, press it just in these little notebooks. It's
<v Speaker 1>the easiest way. So it kind of limits the amount
<v Speaker 1>of material you can take. But that's okay because I
<v Speaker 1>get a shit ton of good photos. But yeah, Dendrophobium
<v Speaker 1>was up there, and then there was a species of
<v Speaker 1>blacking them up in the Parmo. You go through this
<v Speaker 1>really wet forest and at lower elevations it's been turned
<v Speaker 1>into cattle pasture, of course, which is depressing a lot
<v Speaker 1>of blue gum eucalyptus, which is fucking mind blowing. If
<v Speaker 1>humanity goes extinct, which you know it's not too far
<v Speaker 1>fetched or has like a bottleneck event in the next
<v Speaker 1>one hundred and two hundred years, maybe not even that long,
<v Speaker 1>blue gum eucalyptus is gonna thrive. It's gonna speciate. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's on every fucking continent except that article. Now it's
<v Speaker 1>kind of amazing, you know, it's definitely definitely a winner
<v Speaker 1>in the anthropist scene or anthropos scene, however you pronounce that.
<v Speaker 1>But there's others blue gum eucalyptus everywhere and cattle pasture
<v Speaker 1>with little remnants of native vegetation on the margins. And
<v Speaker 1>then you get up to more thicker cloud forest and
<v Speaker 1>it's just wet and chilly. I was definitely wearing a
<v Speaker 1>beanie and uh. And then you walk through that. Some
<v Speaker 1>assholes took motorbikes up there to at some point. So
<v Speaker 1>there's like these trenches that like grutted out the mountain,
<v Speaker 1>and so you go through that and then end up
<v Speaker 1>in the parmo, which is dominated by tussock grasses, and
<v Speaker 1>you've got a couple of cordiderias and uh, and then
<v Speaker 1>this black numb fern is fucking everywhere and it's it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking beautiful. But anyway, the paramo has got to be
<v Speaker 1>one of the most bizarre and hard to recreate habitats
<v Speaker 1>plant habitats in the world. And if you're from the
<v Speaker 1>tempered latitudes and you've never heard of it or experienced that,
<v Speaker 1>it would blow your mind. You're at such a high
<v Speaker 1>elevation in the air is so thin, so you experience
<v Speaker 1>rapid cooling at night, but unless you're really high, it
<v Speaker 1>never quite freezes. It just gets to a few degrees
<v Speaker 1>of freezing. Everything's covered in fuzz, but everythings wet whereas sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I might have bred them going I'm carrying like forty
<v Speaker 1>puns of shit going up this slope and sweating like
<v Speaker 1>a horn church. So you know, if you're in the
<v Speaker 1>western half North America, you think of hairs and trichomes
<v Speaker 1>as being adaptive for dry habitats, okay, or if like
<v Speaker 1>you know, the eastern United States, you're on a glade
<v Speaker 1>or a sand hill, then you might see some more hairs.
<v Speaker 1>But generally you're not gonna see hairs if you're in
<v Speaker 1>a proper ass humid environment and it's humid as hell
<v Speaker 1>up in the parmo, because that's where all the moisture
<v Speaker 1>goes with the rising warm air from the lower latitudes.
<v Speaker 1>But in this case, well so the hair is not
<v Speaker 1>for drying out. But in this case the hair is
<v Speaker 1>obviously it starts to dawn on you for the chilling
<v Speaker 1>effect that happens at night once the sun goes down. Also,
<v Speaker 1>and when the sun comes out, he gets you can
<v Speaker 1>get upwards to like seventy five degrees eighty degrees fahrenheit.
<v Speaker 1>It's not like twenty five celsius. But uh, but you
<v Speaker 1>know then when when the sun goes down, Oh, why
<v Speaker 1>this is that komalin ac thing I saw before? Just
<v Speaker 1>surrounded by plants. Smells incredible, everything's wet. It's like the
<v Speaker 1>conservatory in Lincoln Park, which is free, and they're gonna
<v Speaker 1>fucking not make that free at some point, I bet they, Well,
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna do with Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago too.
<v Speaker 1>Nothing free anymore. The fucking they gotta fucking milk you
<v Speaker 1>for everything is an amazing even in a wonderful place,
<v Speaker 1>I can still get mad about stuff that's good. Never change.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, so so the tricombes in this case are
<v Speaker 1>frost goluth. They're acting is insulation, trapping a layer of air,
<v Speaker 1>which of course takes much longer to warm up or
<v Speaker 1>cool off, and so they're they're trapping that air of air,
<v Speaker 1>protecting the tissue against the cold temps and the occasional freeze.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, everything's fuzzy. It's just so fucking weird because
<v Speaker 1>you're on the equator, but you're up so fucking high too.
<v Speaker 1>And then when we were leaving, we were looking at
<v Speaker 1>Tungaragua volcano, which is spelled like Tunga Rohua and uh,
<v Speaker 1>if you're a fucking you're a hockey. And and you
<v Speaker 1>could just see the head, I mean, it's like this
<v Speaker 1>massive volcano. We couldn't even tell it was there. And
<v Speaker 1>then once the clouds part, the water vapor parts a
<v Speaker 1>little bit, then you can see this massive volcano towering
<v Speaker 1>above you. Uh, and it's just fucking wild. You could
<v Speaker 1>see there's no plants way at the top. There's snow
<v Speaker 1>at the top sixteen thousand feet tall. You're already nine
<v Speaker 1>thousand feet up, twenty seven hundred meters up, and uh,
<v Speaker 1>but you can see plant habitat because basically see the
<v Speaker 1>Paramo and the lower elevations just fucking phenomenal. Man. I
<v Speaker 1>wish I want to go there so bad to some
<v Speaker 1>of that habitat. It's just as it's probably one of
<v Speaker 1>my favorite habitats. You go, I got deserts cloud for us
<v Speaker 1>and then Paramo, or maybe it's Paramo before cloud for us.
<v Speaker 1>But those are just the places that you see the
<v Speaker 1>wildest shit in terms of evolutionary adaptations because there's such
<v Speaker 1>bizarre environments. You know, you take a spot where it
<v Speaker 1>never rains, and then how there's fossils in the limestone here?
<v Speaker 1>How about that Saudi's last time? What is this cretaceous limestone?
<v Speaker 1>So weird to see limestone in the Andes because everything's
<v Speaker 1>volcanic here. So I don't know. I guess lava flows
<v Speaker 1>never reached this area where it was already up uplifted.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Anyway, Yeah, the fucking Paramo, there was
<v Speaker 1>tons of airicacious generic too. There was Nettia dyster Ygma.
<v Speaker 1>Vaccinium Flora bundum was up there. You can tell it's
<v Speaker 1>a Vaccinium as opposed to a Gutheria because the sepals
<v Speaker 1>are on the distal end of the fruit they think
<v Speaker 1>of like a blueberry, right, whereas on Gultheria the sepals
<v Speaker 1>are up towards the top. They're closer to the peduncle.
<v Speaker 1>It's a nice bird. Pellicoia fucking everywhere, Pellicouria aka Psychotria.
<v Speaker 1>There was Serato stema. Oh what was the Serato stem i?
<v Speaker 1>Forget the species name, with another species of eric casey
<v Speaker 1>with these pendent red flowers obviously going for hummingbird pollination.
<v Speaker 1>Serato stema a lot them elate them and uh god.
<v Speaker 1>There was tons of weird littlebilioids too, which you can
<v Speaker 1>always tell because they got that little fused anther tube
<v Speaker 1>that pokes out and then it's uh, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>a biffed Stega want us in the female phase their
<v Speaker 1>male first secondary pollen presentation, like so many members of
<v Speaker 1>aster Ales, like Stylidiace, the stylidiums in Australia, the trigger
<v Speaker 1>plants like Guthiniac like astace h and so on. A
<v Speaker 1>little beautiful heliconia right here, those long pink bracts, Oh shit,
<v Speaker 1>this is still a leaf's Basically, those pink bracts are
<v Speaker 1>just the swollen petioles, modified petioles of the leafs in Heliconia,
<v Speaker 1>which is in the ginger orders. In gibbereles, the big
<v Speaker 1>pink bracts for humming bird pollination, and the flowers are green,
<v Speaker 1>probably full of neck anyway, So they stuck a break
<v Speaker 1>for a second. Now I'm walking. There's just this giant
<v Speaker 1>county of Guadua and Gustafolia, this hundred foot tall bamboo
<v Speaker 1>species with the combs because it's a grass, remember is
<v Speaker 1>it's a hollow bamboo on like many of the New
<v Speaker 1>World bamboos like Chesca, which are solid all the way through,
<v Speaker 1>Guadua is hollow. Very important architecturally. I've seen a book,
<v Speaker 1>an entire monograph on Guadua, especially it's use in building
<v Speaker 1>and architecture because of how structurally, what an important structural
<v Speaker 1>tool it is for you know, for building houses. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know they get fucking massive, and that each calm
<v Speaker 1>is about how what is it? Let's see the only
<v Speaker 1>measured is twelve centimeters across. It's like five inches across,
<v Speaker 1>six inches across, and they just get fucking massive. And
<v Speaker 1>then they got these lateral branches that come off that
<v Speaker 1>don't get very big, that come off at the nodes
<v Speaker 1>that are just covered in uh you know. The nodes
<v Speaker 1>of those lateral branches then have these little half inch
<v Speaker 1>to inch long spines on them, thorns on them. And
<v Speaker 1>then I'm just looking at what looks like a giant
<v Speaker 1>asparagus shoot that's tar than I am. It's like six
<v Speaker 1>and a half feet tall, and it's got it's covered.
<v Speaker 1>Each sheath is covered in these tiny brown irritating heres.
<v Speaker 1>They don't really irritate that much, but they do stick
<v Speaker 1>in you. It's just the very man, what a wild
<v Speaker 1>fucking plan. I love. I'm so happy to see this
<v Speaker 1>thing again. I saw it last year. And they just
<v Speaker 1>from these massive colonies in these tropical forests at what's
<v Speaker 1>their elevation right now, thirty three hundred feet. So we
<v Speaker 1>came up a little bit. It was steeped there for
<v Speaker 1>a minute. We got Gionoma. She's a palm species with
<v Speaker 1>a forked leaf. It almost looks like cyclanth. They see
<v Speaker 1>the Panama half family. But it's you gotta look at
<v Speaker 1>the veins. The veins on Gionoma don't don't taper, they don't.
<v Speaker 1>They don't bow to a point. They don't like bend
<v Speaker 1>to the end point of the leaf. They just kind
<v Speaker 1>of they hit the margin. It looks like a fishtail
<v Speaker 1>palm anyway. Yeah, so the parmo's fucking wild. You first
<v Speaker 1>encounter parmos as as you're heading south from the United States.
<v Speaker 1>You first encountered them in Costa Rica, where you get
<v Speaker 1>a whole bunch of cool stuff, A bunch of cool
<v Speaker 1>pooya is that weird vermeiliad pooya deslaryoides. Tons of members
<v Speaker 1>of Eric Casey, tons of temperate northern hemisphere lineages get
<v Speaker 1>Loopinus gentiana. It's just fucking wild. Man. That's a hummingbird pollination.
<v Speaker 1>Hummingbirds and bumble bees, but no other bees. It's too cold.
<v Speaker 1>I guess you know. Bumble bees have a gimmick that
<v Speaker 1>can do moderately well at higher altitudes or higher elevations.
<v Speaker 1>Excuse me, altitudes is when you're in a plane. But oh,
<v Speaker 1>I just heard a giants cicadas, not that one that's
<v Speaker 1>buzzing in the background. But uh O caesatic gigis the
<v Speaker 1>one that sounds like a hand buzzer, much more obnoxious.
<v Speaker 1>Probably my favorite insect. Yeah, these forests are so lovely.
<v Speaker 1>You're spending time by yourself walking in the forest, digesting
<v Speaker 1>your thoughts, feeling the things you need to feel, do
<v Speaker 1>with some thinking aeroids everywhere. Philodendron pseudoviicosum incredible leaves that
<v Speaker 1>there's like a small erithrena species as well, and then
<v Speaker 1>Iriardia del toidia, which is the it's either Iriardia or Soacretea.
<v Speaker 1>Both have these stilt prop roots that they send out
<v Speaker 1>from higher up the uh we would be the trunk.
<v Speaker 1>But remember palms, I mean, I guess they're trees, but
<v Speaker 1>they're technically herbs. There's no woody tissue, there's no woody growth.
<v Speaker 1>They can have anomalist secondary growth, but tons of Aerardia,
<v Speaker 1>tons of these palms that also have these fishtail like leaflets.
<v Speaker 1>The main leaf is divided up into little h smaller leaflets. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>got tons of melostone diversity to these these metal I
<v Speaker 1>guess he's more lowland forests. It's humid as hell, it's
<v Speaker 1>not that hot, but it's very very humid, very very wet.
<v Speaker 1>It's probably like, I don't know, eighty two degrees right now.
<v Speaker 1>It's got a little hint of breeze. I'm sure that
<v Speaker 1>humidity has a moderating effect as well. But anyway, back
<v Speaker 1>to the Parmo. So up at the Parmo, I think
<v Speaker 1>we only got I think we got like twelve five
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet, but I mean it goes a lot higher,
<v Speaker 1>and the higher you go you start encountering I guess
<v Speaker 1>chucki Arraga. There's a chucky Raga species, which is a
<v Speaker 1>crazy asta racy. It looks like, you know, conifers and
<v Speaker 1>sunflowers banged and then there's a pooh. There's a couple
<v Speaker 1>of PuYas up there as well, gunnera, lots of Gunnera
<v Speaker 1>as well, Magellanica. I'm convinced it's a different species, you know,
<v Speaker 1>gunnera gunner racy, those big shield like peltate leaves Chile
<v Speaker 1>and rub Barbit's commonly called no relation to rub Barbit's
<v Speaker 1>its own lonely branch on the angiosperm family tree. It's
<v Speaker 1>a gun are all lots of orchids, tiny orchids, terrestrial orchids,
<v Speaker 1>epiphytic orchids, but then it's oh yeah, and tons of
<v Speaker 1>aster ace diversity too, including this really cool genus called
<v Speaker 1>Lino Kylis, as well as diplo Stefium. Lino Kylas used
<v Speaker 1>to be in Diplostthium, but they're not that closely related.
<v Speaker 1>Lino Kylis is a related to coyote bush. It's got
<v Speaker 1>really cool looking leaves, lots of puvescents on them, and
<v Speaker 1>a pinkish or purple floorts. It's nice being here the
<v Speaker 1>second time because I got more of I'm more keyed
<v Speaker 1>into what I'm looking at, because especially you know, the
<v Speaker 1>fucking especially in the lowlands, you can really get thrown
<v Speaker 1>off because there's a lot of families you'll otherwise never encounter.
<v Speaker 1>Saw Siparuna, which is a weird one. Ciperunacy smelled really
<v Speaker 1>strongly like lemon, but it was so strong it was
<v Speaker 1>almost nauseating. It's ciperun Ace is in loreles, so it's
<v Speaker 1>one of the magnolids. It's one of those earlier branching
<v Speaker 1>angiosperm lineages. And then also another really fucking weird plant
<v Speaker 1>I saw was Hediosmum, which was also very fragrant, lots
<v Speaker 1>of lots of volatiles being emitted from the leaves opposite leaves.
<v Speaker 1>It was post flowers, so I couldn't see it. I
<v Speaker 1>think it's dioecious hediosmum in Chloranthas order Chlorinthales. If you
<v Speaker 1>look at the angiosperm phylogeny, it's on its own long,
<v Speaker 1>lonely branch, just like Gunnera, but it's more earlier branching.
<v Speaker 1>I think it comes. I think it's next to the magnoliods,
<v Speaker 1>which is Loreles, pipe ales, Magnolilies, and Canalalies. I had
<v Speaker 1>the look that last one up because I don't encounter
<v Speaker 1>it so much. Canni Alies, which winter race is in
<v Speaker 1>just another all these pungent leaves, you know, just like
<v Speaker 1>bay leaf, bay leaf and sassafras, et cetera in the
<v Speaker 1>Magnolia lineage. Shit is that? I don't know if it's
<v Speaker 1>a birder is fucking weird Katie did? Or what you
<v Speaker 1>ever heard of an oropendula before? What a pleasant what
<v Speaker 1>a pleasant sounding bird? Sounds like a like a drop,
<v Speaker 1>like a drop of water falling into a pool. But
<v Speaker 1>if you were on acid, that's what it sounds like.
<v Speaker 1>This monster Bogonia there's like a remember this Bogonia, this
<v Speaker 1>twelve foot tall bogonia. Everything just perpetually humid. And what
<v Speaker 1>we've been lucky with the rant that we didn't get
<v Speaker 1>pissed on only a little bit, didn't have to put
<v Speaker 1>my uh vinyl burka on like I had to last
<v Speaker 1>time I did this walk. And it sucks. You can't
<v Speaker 1>take photos of shit because everything's getting fucking drenched. Where
<v Speaker 1>is Ailing? Speaking of photos, I think he's I think
<v Speaker 1>he's further back down the trail. I don't know. He
<v Speaker 1>and I are competing for you know, slowest walkers too.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you post up there, you take nine thousand photos.
<v Speaker 1>It go be there two hours in the same spot,
<v Speaker 1>half day goes by, you've moved like one hundred yards. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>as we were coming out of the Paramo, there was
<v Speaker 1>another really weird plan as actually we were far below
<v Speaker 1>the apartment, were like three thousand people of the Parmo.
<v Speaker 1>But it was that same day and we were coming
<v Speaker 1>out of the cloud forest into where you know, the
<v Speaker 1>extent that human development is reached, where it's passed land
<v Speaker 1>with little margins of remnant native vegetation and a few invasives.
<v Speaker 1>And we saw this really fucking bizarre plant. I guess
<v Speaker 1>the common name was spider plant or something. But again,
<v Speaker 1>these common names, you get to avoid them. I'll fuck you up.
<v Speaker 1>They're stupid too. But it's called spider plant because the
<v Speaker 1>six stamens were prominently exerted out of the corolla. They
<v Speaker 1>were sticking out of the corolla as you encounter with
<v Speaker 1>a lot of hummingbird pollinated plants. I think were like
<v Speaker 1>eight thousand feet clouds everywhere, water vapor everywhere, the sun
<v Speaker 1>poking out through them. It's just everything smells incredible because
<v Speaker 1>of all the moisture and volatile compounds being emitted from
<v Speaker 1>the abundant plant life, even though you know there was
<v Speaker 1>a lot of clearing there for cattle and it ended
<v Speaker 1>up being cleome or borea. I counted the sepals and petals,
<v Speaker 1>which were four, and then sick stamens, which you know
<v Speaker 1>you got four sepals and petals, it's six stamens automatically
<v Speaker 1>points to brassicles, I mean, namely brassic cac but this
<v Speaker 1>is not Brassic casing. And then it had that kind
<v Speaker 1>of glucose scinilate secondary chemistry smell, that kind of mustardish
<v Speaker 1>kalish smell to it. It's covered in hair, is like
<v Speaker 1>a burgundy color, just a fucking weird plant had a
<v Speaker 1>distinct smell and then leaves that looked like castor being
<v Speaker 1>that looked like rice in this communis you know, which
<v Speaker 1>is invasive and waterways in Mexico and along the La
<v Speaker 1>River and shit, you know, riceness communists is the plant
<v Speaker 1>that Walter White made the risin out of in breaking
<v Speaker 1>bed Anam. It's TV. You're good for you, buddy, Let
<v Speaker 1>me just settle down. They'll tell me about it. But anyway, Wow,
<v Speaker 1>every once in a while you just find these masses
<v Speaker 1>of epiphytes that fall out of the trees. It's like
<v Speaker 1>six different orchid species of Pileea, A Pepperomia and Tolanzier
<v Speaker 1>or something on this massive piece of epiphytic material a
<v Speaker 1>lag that just fell in the middle of the trail.
<v Speaker 1>But uh so that was really exciting to see. Do
<v Speaker 1>cleomar Boia know anomala excuse me, Cleo Macy same family
<v Speaker 1>as California bladder pod and PoTA androgony which you get here,
<v Speaker 1>and number of Cleo Macy members in Texas and I
<v Speaker 1>think the southeastern United states too, that are mostly annuals
<v Speaker 1>and ruteral plants, but it was this thing was massive,
<v Speaker 1>was like eight feet tall and just huge, huge leaves
<v Speaker 1>totally wouldn't you know. Obviously used a lot of humidity
<v Speaker 1>and cool temperatures. So the only place I think you
<v Speaker 1>could grow out of the ship maybe some places in
<v Speaker 1>Florida in a glasshouse, or in like the coastal California,
<v Speaker 1>like Bay Area, but they're just I mean, so many
<v Speaker 1>amazing plants. Just the parma was cool, but even just
<v Speaker 1>the way up there was filled with tons of dope shit,
<v Speaker 1>even just remnant growing on the margins of agriculture. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it took a while, but it finally started raining, and
<v Speaker 1>I just saw a giant aeroid, terrestrial aeroid with leaves
<v Speaker 1>that were nearly a meter from top to bottom cord date.
<v Speaker 1>And then it was flowering too, and the flower smelled
<v Speaker 1>like winter green, and as they tend to do, it
<v Speaker 1>had beetles inside of it, but I didn't get a
<v Speaker 1>photo of the beetle. The beetle fell out, I put
<v Speaker 1>him back on the little space and then he just
<v Speaker 1>fell right inside the cup down below, and I couldn't
<v Speaker 1>see him anymore. I didn't I want to cut the
<v Speaker 1>flower open because that's a horrible thing to do. You know,
<v Speaker 1>things finally getting a chance to bang, and uh, you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna go ruin it. You're gonna go cock block it
<v Speaker 1>or box block it, or whatever you want to call it.
<v Speaker 1>You know it's not right. But the winter green smell
<v Speaker 1>is it's unique. I didn't I thought they had more
<v Speaker 1>of like a starchy smell. They did, many of them
<v Speaker 1>did co evolve with beetles. But what's up with the
<v Speaker 1>winter green? You know suppos like tiger bomb. Anyway, h
<v Speaker 1>got an uphill walk to the research station through thick mudd.
<v Speaker 1>And you gotta wear these these boots, the serial killer boots.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they're like little rubber buckets. Bought a pair
<v Speaker 1>for eleven bucks here because I left mine at home.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, anything else is not sufficient. It's just too
<v Speaker 1>much mud, too much rain, too much mud. Oh there's
<v Speaker 1>some memosoid thing that's not an inga a fuck toens
<v Speaker 1>of large ferns. Anyway, I don't really have much else
<v Speaker 1>to contribute here. It's too exciting. O. What is this
<v Speaker 1>as slainem? It's a nice slenum. Ah. We saw Blakey
<v Speaker 1>a subveginata. I put camillo on my shoulders. Then he
<v Speaker 1>used the pole cutter because it's like a fifty sixty
<v Speaker 1>foot tall tree and he was able to snip a
<v Speaker 1>branch off with a flower on it. We took an
<v Speaker 1>rbarium specimen, got some nice macro photographs of those bizarre
<v Speaker 1>melostomitaceous anthers. All the blaky flowers look cool, and I
<v Speaker 1>think they're all bird donated, but I get fucking weird
<v Speaker 1>anther shapes. Man yellow anvils look like ten or however,
<v Speaker 1>many little yellow anvils inside that five pedaled corolla. But
<v Speaker 1>thank god, there's water up here. I forgot. Somebody took
<v Speaker 1>a piece of guadua and stuck it in the mountain
<v Speaker 1>where there's a seep and then there's just a little rock,
<v Speaker 1>and there's always a whenever you go there, there's a piece.
<v Speaker 1>There's a little glass beneath it. You know, should you
<v Speaker 1>know for anybody if they want to they want to
<v Speaker 1>take a sip the way up? Mean, this is probably
<v Speaker 1>annoying listening to me with this hyperventilating. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if i'd like to listen to it. What
<v Speaker 1>are you doing right now? Oh God, it's not that hot,
<v Speaker 1>but goddamn is it ball me. It's just you're really
<v Speaker 1>going for the Bickram yoga thing, except there's nobody farting.
<v Speaker 1>You know. The arison smell like like hydrogen sulfi and
<v Speaker 1>methane gas, like I imagine it would in a Bickram studio,
<v Speaker 1>because even if they're cleaning that, there's still a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people, you know, passing gas, and people just generally
<v Speaker 1>smell like hell, it's so humid, you know, guess is
<v Speaker 1>better than smelling hair care products and whatever toxic shit
<v Speaker 1>they put in those toxic chemistry. You know, I wanted
<v Speaker 1>to do a video that I've been doing these videos
<v Speaker 1>that sound like WG and Chicago Channel nine infomercials, you know,
<v Speaker 1>late night infomercials, really annoying voice. You know, it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of what makes it funny. But it'd be nice to
<v Speaker 1>do a rant instead where you're just you're just talking
<v Speaker 1>about the futility and a meaninglessness of human existing and
<v Speaker 1>then the fact that our species is still continuously governed
<v Speaker 1>by pigs and wolves, you know, and the hierarchies that
<v Speaker 1>our society creates kind of filters out, it kind of
<v Speaker 1>selects for those personalities, because anyone who's actually got substance
<v Speaker 1>doesn't want to go into business or politics. Probably at
<v Speaker 1>least most people you know, or at least strive to
<v Speaker 1>have so much, you know, I think most people, if
<v Speaker 1>they got any sense about them, they'd stop at a
<v Speaker 1>certain point, say I got enough to live comfortably, now
<v Speaker 1>I want to go accumulate experiences, passions, you know, creativity,
<v Speaker 1>shit like that. What is this? You got a slime
<v Speaker 1>mold coming off. I'm at the little founta where to
<v Speaker 1>guadua the bamboo branches. I gotta take a where it's
<v Speaker 1>coming out to sleep in a mountain. I gotta take
<v Speaker 1>a sip here. I thought it was nice, like a
<v Speaker 1>hat towel from the dryer, if you got the drink
<v Speaker 1>water all day. I gotta filter on me. But it's
<v Speaker 1>one of those Sawyer squeeze filters, and the fucking bag broke,
<v Speaker 1>so it just when you squeeze it half goes through
<v Speaker 1>the filter and the other half just leaks out all
<v Speaker 1>over your face. It's really nice. There's a big selassiby uh.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's it's either muliercula or who higani. Those
<v Speaker 1>are the two common silassaby. That is the psychoactive mushroom
<v Speaker 1>genus species. There's a big one just growing on the
<v Speaker 1>side of this trail up there, up to the research station.
<v Speaker 1>It smells some nice here. Fucking I can't do they
<v Speaker 1>really planted some like I will eat a plant on
<v Speaker 1>the side of this trail You're in, like this incredible forest,
<v Speaker 1>and they planted these what is this? What is it? Thing?
<v Speaker 1>It's like a dressina or something. All clones the home
<v Speaker 1>Desperate Garden Center. God, the Home despert Garden Center bums
<v Speaker 1>me out? Does it? Bum you out? I see plants
<v Speaker 1>from there, and I'm just fucking set a sinking feeling everything,
<v Speaker 1>you know, Modern horticulture needs that about everything, and so
<v Speaker 1>much of like modern First World or Second WARLD whatever
<v Speaker 1>the fuck horticulture just sucks. It's just so bleak. It's
<v Speaker 1>like the SAME's. I mean, it's the same if you
<v Speaker 1>go if you shopping centers in the United States or
<v Speaker 1>like any of the socolos in Mexico. Though I do
<v Speaker 1>appreciate the socolos the town plazas, they never have cool
<v Speaker 1>plants there. It's always the fucking home Desperate garden center garbage.
<v Speaker 1>Just more disconnection you know more, just once again, so
<v Speaker 1>emblematic of modern sieves disconnections from the living world. Right,
<v Speaker 1>the only plants are just supposed to look good. Here
<v Speaker 1>we fucking rant that before. You don't need to hear
<v Speaker 1>it again. You don't need to hear it again. Did
<v Speaker 1>somebody pick that so it has to be? Oh, I
<v Speaker 1>guess they did anyway, Oh lovely sandstone. Oh crapping, We're
<v Speaker 1>almost there. Oh. I saw a lot of nice frogs
<v Speaker 1>last night. Holy shit, frogs and snakes the genus priystamantis
<v Speaker 1>of frog, especially Priystamantis, and then it's really cute little
<v Speaker 1>tone and the genus Ranella. But uh, some of the
<v Speaker 1>snakes we're next to selling three species like ribbon snakes.
<v Speaker 1>One's called like a shoelace snake or something. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>They were fucking adorable. They were all relatively harmless calubrids. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna go sit my ass down, have more of
<v Speaker 1>a temper tantrum about my TTL cable fucking up, and uh,
<v Speaker 1>dry some specimens with a blow dryer and sip on
<v Speaker 1>some YU said, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Okay, have
<v Speaker 1>a GIRs today for now, go by.
<v Speaker 2>I'm trying to sleep. The research stations just open air.
<v Speaker 2>Everybody's fucking around in a laboratory. Everybody's messing around the
<v Speaker 2>laboratory looking at the microscopes. I was just hanging out there,
<v Speaker 2>drawing and going through some of the forestry books. But anyway,
<v Speaker 2>I just wondered, I wanted you to hear the rain.
<v Speaker 2>It sounds nice. A lot of thunder very close by. God,
<v Speaker 2>we really lucked out today. We barely rained at all.
<v Speaker 2>Got a lot of nice got a lot of nice footage,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of nice photographs. So the fragment Pedium pierci
<v Speaker 2>again that's only pollinated by the single species of hoverfly
<v Speaker 2>and tricks them using pheromones that mimic the alert pheromones
<v Speaker 2>of aphids. And and then it's like Cranopigium species from
<v Speaker 2>the Panama half family. Put the staminodes, you know, the
<v Speaker 2>frilly staminodes that emit odor and also serve as visual
<v Speaker 2>attractions for pollinators.
<v Speaker 1>But listen to the rain. Is that nice? No?
<v Speaker 2>I mean it's no windows, no glass, just you don't
<v Speaker 2>need them. It's open air. But then again, if you
<v Speaker 2>you know, if you're all you got is like these
<v Speaker 2>curtains hanging up, but it's just these It's like bay
<v Speaker 2>windows without the glass.
<v Speaker 1>Really nice.
<v Speaker 2>I could live like this forever. They got a solar
<v Speaker 2>panel set up. They got the interweb, I guess they
<v Speaker 2>got satellite internet, so in a library full of books,
<v Speaker 2>they got microscopes, flow hood, all this good shit. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna try to go to sleep, but try to
<v Speaker 2>get some sleep right now.
<v Speaker 1>You know what I'm wondering, Actually, if I can, if
<v Speaker 1>I can stand up the.
<v Speaker 2>Piss, because we're on the second floor, If I can
<v Speaker 2>urinate out the window it's not really.
<v Speaker 1>Wind us an opening in a wall.
<v Speaker 2>I can urinate out the this opening without falling out.
<v Speaker 2>You know, that would be nice. If I fill out,
<v Speaker 2>that might be that might do hurt. I'd be and
<v Speaker 2>I'd do web. But I could probably piss out the window.
<v Speaker 2>Say other words, I gotta go outn stairs. The whole
<v Speaker 2>building smells nice too. It's got this wonderful rustic smell.
<v Speaker 2>It's locally harvested wood from the surrounding forest, traded with
<v Speaker 2>diesels so that the termites and the insects don't get it.
<v Speaker 2>They wash it down. A diesel makes a very nice smell.
<v Speaker 2>It's better than creosolt. Yeah, I hope I'm a foul thing.
<v Speaker 2>I got a piss like cow man. I've been drinking
<v Speaker 2>green tea, you know, real light green tea. But still, well,
<v Speaker 2>hopefully it's not enough caffeine to keep me up.
<v Speaker 1>All right, that's all I got for tonight. I'll talk
<v Speaker 1>to you tomorrow. Anyway. It's a few days later, and
<v Speaker 1>now we're in the Amazon what could collectively be called
<v Speaker 1>the Amazon. There's not much to our east except except
<v Speaker 1>the vast expanses of tropical forest lower elevation, tropical forests
<v Speaker 1>worth two thousand feet. When's the last time you played
<v Speaker 1>in a good pile of muck, or even just smell
<v Speaker 1>the good pile of muck. I just fell in one,
<v Speaker 1>and I wasn't wearing the fucking knee high boots were
<v Speaker 1>normally wearing we walk out here. I was just wearing
<v Speaker 1>my little steel toes, and uh, I'm just covered in mud.
<v Speaker 1>It's got that smell to it too. There's heliconias everywhere
<v Speaker 1>as well. Heliconia's aeroids and cyclanth They see the cyclanthus,
<v Speaker 1>the namesake of the cyclant. They see family the Panama
<v Speaker 1>half family Cyclanthus also have guadua and costafoya, the giant bamboo,
<v Speaker 1>and just saw a tree senna to like thirty feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>had kind of a scrambling habit, but not a lot
<v Speaker 1>of reproductive structures to see, you know, used to the
<v Speaker 1>fucking nice nice muck a nice big muck pile. Some
<v Speaker 1>ferns too. Ooh, what is that? It's a large fern.
<v Speaker 1>Some psyathias as well. It's balmy as hell. The giant
<v Speaker 1>cicadas in Casata Gigas were out last night, which we
<v Speaker 1>also get in South Texas where there's vegetation left where
<v Speaker 1>it hasn't been turned into a car dealership or a
<v Speaker 1>parking lot or anyway. Trying to keep a positive mindset
<v Speaker 1>here and not think about things that bumm me up.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, God, damn though, man, it's it is. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's sweaty. It's not even that hot, it's just sweaty.
<v Speaker 1>That this reminds me of where I live in the summertime.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it was already like ninety two where I live.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's that already. It's like it's already ninety
<v Speaker 1>two degrees. God, the palms here are just incredible, and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of them four or five of them have
<v Speaker 1>independently evolved. Those stilt roots. Here, I am looking at
<v Speaker 1>Iriardia del Todia, fishtail like leaves, fishtail pinnate leaves, and
<v Speaker 1>then the dong roots. The root cap looks like the
<v Speaker 1>the head of the cac, the head of the cac.
<v Speaker 1>Can you say that on a podcast? Amazing species, though,
<v Speaker 1>I'd love to see the flowers someday, hundreds of tiny
<v Speaker 1>white flowers arranged on spikes or panicles. But uh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we got here last night. We set up a mothlight
<v Speaker 1>last night. God, the fucking insects that came through three
<v Speaker 1>different species of cicada, a Dobson fly, which I've never
<v Speaker 1>heard of before. And then the moth diversity was just insane.
<v Speaker 1>It was just off the charts. It was fucking wild,
<v Speaker 1>incredible moth diversity, large moths. So what is that? Oh
<v Speaker 1>it's a fycus? Is it a climbing fycus? I can't
<v Speaker 1>even tell, man, But lots of heliconias. You know what
<v Speaker 1>was weird is so Heliconias are in the ginger orders
<v Speaker 1>in Gibbereles, along with the costace and moran taesi at
<v Speaker 1>least in the New World and an old world families.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you got the gingers and Strelitzia family, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, but these heliconias can have erect inflorescences or
<v Speaker 1>pendent inflorescences. And I saw them with a pendent inflorescence,
<v Speaker 1>bright red like zigzag inflorescence, and there were ants all
<v Speaker 1>over like guarding it. They weren't moving, they were just
<v Speaker 1>big ants like maybe an inch long, hanging out one
<v Speaker 1>on each flower, you know, each breaking the zigzag is
<v Speaker 1>a different flower like this pendent zigzag inflorescence, and the
<v Speaker 1>ants are just hanging out there guarding it. Fucking bizarre.
<v Speaker 1>And then if you touch it, they'll like come at you.
<v Speaker 1>So I sat there and took photos of it for
<v Speaker 1>a while and then went to, uh touch it right
<v Speaker 1>before I left, and they didn't come out anymore, like
<v Speaker 1>they were just gotten used to me. It was really weird.
<v Speaker 1>Oh here's a little micena, a little white micena. I
<v Speaker 1>guess there's a bunch of bioluminescent mushrooms in this forest.
<v Speaker 1>Forgive me. I'm a little out of breath. I'm sweating
<v Speaker 1>like hell and walking up a hill. Can you hear them?
<v Speaker 1>Can you hear them? Going? Off. They're really going. Now, God,
<v Speaker 1>I feel like everything everything at the lower elevations is
<v Speaker 1>ruby ac. Everything in the lower elevations the tropical forest
<v Speaker 1>is ruby ac. Not everything, of course, there's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of monocots here, but goddamn or inga. There's like twenty
<v Speaker 1>different species of inga within like a square kilometer of
<v Speaker 1>where I am. But I'm looking at this moth pollinated
<v Speaker 1>rubiaceous thing. You know, it's got the interpetiolar stipules. That's
<v Speaker 1>the big giveaway for the coffee Family's those interpetiolar stipules,
<v Speaker 1>and then petals, four or five petals in this case,
<v Speaker 1>they're fringed in liciniate laciniate. Uh, and then white tube flowers.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of moth pollination, I presume, but uh, Jesus man,
<v Speaker 1>big fucking leaves, large leaves, probably nine inches, an interesting
<v Speaker 1>flower structure. And this thing is a tree. This is
<v Speaker 1>a tree, you like, goddamn fifty feet tall and lots
<v Speaker 1>of drip tips too. Let us not forget the drip tips.
<v Speaker 1>Here's no what is this? This is rubyac too? Oh?
<v Speaker 1>You know what? Maybe not? Oh, this looks like it
<v Speaker 1>might be different, and it's got exerted. It's got exerted stamens.
<v Speaker 1>What is this? Maybe this is a this might be
<v Speaker 1>an eyelex, but all the leaves have drip tips in
<v Speaker 1>the fucking insects. Or oh, there's that fifteen foot tall
<v Speaker 1>bogonia too, Maybe I should give photos of that. I
<v Speaker 1>probably should. Oh there's an orchid back there something. It's
<v Speaker 1>overwhelming and hot and balmy. But don't forget the drip tips.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you know when you got that the distal
<v Speaker 1>end of the leaf terminates in this uh moucrenate, well,
<v Speaker 1>more like a cuminate point for a shedding water. I
<v Speaker 1>gotta get a photo of this thing. Hold on, Well,
<v Speaker 1>it's the next day, and I feel like dog shit,
<v Speaker 1>and uh we're just going lower into the Amazon. It's
<v Speaker 1>just balmy as all hell, just very high humidity index.
<v Speaker 1>And I did have some loose stools the last couple
<v Speaker 1>of days, which hopefully you can enjoy picturing net And uh,
<v Speaker 1>I feel that like food poisoning fatigue. But I didn't
<v Speaker 1>get food poison. I don't know what it is, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it was a yellow dragon fruit,
<v Speaker 1>but it definitely feels amoeba like, you know, maybe I
<v Speaker 1>got some damn produce. It's always the fucking protests. Oh
<v Speaker 1>it's this climbing fern. I didn't really want to go
<v Speaker 1>on this hat his like today, but it got bad fomo,
<v Speaker 1>you know they. I guess everybody saw a viper last night,
<v Speaker 1>one of those green both roped species. So uh anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but oh, buttressed roots? What is this? A ficus? Just
<v Speaker 1>stopped to take a picture of some blaky as some
<v Speaker 1>interesting vining mellowstone species, as well as some legume with
<v Speaker 1>balhinia shaped leaves, which indicates the Bohinia and red bud
<v Speaker 1>subfamily of Fabasia. That's a cool fern. Oh yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>is nice. Whatever this is. Damn, this looks like a
<v Speaker 1>fucking fern. That looks like a psychicad. But uh, but
<v Speaker 1>the fruits on that thing were wild. It was like
<v Speaker 1>two carpoled I guess it was just a sing just
<v Speaker 1>just these beans that split open and dehess I couldn't
<v Speaker 1>really figure it out, but there were three of them
<v Speaker 1>attached to a single pedicel or a peduncle or rather,
<v Speaker 1>and anyway, yeah, it was very interesting. But uh, and
<v Speaker 1>the seeds were out and already germanying, but we couldn't
<v Speaker 1>really see him or we couldn't see the tree that
<v Speaker 1>they were coming from. It was too high up. It
<v Speaker 1>was either a tree or a leana, a large vine.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sitting here, look at it. Some member of zim
<v Speaker 1>zim Gibbereles, the ginger order in Kushi the dog, this
<v Speaker 1>little terrier, Alex's dog. You know, she comes with us everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>She just decided to come lay down next to me.
<v Speaker 1>Thank you. You could tell them feeling like shit. Hopefully
<v Speaker 1>I don't puke up my ass again. One thing I
<v Speaker 1>did see that was pretty remarkable yesterday, I think I
<v Speaker 1>don't think I mentioned was a member of the cannonball
<v Speaker 1>tree family lecythidesi, which is in the order Eric Hayley's
<v Speaker 1>and has is califlorus. So it produced its you know
<v Speaker 1>call as in coallescent or et cetera stem referring to stem.
<v Speaker 1>It flowers from the stem directly and then has these fruits.
<v Speaker 1>The most famous member is the cannonball tree because it
<v Speaker 1>produces which it looks like canniballs that come right off
<v Speaker 1>I think they come right off the stem as well.
<v Speaker 1>But it's a it's a pantropical family. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>most diverse in the New World that's also in the
<v Speaker 1>Old World Order is Eric Hayley's flowers are rather large,
<v Speaker 1>like baseball sized in some cases. I think the genus
<v Speaker 1>I saw was Gria g R E A. I might
<v Speaker 1>be spelling that wrong, but it's a remarkable family. The
<v Speaker 1>family is l E C y t h I D
<v Speaker 1>A C E A E and uh. I have little
<v Speaker 1>experience with it. I just know it from the Field
<v Speaker 1>Museum Botany room, the Botany Hall, which I always fear.
<v Speaker 1>That's where I got the Welwitchia Mirabolis diorama, and I
<v Speaker 1>always fear because plants are so disrespected in culture in general.
<v Speaker 1>It's some fucking administrator is gonna, you know, they're gonna
<v Speaker 1>hire some new administrator, some you know, higher up pencil
<v Speaker 1>neck knob at the Field Museum, and they're gonna they're
<v Speaker 1>gonna say, we got to get rid of the fucking
<v Speaker 1>Hall of Botany. Why don't we put another you know, uh,
<v Speaker 1>giant bug exhibit there, or you know, Hall of China
<v Speaker 1>exhibit or something like that. You know, it's my worst
<v Speaker 1>fear regarding me, well, I can't think of a lot
<v Speaker 1>of worse things, you know, I can get really dark,
<v Speaker 1>but regarding that museum, but that it's got a remarkable
<v Speaker 1>or barium. They being here does make me think of
<v Speaker 1>the Field Museum. I was you know, it was instrumental
<v Speaker 1>in my upbringing, that pee Wee's Big Adventure to movie,
<v Speaker 1>as well as pee Wee's Playhouse and a few other things.
<v Speaker 1>But the Field Museum, fucking that was it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>if you've got kids, you live in the Midwest, you
<v Speaker 1>got to bring them to the Field Museum, right like
<v Speaker 1>three times a year at least, right, hopefully they won't
<v Speaker 1>turn out like jackasses. Right, it's better better at than
<v Speaker 1>you know, other elements of culture that could poison their youth.
<v Speaker 1>You know. But this this member of I'm not sure
<v Speaker 1>if it's morantasy or or cost thecy, but it's got
<v Speaker 1>these really it's got this this infratessence that's on ground
<v Speaker 1>you know, ground level maybe eight inches max, so about
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, sixteen centimeters tall, and it's got bright
<v Speaker 1>orange I think that I think that's just the old
<v Speaker 1>corollas or the Yeah, I guess it's just the old Corollas.
<v Speaker 1>And then subtending that is the fruit, which is like
<v Speaker 1>this little three carpled so like a berrier I'm wondering
<v Speaker 1>what this thing evolved dispersing it? What the fuck is this?
<v Speaker 2>Oh?
<v Speaker 1>These are like, these are the little seeds covered in
<v Speaker 1>this powdery, gelatinous material. I should take somebody, so go
<v Speaker 1>plant them up top. Really remarkable though, it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's obviously going for conspicuous. We're going for a tractive
<v Speaker 1>you know, to attract something, possibly some ground bird or
<v Speaker 1>some other small mammal. And the whole plant it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a monocot. It's got alternate alternate leaves coming off
<v Speaker 1>of this shoot. Guess he wouldn't call them alternate leaves
<v Speaker 1>in that case, since the applical marastem is down below.
<v Speaker 1>But it only gets about, I don't know, half a
<v Speaker 1>meter tall. What interesting set here? But again, it's all leaves.
<v Speaker 1>I've never paid so much attention to leaf venation, and
<v Speaker 1>I've been drawn drawing leaves a lot too. You really
<v Speaker 1>pay attention to leaf venation when you're drawing them. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>here's this monstrous fucking palm. What was this genus? I forget.
<v Speaker 1>It's got leaves that are probably twenty feet long, very fibrous. Drunk, God,
<v Speaker 1>I feel less like dog shit. Somebody gave me some mombie,
<v Speaker 1>which is like crushed coca leaf with sacropia ash, and
<v Speaker 1>it does it does help. God, damn, I just felt
<v Speaker 1>like dog shit. I don't know what it was, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you piss all your nutrients that I took some took
<v Speaker 1>some creatine vitamin. See it took a one of those
<v Speaker 1>you know, electrolyte packets. But I just feel fucking out
<v Speaker 1>of it. Man. Probably not very fun to listen to
<v Speaker 1>right now because I'm you know, I feel like I'm
<v Speaker 1>about to pass out. But uh, hopefully we can get
<v Speaker 1>something out of this. Eh, what are you doing? Anyways?
<v Speaker 1>You're working? What are you doing? Working on something? I
<v Speaker 1>tend to listen to podcasts when I'm working on doing
<v Speaker 1>some shit work or something. Fuck. Okay, Well, anyway, we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna keep clambering on here, and I think we're dropping
<v Speaker 1>an elevation. We're at like twenty four hundred feet now,
<v Speaker 1>probably twenty six. Goddamn it. We got a long way
<v Speaker 1>to go for us. Sounds so nice though, the singing insects.
<v Speaker 1>You appreciate singing insects, I hope. So, okay, we'll get back.
<v Speaker 1>We'll get back with you a little bit. Can you
<v Speaker 1>hear the waterfall over there. This is what it's gonna
<v Speaker 1>sound like later tonight. You know, when I'm pissing out
<v Speaker 1>my ass. You know you got the really the auditory effects.
<v Speaker 1>You so so crisp. You can hear it, you can
<v Speaker 1>picture it hitting the bowl. Ah, God leaves, leaves and
<v Speaker 1>more leaves. Only a guess as to what families some
<v Speaker 1>of these things might be more racy. Melostoma tasi. There's
<v Speaker 1>a cool vining celadjanella. This shit is this? This looks
<v Speaker 1>like a dan night as skullus. Lots of U four bac.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck is this? There was a cool there's
<v Speaker 1>a cool melostome, lots of milstone taty. There's a cool
<v Speaker 1>melostone that gets maybe a meter tall that's got domatia.
<v Speaker 1>That is little hotels for these tiny ants. Except the
<v Speaker 1>ants aren't aggressive and you can reportedly eat them. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I know you can eat They taste like lemon. So
<v Speaker 1>if they're not doing what is it? Is it a dong?
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck is this thing? It's like a Is
<v Speaker 1>that a phallus? Is that a fungus? I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>There's some cool members of Burmanniac, which is a monocop
<v Speaker 1>family that's micoheterotrophic, that is, at each eat fungus and
<v Speaker 1>some cool members of Bolano for ac, which is a
<v Speaker 1>plant parasitizing fungus plant parasitizing plant family, So plants that
<v Speaker 1>are parasites, some of the parasitized fungi and some of
<v Speaker 1>the parasitize plants. And there's records on iinad from here,
<v Speaker 1>but the chance of them being out at this time
<v Speaker 1>and flowering seemed to be nil. But anyway, back to this,
<v Speaker 1>these domatia, these little swollen leaf bases, swollen two locku
<v Speaker 1>oled leaf bases, two compartments that are formed at the
<v Speaker 1>base of these melastome leaves that are very pubescent. They
<v Speaker 1>house these tiny ants. So I'm guessing it's not for
<v Speaker 1>detection because the ants are so fucking tiny and they're
<v Speaker 1>not very aggressive to begin with. So it might be
<v Speaker 1>maybe for some sort of nutrient acquisition, but it's some
<v Speaker 1>sort of mutualism because nothing the plant wouldn't evolve these
<v Speaker 1>dumatia if there wasn't something selecting for it, some benefits
<v Speaker 1>selected for it. So I realized last night that the
<v Speaker 1>UH three notebooks of herbarium specimens I've been collecting over
<v Speaker 1>the past few days to a session at the herbarium
<v Speaker 1>for further study for anybody who might be interested. Half
<v Speaker 1>the fucking specimens got moldy, as you could easily predict
<v Speaker 1>they would, But I was a dumbass, so I fucking
<v Speaker 1>ruined that it's a nice philodendron, and you know, I
<v Speaker 1>promptly lost it and I tapped into this city is
<v Speaker 1>not going to be a safe part of the podcast
<v Speaker 1>if you have younger viewers around, Okay, just a forewarning.
<v Speaker 1>I realized I had to tap in at that point
<v Speaker 1>to my vocabulary bank of turetts like curse words, and
<v Speaker 1>just fucking let it out, you know, shit cock, cunt,
<v Speaker 1>shit on my tits, fuck you mother, you know, just
<v Speaker 1>just really going. Do you have one of those? It's
<v Speaker 1>important to have a you know, a word bank, which
<v Speaker 1>you know, this is probably more of a male thing,
<v Speaker 1>I suppose, though I do know some salty women who
<v Speaker 1>might engage in this kind of behavior, but it's really
<v Speaker 1>I realized the fucking sip of rune I collected was
<v Speaker 1>all moldy and just fucked. And the blow dryer I
<v Speaker 1>brought what is that red flower? The blow dryer I
<v Speaker 1>brought to dry things was not enough, and so I
<v Speaker 1>looked up on Google scholar methods for drying or barium
<v Speaker 1>specimens in the tropics, and wouldn't you know, some cunning
<v Speaker 1>slippery shit had already thought of it, and there was
<v Speaker 1>a paper described me. It was from two thousand and six,
<v Speaker 1>using a Lakewood model space heater that stood about ten
<v Speaker 1>maybe eight inches tall, and then using the rack that's
<v Speaker 1>used to hang files in a file cain, which you know,
<v Speaker 1>a good three quarters of people listening to this podcast
<v Speaker 1>probably don't even know what it is. I didn't know
<v Speaker 1>what it was, but a metal rack that can screen.
<v Speaker 1>It's basically they were using. The rack is like a
<v Speaker 1>frame to prop up the herbarium press, the plant press,
<v Speaker 1>the corrugated cardboard is instrumental to and the corrugations, the
<v Speaker 1>open parts of the corrugations have to go perpendicular to
<v Speaker 1>the ground to facilitate airflow. Vertical airflow through them. Wonderful
<v Speaker 1>buttress trunk over there by the way. I'm really looking
<v Speaker 1>at it. I'm urinating into the forest right now. Next
<v Speaker 1>to some member of Cyclant. They say, wow, look at
<v Speaker 1>that inflorescence. What the fuck? So anyway, uh, and then
<v Speaker 1>you drape a cloth with this seems kind of sketchy.
<v Speaker 1>You drape a cloth over the plant press and then
<v Speaker 1>over so that it's like funneling kind of. It looks
<v Speaker 1>like one of those sheets from like those old style uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, silver plate cameras from like the mid eighteen hundreds.
<v Speaker 1>You drape that cloth over the space heater two space
<v Speaker 1>heaters on the ground. Frame is on the ground, plant
<v Speaker 1>presses on the frame, and then it channels the heat
<v Speaker 1>and you want like one hundred and five degrees fahrenheit max, right,
<v Speaker 1>which is what is that? Like thirty five to forty
<v Speaker 1>degrees celsius, no hotter and just airflow through it. And
<v Speaker 1>supposedly eight hours of that works. But of course you've
<v Speaker 1>got a hip. What am I? What is it? What
<v Speaker 1>the fuck is this? This is like a little crabspider.
<v Speaker 1>I just fucked up. You're a web I'm sorry. I
<v Speaker 1>can already feel you can feel the sugers is they're
<v Speaker 1>gonna come. There's been little sweat bees coming in to
<v Speaker 1>tap me too for sweat, but they don't you know,
<v Speaker 1>they're not really a nuisance. But anyway, so that's what
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna do, or you could do the blow driver,
<v Speaker 1>but you know the blow drivers, even these little travel ones,
<v Speaker 1>you put it on low. You don't want high heat,
<v Speaker 1>put on low heat. They're not meant They're not meant
<v Speaker 1>to fucking run for five hours. I'm such a dumb ass.
<v Speaker 1>I can't. But I just wasted so much fucking time
<v Speaker 1>and specimens. And also I forgot to label these, so,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I can remember what they were, but I
<v Speaker 1>had to go back and fucking label them with in
<v Speaker 1>at numbers and goddamn sit to pain in the ass.
<v Speaker 1>I just can't believe I fucking waste me fuck, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I just it's still just thinking about it. It's like
<v Speaker 1>whatever dopamine is the opposite of that, whatever you call that,
<v Speaker 1>that feeling, that's what I'm feeling right whenever I think
<v Speaker 1>about it. So avoidable. Right Normally, if I'm like collecting
<v Speaker 1>and we've got a rental car, I just put it
<v Speaker 1>on the dash. Blow the fucking defrosters. That's fine, that
<v Speaker 1>works like a charm. Maybe take some Q tips, insert
<v Speaker 1>them in between the pages to facilitate airflow through the pages.
<v Speaker 1>But god damn it, just I can't believe I didn't,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I dried these things half fast and then
<v Speaker 1>put them in a suitcase. Then then just the suitcase
<v Speaker 1>was closed in the fucking uh the other place we
<v Speaker 1>were gonna go for like three days, and they just
<v Speaker 1>molded the shit. Such a dummies. I could have seen
<v Speaker 1>it coming, you know. I feel remarkably better though in
<v Speaker 1>just an hour. Still sweating like hell, but it's become overcast.
<v Speaker 1>Now we're just bathing in vapor. It's so humid you
<v Speaker 1>gotta spoon the air into your lungs. But it's amazing
<v Speaker 1>what an electro like packet can do. Holy hell. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I feel tons tons better still just taking pictures of leaves,
<v Speaker 1>though very few reproductive structures. Okay, it's a couple of
<v Speaker 1>days later, don't worry. He's I've been talking to this
<v Speaker 1>in a lot of ops. So I'm in a town
<v Speaker 1>of bonios at my friend Crazy MIC's house. Crazy Mic,
<v Speaker 1>the bee guy. He's not crazy, he's just eccentric. Spent
<v Speaker 1>all day with him, I said, a wonderful man. He's
<v Speaker 1>uh seventy two. He inhales a lot of naphthaline. You know,
<v Speaker 1>his whole office just smells like mothballs because he's got
<v Speaker 1>these insect cabinets. He's you know, he's an entomologist. He
<v Speaker 1>studies him an out there are wasps and bees, especially,
<v Speaker 1>oh the sweet volcanic soil. This climate where it never
<v Speaker 1>gets hotter than eighty degrees, where it's sixty two hundred
<v Speaker 1>feet in the town of Banos, which literally means baths.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's some religious shit. We didn that makes sense.
<v Speaker 1>It's all religious shit. It's all Catholic. You know, a
<v Speaker 1>lot of Catholic guilt. The Spanish went hard when they
<v Speaker 1>were doing the whole genocide thing. They really infused it
<v Speaker 1>with Catholic Catholicism, Catholic punishment, Catholic erotic never mind, that's
<v Speaker 1>a that's a horrible thought. Anyway. So anyway, Mike spends
<v Speaker 1>a lot of time breathing in annapoli, in vagers, vapors
<v Speaker 1>because he studies insects. He's pining insects for the last
<v Speaker 1>sixty years of his life. So, but he's got a
<v Speaker 1>wonderful house, very kind enough to let me stay there,
<v Speaker 1>and then took me out yesterday like a fucking sweet man.
<v Speaker 1>And so I bought him dinner, and uh, anyway, he
<v Speaker 1>took me some really nice spots. It's crazy that it's
<v Speaker 1>so fucking steep here, because the mountains are still uplifting.
<v Speaker 1>There's still a out of earthquakes. See an every earthquake
<v Speaker 1>you get a couple of feet right, Probably have a
<v Speaker 1>large earthquake every thirty or forty years, maybe less. But
<v Speaker 1>I'm just right now. I'm just looking at these mountains
<v Speaker 1>just bathed in water vapor and covered in either pasture
<v Speaker 1>or eucalyptus trees. It is crazy how little of the
<v Speaker 1>native vegetation here is left. And you see the same
<v Speaker 1>horticultural atrocities. They got scotch broom. You want scotch broom,
<v Speaker 1>We got scotch broom. They got fucking Himalayan blackberries. It's
<v Speaker 1>like all the shit you'd see in the Pacific Northwest.
<v Speaker 1>It's the climbing of the Pacific Northwest. And we're only
<v Speaker 1>an hour two hours west of the Amazon where we
<v Speaker 1>were before. We were all sweating balls, and uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>when they booked this tour and invited me to come
<v Speaker 1>on and help it, they told me to we were
<v Speaker 1>gonna stay at our friend's place in the Amazon, and
<v Speaker 1>it was nice, but this guy was like needlessly extravagant.
<v Speaker 1>It was kind of like a phrase of joy. It
<v Speaker 1>was uncomfortably extravagant, the kind of place I'm normally getting
<v Speaker 1>kicked out of. And so we stayed there for three nights,
<v Speaker 1>and I think and his staff was all really sweet,
<v Speaker 1>the cooks and shit, they were fucking you know, they
<v Speaker 1>were really wonderful people. They wanted to take a picture
<v Speaker 1>with me afterwards, which kind of weirded me out, but
<v Speaker 1>that's all right whatever. But uh, but everybody got sick.
<v Speaker 1>Camilo was pissing out his ass, everyone got diarrhea. Ever
<v Speaker 1>was fucking you know. I thought maybe it was like
<v Speaker 1>a neuro virus, because that happens sometimes you get neumal
<v Speaker 1>viruses sweeping through. But it wasn't as violent as a
<v Speaker 1>neuro virus, you know. It was just it was just
<v Speaker 1>mild food poisoning. I don't know, you know, maybe he
<v Speaker 1>ate some maybe didn't. Maybe no fruit didn't get washed
<v Speaker 1>and there was some turred on it somewhere. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know a way. Uh, that day, that day I was recording,
<v Speaker 1>I just felt fucking destroyed, just like the fatigue you
<v Speaker 1>feel after you do get food poisoning. And uh, but
<v Speaker 1>then you know, they gave me some electrolyte packets. Alex
<v Speaker 1>gave me some et cetera, and so then I kind
<v Speaker 1>of came back and uh some mambe the coca powder
<v Speaker 1>and put a little bit in your cheek. Coca powder
<v Speaker 1>and soacropia ash. That always helps you don't feel high,
<v Speaker 1>but it just like gives you a little bit. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, it's it's a it's nice. It's a nice plant.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, so then uh, we came after that, we
<v Speaker 1>went back up to Mara after three We spent three
<v Speaker 1>nights there. We didn't need to spend three nights there. Right,
<v Speaker 1>needlessly extravagant it was. It was not the most diverse.
<v Speaker 1>It was hot as a nutsack wrapped in a vinyl
<v Speaker 1>fucking sack next to a space heater, right like it
<v Speaker 1>was hot does a nutsack and a sun. It was
<v Speaker 1>just fucking not. But the it wasn't pleasant, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And he says things like that. He really alienates a
<v Speaker 1>lot of his viewers. I just don't, you know. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I really appreciate what he does for the plant science community,
<v Speaker 1>but I just he's just not my cup of tea.
<v Speaker 1>I just can't get it. I'm just I just imagine
<v Speaker 1>these conversations I've overheard or been exposed to. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the squares always think it's for them. It wasn't for you, buddy.
<v Speaker 1>It's very obviously not. But anyway, so, but the thing
<v Speaker 1>I did liked on it, there was a lot of
<v Speaker 1>members of Costs. They see the family which is in Zingibarele's.
<v Speaker 1>They have this spiral stem, this spiraling stem uh. And
<v Speaker 1>then these really bizarre flowers with one stamen that's fused
<v Speaker 1>to a stigma. And then they have pedaloid stamens. Right,
<v Speaker 1>so these like they look like petals, but they're essentially
<v Speaker 1>sterile stamens. They're pedaloid staminodes. Excuse me. So that was
<v Speaker 1>cool to see some of those because that family always
<v Speaker 1>blows my mind. Then you have marin Tasty, which is
<v Speaker 1>also in the ginger order, but those that's this Maritasy
<v Speaker 1>is more like your typical uh, you know, office plant,
<v Speaker 1>like you buy him at Ikea or shop lift them
<v Speaker 1>at Ikea and then put them on a desk somewhere. Right,
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's like, you know, they label it tropical folders.
<v Speaker 1>It's kind of marinthasty. Don't get too big. They got
<v Speaker 1>pretty leaves, they got different colors and patterns on the
<v Speaker 1>leaves right to make it interesting for the people who
<v Speaker 1>think there's nothing else worth paying attention to about plants.
<v Speaker 1>But I saw on Acarpus battoir b A T A
<v Speaker 1>u A pronounce however the fuck you want, that's a
<v Speaker 1>freebie right there, batulua. But how will and that it's
<v Speaker 1>it's this palm that's got these fucking thirty foot long leaves,
<v Speaker 1>like a single frond from pettiole to where it turns
<v Speaker 1>to racus, the racers is where it's got the leaflets
<v Speaker 1>on either side. It can be thirty feet fucking long. Insane.
<v Speaker 1>It's absolutely insane. And then the base of these leaf sheaths,
<v Speaker 1>there's this hair that peels off of them, so you
<v Speaker 1>get these mats of hair beneath it. Absolutely fascinating and cool.
<v Speaker 1>Plant ethnobotanically very important. They start in the forest. You'll
<v Speaker 1>be walking through this dense rainforest and then there's just
<v Speaker 1>this giant fucking palm. You know, before they get a stem,
<v Speaker 1>before they become coalescent, they become colessenant, like age thirty
<v Speaker 1>or something. I think they probably grow slow as fuck.
<v Speaker 1>They probably lived two hundred years. I don't know. Maybe longer,
<v Speaker 1>but it's if eventually they get a stem and they
<v Speaker 1>keep growing up and they eventually emerge through from the
<v Speaker 1>canopy saw Siba pentandra, which you know, you get siba
<v Speaker 1>grown as garden plants where I live. But the Siba pentandra,
<v Speaker 1>the ones when they form that giant buttress trunk that
<v Speaker 1>looks like a ficus, and a number of plants do that,
<v Speaker 1>I should. That's a convergent evolutionary trait. The form buttress trunks.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking palms, the dong palms, the walking palms, they
<v Speaker 1>form buttress trunks as well. That's what they're doing with
<v Speaker 1>those roots that emerge, you know, a meter or two
<v Speaker 1>meters up the trunk and then root themselves into the ground. Right.
<v Speaker 1>It's for stabilization. The pumps don't actually fucking walk. They
<v Speaker 1>might move, they might lean a little bit, they might
<v Speaker 1>shift their growing access a little bit as they if
<v Speaker 1>they're growing on the hillside and they lean over and
<v Speaker 1>their proper roots prop them up. But it's all just
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's all just buttressed trunks. It's stabilization and support.
<v Speaker 1>That in drip tips, the drip tips on the leaves
<v Speaker 1>where the the leaf turns into this would it be
<v Speaker 1>mocrinate point or aerostates, I don't know, you know, when
<v Speaker 1>it's basically trying to channel water off the leaf. Those
<v Speaker 1>are two things that the two traits, two of the
<v Speaker 1>traits that the many plants and related plant lineages converge
<v Speaker 1>on evolutionarily when they're growing in such a wet, vapor
<v Speaker 1>bathed environment. And it was great because we were on
<v Speaker 1>this hill and you could look out over and there's Onocarpus,
<v Speaker 1>that giant palm popping up here and there throughout the forest,
<v Speaker 1>and you can just see the fucking vaporizing off of it,
<v Speaker 1>you know. And there'll be a lot horizon line of trees,
<v Speaker 1>and then another horizon line of trees behind that, and
<v Speaker 1>then another horizon line of trees behind that, all different couts.
<v Speaker 1>It's fucking incredible beautiful. There was this guy Marley who
<v Speaker 1>brought uh water colors and he uses a little refillable
<v Speaker 1>brush pen that he fills with water and he'll just
<v Speaker 1>dip the tip into colors and then when he needs
<v Speaker 1>to change color, he just squeezes water out of it,
<v Speaker 1>which like flushes the inking and they can put a
<v Speaker 1>new a new water color and color in there and
<v Speaker 1>he was doing these sketches of of all the uh
<v Speaker 1>landscapes we went to. Is really nice, but that Siba
<v Speaker 1>was fucking dope. And everything's covered in mosses and brow
<v Speaker 1>fights and ferns and incredible shit. It was really incredible shit.
<v Speaker 1>Saw a member of the genus Teculia that had these fruits,
<v Speaker 1>these woody fruits that opened and then were covered in
<v Speaker 1>these little irdicating hairs that kind of stuck in you.
<v Speaker 1>Camillo picked one up and got these hair stuck in it. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was. It was a fucking dope trip. The Amazon
<v Speaker 1>was cool. It's the fucking Amazon, man. I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to look on the map and you see everything east
<v Speaker 1>to you and there's nothing there. It's just green. There's
<v Speaker 1>maybe a couple settlements here and there in a busted road.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>It was cool, man, It was fucking cool. And then
<v Speaker 1>I was out at one point, I was out taking
<v Speaker 1>pictures of plants on the road, Lots of ruder uls,
<v Speaker 1>lots of you know, invasive bullshit, you know, gingers from
<v Speaker 1>Asia or whatever, just you know, some native plants to
<v Speaker 1>a lot of pine, just native pioneer species. Fucking every
<v Speaker 1>bus that goes by just fill with indigenous people, right,
<v Speaker 1>because the only people who live east of there in
<v Speaker 1>the Amazon are mostly indigenous people. It's uh, I really
<v Speaker 1>love that though. Just looking on a map and you
<v Speaker 1>just see everything east it's just fucking dark green with
<v Speaker 1>very few human settlements poking up. Pretty incredible. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>after three nights of that, you know, you're like Jesus man,
<v Speaker 1>it's just vapor on everything. Shit molds so quick. So
<v Speaker 1>after that I went back to the Marah and then
<v Speaker 1>now I came up here because there was a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of shit I wanted to see, and I wanted to
<v Speaker 1>see this stuff in Banios for a while because it's
<v Speaker 1>you've got these, you know, large lava flows, columnar basalt,
<v Speaker 1>epic road cuts covered in puya's puya, glomarifhra. It's a
<v Speaker 1>it's a bermelia that looks like in a gave, with
<v Speaker 1>these incredible torch like inflorescences that emerge from them, tons
<v Speaker 1>of orchids, all all the shit I love. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's like this weird mix between chilly, foggy vegetation mixed
<v Speaker 1>with more xeric stuff, more drought tolerant stuff growing on
<v Speaker 1>these rocks, on these like these rocky outcroppings and microsites,
<v Speaker 1>like on the west side of Banios yesterday we saw
<v Speaker 1>borzicact this which was a it used to be in
<v Speaker 1>Kleisto cactus. It's a hummingbird pollinated cactus. You know, forms
<v Speaker 1>these stems that get maybe three four feet tall. But
<v Speaker 1>then they'll like fall over, you know, is the rocks
<v Speaker 1>they're on shift or part of the wall, the rock
<v Speaker 1>wall they're going on the roads, and then it'll form
<v Speaker 1>this little curve, you know, this little curving stem and
<v Speaker 1>they end up looking all it just looks fucking wild.
<v Speaker 1>Tons of cool orchids. I saw fragment Pedium lyndle lie
<v Speaker 1>ainum or lindinii. Excuse me, fragment Pedium lindinii growing in
<v Speaker 1>this really interesting spot Mike took me to. I guess
<v Speaker 1>he was collecting wasps there a couple decades, a decade
<v Speaker 1>ago or something, and uh, this fragmentedium, you know, fragment
<v Speaker 1>Pedium is an orchid. They're in the Lady slipper stupid
<v Speaker 1>common name Lady slipper subfamily, the sipper pedoid, which has
<v Speaker 1>two statemens and a staminode. Most orchids only have one stamen,
<v Speaker 1>especially the epidendrods, one stamen, one anther, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>then each side of the anther, each each each of
<v Speaker 1>the theka is a theka releases pollen. So it's just
<v Speaker 1>one stamen producing pollinia, but person of pollen nodules, because
<v Speaker 1>you know, epidendrods produced two polyin nodules, but it'll be
<v Speaker 1>one on either side. And that's on either side of
<v Speaker 1>the stamen, the theka, which are the yellow anther lobes.
<v Speaker 1>But so this this uh, this sip. The super pedioids
<v Speaker 1>are cool. They're not as species rich as the epith androids.
<v Speaker 1>But this what was interesting is that this I assumed
<v Speaker 1>all the super pedioids had a bag, right, that they
<v Speaker 1>had a uh, you know, a labellum that had been
<v Speaker 1>morphed into a bag and for the fly to go
<v Speaker 1>in and then to fly out the back whatever. But
<v Speaker 1>this didn't have that. This just had these really long teeples,
<v Speaker 1>probably four times as long as the flower had itself,
<v Speaker 1>the mass of the flower itself, the parient itself. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>I mean the peoples are of parents, but you know
<v Speaker 1>what I'm saying, right, they're fucking long peoples, right, long
<v Speaker 1>dong peoples and it just had a really bizarre morphology.
<v Speaker 1>And then you look inside at the column and it
<v Speaker 1>had these red hairs like it was mimicking rotting meat
<v Speaker 1>or something, you know, like it was mimicking dead animal flesh.
<v Speaker 1>And then it had this this other statement in the back.
<v Speaker 1>It was so fucking weird. And I sent it to
<v Speaker 1>some other orchid or nerves that I know, and yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was just God, it was bizarre. But there were
<v Speaker 1>tons of orchids there, you know, terrestrial orchids, and this
<v Speaker 1>thing was growing terrestrially just out of the ground. And
<v Speaker 1>the ground at this site we were at like sixty
<v Speaker 1>five hundred feet, it was remnant vegetation because everything around
<v Speaker 1>here is agriculture, or its pines or its fucking blue
<v Speaker 1>gum eucalyptus. There's more blue gum eucalyptus here than I've
<v Speaker 1>seen in Australia. I'm looking at a hillside that's been
<v Speaker 1>denudative native vegetation and is mostly pines now right. It's
<v Speaker 1>crazy to see. It makes me really wonder what was
<v Speaker 1>here before, because there's so little record of it. Like
<v Speaker 1>normally on agriculture you'll find and it's incredibly steep slopes.
<v Speaker 1>We saw greenhouses on the thirty degree slope yesterday. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it's so steep because these mountains are still
<v Speaker 1>being uplifted, right, it's the fucking andes, right, You've got
<v Speaker 1>the Nasca plates causing all this uplift that's subducting Naska
<v Speaker 1>plate is causing these mountains and these volcanoes. I'm looking
<v Speaker 1>at a volcano right now, Tungaragua volcano, bathed in vapor
<v Speaker 1>right like towering above you. It's really cool at night
<v Speaker 1>when like lights come on, because you know, it's like
<v Speaker 1>they got the Catholic dungeon everywhere. They got these shrines
<v Speaker 1>and shit, and you see these they're all lit up
<v Speaker 1>and it's like they look like they're in the sky.
<v Speaker 1>They're so high up there, you think that they're you forget,
<v Speaker 1>mountains can be that tall, right, taller than skyscrapers. So
<v Speaker 1>in a relatively short amount of time, like the slope
<v Speaker 1>is really steep, you know, like they're they're right there.
<v Speaker 1>It's like comb peak and uh you know they're big
<v Speaker 1>sur that's sir with the s U R, not big sir.
<v Speaker 1>You know, like you call you deity. Uh but anyway, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so uh this but this area that we had like
<v Speaker 1>this peat soil, it felt like subparramo vegetation. There was
<v Speaker 1>a cool back wrist there I'd never seen before, cool
<v Speaker 1>coyote bush, tons of orchids. There was like six or
<v Speaker 1>seven different orchid species, probably more. There was that wine
<v Speaker 1>Mannias species qunony A c. Which you can always tell
<v Speaker 1>is keunony ac because it denoted by those two uh
<v Speaker 1>uh half circle uh stipules that you get at the
<v Speaker 1>appical marastem of every shoot, you know, before the new
<v Speaker 1>growth emerges. Relatively uninspiring flowers. But whatever, But that was
<v Speaker 1>a that wye manny I've seen before. It was a
<v Speaker 1>pioneer species winged the winged stems too, or winged racus,
<v Speaker 1>the winged rackus where the leaves leap, the pinnate leaves are,
<v Speaker 1>the odd pinnate leaves are. God damn, I got fucking
<v Speaker 1>chiger bites on my ass. I got really taken apart
<v Speaker 1>by the chickers. What else did I see there? Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>I mean just just wild, really cool ferns. Uh. That
<v Speaker 1>epiphytic red liver wart that looks like a Spanish moss
<v Speaker 1>was everywhere. I mean, it's just it's a spot you see,
<v Speaker 1>and you just want to stop and check it out.
<v Speaker 1>There there was a oh yeah, and ruepalla rupala monosperma proteace.
<v Speaker 1>I saw this thing, this little this small tree, small
<v Speaker 1>shrub and a large shrub, small tree, and with these
<v Speaker 1>these giant, ovate, serrated leaves that felt like they were
<v Speaker 1>made out of plastic, very coreaceous. They felt like stiff leather,
<v Speaker 1>like a like a leather glove had been left to
<v Speaker 1>dry out in the sun, you know. And that's always
<v Speaker 1>for me, that's always a giveaway of prote ace, the
<v Speaker 1>bizarre Southern hemisphere plant family with woody fruits. It always
<v Speaker 1>has woody fruits. And you get the banksias in Australia,
<v Speaker 1>you got the fucking proteas used in the floral arrangements.
<v Speaker 1>And ship from South Africa got a South African accent.
<v Speaker 1>Is so punishing, man, there's just no offense, you know
<v Speaker 1>what I mean? That Dutch Afrikaans like, okay, never mind,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna I'm already of finding people again, but I
<v Speaker 1>just can't take the fucking accent. Oh It's like, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what it is. I don't know what you
<v Speaker 1>know what. I'm sorry I'm just gonna stop before I
<v Speaker 1>get myself out of trouble. But anyway, but the the
<v Speaker 1>soil was it was pretty dry. It had and rained
<v Speaker 1>in like in like two months. And uh, and the
<v Speaker 1>soil was like this, this black carbon rich pea, probably
<v Speaker 1>very acidic, which was enabling these things to grow here.
<v Speaker 1>Lots of cabin dishes too. Speaking of acid soils, we
<v Speaker 1>got eric acy cavin dishy is a prominent genus with
<v Speaker 1>those wonderful tube flowers for hummingbird pollination. But just tons
<v Speaker 1>and tons of interesting shit and uh and yeah, Rupaula
<v Speaker 1>monosperma was a cool one. Rupaula. I've seen that genus
<v Speaker 1>in Brazil. It's proteac again given away by those the
<v Speaker 1>texture and feeling of those relatively large leaves. I couldn't
<v Speaker 1>find influorescences on any and then I found an inflorescence
<v Speaker 1>full of the woody fruits. I would love to see
<v Speaker 1>it when it flowers. It's gotta be fucking wild. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>There was a cool Corsettia which is fabasi. This is
<v Speaker 1>more in the dry site. So we were at this
<v Speaker 1>this like Subparmo vegetation spot with all the orchids, and
<v Speaker 1>we drove to the drier site where there's native Apuntias
<v Speaker 1>species and Borza cactus with a little red you know,
<v Speaker 1>hummingbird pollinated flower coming out. You gotta look up Borza
<v Speaker 1>cactus and Cleisto cactus if you've never heard of them before.
<v Speaker 1>Very interesting. The whole genus Kleisto Cactus is hummingbird pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>Uc Berkeley Botanic Garden, probably the best botanic garden in
<v Speaker 1>the country, had a huge Cleisto cactus collection, and so
<v Speaker 1>all the different species. Right, This like adaptive radiation of
<v Speaker 1>these hummingbird pollinated high andian cacti really cool to see, right,
<v Speaker 1>but they all have that red flower. The hummingbird pollination
<v Speaker 1>thing is so fucking prominent in the andes. Of course,
<v Speaker 1>is this dog shit I'm walking on and it's just
<v Speaker 1>like horseshit. Okay, I feel better. I saw this dog
<v Speaker 1>as day. It looked like Rick James. It was like
<v Speaker 1>a white loss of apso. I don't know it was
<v Speaker 1>a muth, but it looked like Rick James because the
<v Speaker 1>hair had it was all like stringing shit and it
<v Speaker 1>was like hanging down the fucking doghead bangs it was.
<v Speaker 1>It was made all the more funny because it was
<v Speaker 1>talking ship to me. It was really upset that I
<v Speaker 1>was where it was. It was fucked I was fucked up.
<v Speaker 1>But the so then after that we went to the
<v Speaker 1>dry site, and we saw the dryer site on this
<v Speaker 1>like kind of like this rain shadow area of Bono's
<v Speaker 1>once all the rain's been squeezed up as the air
<v Speaker 1>ascends westward from the Amazon. And and that's where we
<v Speaker 1>saw the Borzicctus growing on these rock out croppings. There's
<v Speaker 1>a gave everywhere too, but I'm pretty sure it's not
<v Speaker 1>it's just naturalized, it's not native. Lots of interesting stuff.
<v Speaker 1>This whole area was so floristically diverse. Uh yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>I made a ton of collections pressings, uh and uh.
<v Speaker 1>But that corsetti was fucking weird too. That corsetti was
<v Speaker 1>really was was a Corsetti at Dubia I think, which
<v Speaker 1>you know is a pink Papoleonaceous faboid subfamily flower. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Camillo's got he's got permits from the the Anabio at
<v Speaker 1>the Keto, the Rbariamaketo. So we're collecting stuff for there.
<v Speaker 1>So I collected all I collected all that shit. The uh,
<v Speaker 1>the other interesting thing that I saw there too was crotons.
<v Speaker 1>There was so much croton diversity. There was this one
<v Speaker 1>croton that looked like California flannel bush, the genus Fromontodendron
<v Speaker 1>because it god damn man, which it was covered in
<v Speaker 1>this like this orange rusty scale, like pubescent, and it
<v Speaker 1>had kind of malvoid like malevasy looking leaves. Just a
<v Speaker 1>really fascinating plant, really interesting. You know, crotons up four bac.
<v Speaker 1>They have flowers, you know, spikes of male flowers subtended
<v Speaker 1>by female flowers. The mature at the ovaries and the
<v Speaker 1>female flower. The female ovary has three carpals, so three sections,
<v Speaker 1>and each section has a two branched style and stigma
<v Speaker 1>that comes off of it, so it's it almost looks
<v Speaker 1>like a stam and if you know, if you're not
<v Speaker 1>paying attention to the fact, there's this jar large ovary
<v Speaker 1>down there, because there's all these appendages coming off, you know,
<v Speaker 1>so numerous they look like stamens. But there was this
<v Speaker 1>what was a croton mentadora, and then croton I forget
<v Speaker 1>the other one you got. I gotta look in the
<v Speaker 1>Ecuador a catalog of ascular plants, or at the INET
<v Speaker 1>observations I made. But just the diversity was just fucking nuts.
<v Speaker 1>There was so, you know, you see one thing. That's
<v Speaker 1>how it always works. You go looking for one interesting thing,
<v Speaker 1>and you see six other things that are interesting, or
<v Speaker 1>ten other things that are interesting, you know, and then
<v Speaker 1>now you've got an interest in this, right, So you
<v Speaker 1>always just got to get your ass out there. You
<v Speaker 1>just got to get your ass out and look for
<v Speaker 1>this stuff. Right, get out of the fucking house, Get
<v Speaker 1>off the phone. Definitely, get off the fucking video games
<v Speaker 1>if that's what you're doing. No offense the fucking video games. Right,
<v Speaker 1>get out the social media stuff, comparing yourself to others.
<v Speaker 1>Realize what you're doing, your bad habits. It's sick, it's
<v Speaker 1>bad for you, it's bullshit. Don't do it. You're being
<v Speaker 1>fucking indoctrinated. Get out there, go look for some nice ship.
<v Speaker 1>So I think today, I don't know, we're gonna go.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe we'll go to Ambato. I gotta take the bus
<v Speaker 1>back down the hill eastward towards the Amazon to go
<v Speaker 1>rejoin my party. I don't know if you can hear this,
<v Speaker 1>but this is an Andy and J fucking weird bird
<v Speaker 1>stand out on a cliff looking at some tiny patch
<v Speaker 1>of remnant forest in the Banios area. Most of it's
<v Speaker 1>been cleared. You heard it. That's a violacious j The
<v Speaker 1>Andy and j flew up, but we got a violacious Jane.
<v Speaker 1>Now you gonna look those things up, like violacious, like
<v Speaker 1>a lush, like a luscious, luscious violet, luscious violet. J
<v Speaker 1>What are these fucking corvids? Man? All these fucking corvids. God,
<v Speaker 1>they're amazing. Ah made of Corvid's inherit the earth. Once
<v Speaker 1>we've fucked everything, I don't think there's any hope. I
<v Speaker 1>shouldn't be saying that out loud. There's no hope. I'm
<v Speaker 1>a catastrophist. Right. It's like any any alcoholic They any
<v Speaker 1>alcoholic ratic, they don't stop until they're forced through. Right.
<v Speaker 1>We're not gonna stop until we're forced to from our
<v Speaker 1>own bad behavior. Were there. We're forced to make room
<v Speaker 1>for the sacred within our society and have a place
<v Speaker 1>for the living world. It's a cool bird though, Oh
<v Speaker 1>this is you gotta listen to this stone. It's a
<v Speaker 1>couple of days later, it's a day later. Listen to
<v Speaker 1>this stone, isn't it nice? That's Jillian Welch. See suddenly
<v Speaker 1>I pick on a persona of like a sixty five
<v Speaker 1>year old lesbian that lives by yourself with like five
<v Speaker 1>cats in New Mexico or something. But it's a fucking
<v Speaker 1>beautiful song and there's nothing wrong with me. And it's
<v Speaker 1>sixty five year old lesbian that lives alone with five
<v Speaker 1>cats in the middle of a desert in Mexico. It's
<v Speaker 1>actually that's a that's not a bad you know, if
<v Speaker 1>you come out like that, that's not a bad way
<v Speaker 1>to end up, you know, if you've made it through
<v Speaker 1>sixty five fucking years of this life anyway. At Jillian
<v Speaker 1>Welch is great. She's liked some of my stuff before
<v Speaker 1>on Instagram, but she don't follow me, probably because I
<v Speaker 1>fucking annoyed her. You know. See, I think it happens
<v Speaker 1>with a lot of people. They they see a video
<v Speaker 1>I did or something, and then they look closer and
<v Speaker 1>they're like, yeah, that's you know what. This guy's kind
<v Speaker 1>of crass and and and obnoxious, and maybe I just
<v Speaker 1>won't And that's fine with me. That's pleasant. That's the
<v Speaker 1>way I've lived my life anyway. So I'm fucking back,
<v Speaker 1>I'm chilling at hobbies. He's gone, I'm putting together a
<v Speaker 1>burium labels. It is remarkable how fucking long it takes
<v Speaker 1>for some of this plant material to dry out. You know,
<v Speaker 1>when you come from a climate like that of Bono
<v Speaker 1>Sekwood or in Tungaragua Province. Uh, you know the shit
<v Speaker 1>swear it's it never gets hotter than eighty degrees and
<v Speaker 1>everything's just bathed in raper all the time. It's very
<v Speaker 1>hard to dry out. The last couple of days, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I was hanging out with the crazy entomologist. He's an
<v Speaker 1>eccentric and uh, and just going through some really notable habitat.
<v Speaker 1>It is wild how much of the fucking habitat Again,
<v Speaker 1>I know I just said it, but it's wild how
<v Speaker 1>much of a habitat has been destroyed like we we
<v Speaker 1>And I went out with this wife the next day, Alina,
<v Speaker 1>who studies the genus Monina, which is in polygalaci And
<v Speaker 1>there's like eighty different Monina species. They look like pea flowers.
<v Speaker 1>They're always purple and with like maybe a hint of yellow,
<v Speaker 1>and they can be shrubs. You see them in Parma
<v Speaker 1>vegetation a lot, generally at higher elevations. Sometimes you'll see
<v Speaker 1>him in lower elevation tropical forests. They kind of look alike.
<v Speaker 1>They're cool, but they kind of look alike. And anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so we were driving around, like the other side of
<v Speaker 1>the mountain and Bonios, going past these fucking incredibly sketchy
<v Speaker 1>cliffs where you know, like maybe I said this already.
<v Speaker 1>The road used to be two lanes, but now it's
<v Speaker 1>like one and a half because the other half of
<v Speaker 1>the lane fell off the cliff. And so it's it's
<v Speaker 1>terrifying territory. It's like, you know, the type of shit
<v Speaker 1>where you're like, fuck it, I'll just get out and walk.
<v Speaker 1>I feel safe for walking than being in a car.
<v Speaker 1>And we were driving past all this, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>it's it's a lot of blue gum you can lit
<v Speaker 1>this and pine probably I guess it's radiota pine. And
<v Speaker 1>there's just nothing in the original vegetation left. Supposedly indigenous
<v Speaker 1>cultures that lived there before had cleared most of the
<v Speaker 1>forest or set fire to it so they could graze
<v Speaker 1>el pacas, I guess, and lamas. You know that the
<v Speaker 1>fuckers had spit on you, you know, with the fucked
<v Speaker 1>up teeth I had. I got spin on by a
<v Speaker 1>lama two years ago. I never really shook it off.
<v Speaker 1>There was some church I went. Is this church the
<v Speaker 1>near where I lived? They kept lamas upsid. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking priest is that he loves he loves the animals,
<v Speaker 1>and it's lama. I went to go pettit and it'd
<v Speaker 1>spit on me, and then my daughter started laughing at me,
<v Speaker 1>and it was, you know, it was the lama was
<v Speaker 1>the thing was a to be honest, all right, I
<v Speaker 1>know I can be a pain of the ass too,
<v Speaker 1>but the fucking lama was an asshole. And that's just
<v Speaker 1>the way it goes. Sometimes you meet a lot of
<v Speaker 1>these fucking lamas that are are and camel lid, you know,
<v Speaker 1>these South America, South American camel lid bastards that are
<v Speaker 1>just assholes. Have you ever met a nice one? Have
<v Speaker 1>you ever met one that was kind and soft? Right?
<v Speaker 1>It's not like that. It's not like if you meet
<v Speaker 1>a donkey. I've met plenty of nice donkeys and uh, horses,
<v Speaker 1>and shit, I've never met a nice lama. They're kind
<v Speaker 1>of assholes, you know. And if you're gonna be species,
<v Speaker 1>just you know, it's just call it what it call
<v Speaker 1>a spade a spade, right, what is it? What does
<v Speaker 1>it fucking saying mean? Hopefully I didn't just say some
<v Speaker 1>racist shit? What does it mean to say call a
<v Speaker 1>spade a spade? I don't know what is a fucking spain?
<v Speaker 1>Is that a fucking racist term? Did I just say
<v Speaker 1>some racist shit? Fuck? Anyway, So we were looking for
<v Speaker 1>remnant patches of forest and uh fuck the lamas. We
<v Speaker 1>were looking for remnant patches of forest. We finally found some,
<v Speaker 1>and there was a Heliocarpus americanus, which is malvesi, and
<v Speaker 1>it's got these really like kind of cool tiny white flowers. Big.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, the leaves look malvacious. They look like that
<v Speaker 1>kind of single lobed quasi maple leaf, look large tree.
<v Speaker 1>There was lots of members of Qunoniace. You know, they
<v Speaker 1>got the resin. Keunoni Has always have the resin. They're
<v Speaker 1>kind of a boring plant genus, but they can be
<v Speaker 1>really cool. I just don't know enough about them. And
<v Speaker 1>the leaves all look the same. They got opposite leaves,
<v Speaker 1>segmented stemins. They're generally very glabrous. We saw some of those,
<v Speaker 1>but again very steep vegetation. Puya's on everything. Piccarnia. What
<v Speaker 1>was it Pickearnia pungens or I figured this red flowered Piccarnia.
<v Speaker 1>It looks fucking wild. It doesn't. It almost doesn't look
<v Speaker 1>like Jesus Christ. Yeah, I've tried to come outside to
<v Speaker 1>get peace. There's fucking I gotta stock. I'm dropping too
<v Speaker 1>many f bombs from cursing, you know a lot. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>this Piccarni is really unique. It looks like kind of
<v Speaker 1>like a geophytic member of asparagacy, and it's got the
<v Speaker 1>monoca thing going on. It's got these bright red flowers
<v Speaker 1>coming off of eighteen twenty inch tall scapes or race seams,
<v Speaker 1>but the leaves don't look bromeliad like it all. And
<v Speaker 1>it is a bromeliad, and it was dominating these rocky
<v Speaker 1>outcroppings of basalt. It's got the fucking rocks. They were amazing.
<v Speaker 1>Just you'll see you'll find like a fifty foot tall
<v Speaker 1>layer of columnar jointed rock with a sketchy road, winding road,
<v Speaker 1>you know, at the base of it. The whole thing
<v Speaker 1>is covered in orchids and PuYas and uh puya glamariphra.
<v Speaker 1>Everything's bathed in water vapor. It's just like gray all
<v Speaker 1>the time, and then you'll just see these these cliffs
<v Speaker 1>of basaltic magma that cool these lava flows that probably
<v Speaker 1>happen I don't know, ten million years ago, maybe maybe
<v Speaker 1>more recently. But you know, the whole the whole mountain
<v Speaker 1>chain is consistently being uplifted, and so that's why it's
<v Speaker 1>so steep. It's because the mountains are still growing, and
<v Speaker 1>so they're kind of growing. They're growing faster than they're
<v Speaker 1>being weathered and eroded. But we found some patches of
<v Speaker 1>remnant vegetation what the forest looked like. Because everything around
<v Speaker 1>a town of Bonios, which I guess they're claimed the
<v Speaker 1>fame with sugar. There's all these like you know, gross
<v Speaker 1>like little sugar tiendas everywhere, candy tiendas and shit for sugarcane.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, but we found some patches of native vegetation
<v Speaker 1>and you know, got like a minute to get into it,
<v Speaker 1>but it's again very steep. There was wine Mania spruciana,
<v Speaker 1>another member of Keunoniac. There was Cunonia. There was heliocarpus.
<v Speaker 1>There was Trema micranto, which is cannaba. See it basically
<v Speaker 1>looks like a hackberry. It's like a pioneer species, edible
<v Speaker 1>little berries in it. Kids up in all this stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Romelia is up in all this stuff. Everything's covered in mosses.
<v Speaker 1>It's basically a cloud for us. But uh, and thank
<v Speaker 1>god there was these little bits left because there's so
<v Speaker 1>little again, like I said, the hills on everywhere it's dominated,
<v Speaker 1>it's all cleared. There's grasses, the odds, shrub here and there,
<v Speaker 1>maybe a monina, and then pines and eucalyptus everywhere. The
<v Speaker 1>fucking eucalypus. I've seen more eucalyptus there than I've seen
<v Speaker 1>the Tasmania. And we work. We went the Keto yesterday
<v Speaker 1>to Cruises. I guess my buddy Cruise got an apartment.
<v Speaker 1>Cruise is kind of an eccentric. He's always walking around
<v Speaker 1>his sandals with one of those little you know bags.
<v Speaker 1>He looks like he's just perpetually on some vision vision quests,
<v Speaker 1>like if you're gonna meet someone who's gonna give you
<v Speaker 1>acid in public, you know, just because like so you
<v Speaker 1>bump into him at a fucking, you know, burrito spot
<v Speaker 1>or something. If there's gonna if there's someone who's gonna
<v Speaker 1>do that, they would be Cruise. And he got this
<v Speaker 1>little so he got an apartment. He's got this goofy
<v Speaker 1>mustache too, which I say and endearingly. He's a friend
<v Speaker 1>of mine, but it looks hilarious. It's like a fucking
<v Speaker 1>Hulk Hogan mustache. But then he's like this neo shaman
<v Speaker 1>fucking I don't know. He's an eccentric. He's an eccentric.
<v Speaker 1>So we went and crashed it at his apartment get
<v Speaker 1>our shit together. After sitting on his bus smelling like ass,
<v Speaker 1>you know, maybe not ass, smelling like you know, we'd
<v Speaker 1>been we'd been out in the field, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>half the crew got fucking diarrhea. I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>they ate, right, And so and Camillo's been staying at
<v Speaker 1>Cruise's spots, so we went there to go collect ourselves.
<v Speaker 1>And he lives next to this park, in this kind
<v Speaker 1>of Fraser area, like a more fancy area of Keto.
<v Speaker 1>I went to the park. The park's all eucalyptus. It
<v Speaker 1>reminds me of Oakland Hills. It's all eucalyptus. And then
<v Speaker 1>in the Understey there's these little patches of native remnant vegetation.
<v Speaker 1>There was a cool dahlia like a beautiful shrub dahlia.
<v Speaker 1>The flowers and all the native vegetation are super bright
<v Speaker 1>and vivid, probably because of hummingbirds. This is at nine
<v Speaker 1>thousand foot eleve. There's not a lot of bees. The
<v Speaker 1>only bees you'll see are the occasional bumblebee and that.
<v Speaker 1>But moths, of course can get by at those elevations
<v Speaker 1>and the chili temperatures. I guess they got some insolation
<v Speaker 1>and they can vibrate their wings too to drum up
<v Speaker 1>some heat. And then uh, and then lots of hummingbirds
<v Speaker 1>like this, what was it? Discover? What is it? The
<v Speaker 1>fucking scarlet violators? I forget something violetator. There's so many
<v Speaker 1>hummingbird species. But again it's just like it's again, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's just like it's like the bay. It's all eucalyptus
<v Speaker 1>and then horticultural atrocities. There was a catoniaster. What do
<v Speaker 1>you You don't want to see a Katonia aster in
<v Speaker 1>the cloud force of Central America. That's that's like disgusting
<v Speaker 1>and insulting, you know, to it's it hurt me, It
<v Speaker 1>hurt my spirit inside. Right, It's like I would rather
<v Speaker 1>turn a corner and see, you know, a fat homeless
<v Speaker 1>lady taking a ship, and no offense to fat homeless women,
<v Speaker 1>but I'd rather see that then a katoni aster, whether
<v Speaker 1>it's in someone's landscaping or just naturalized on a landscape. Right,
<v Speaker 1>there's something almost charming you see, like like a fat
<v Speaker 1>homeless lady taking a ship. Maybe she flips you off
<v Speaker 1>and get you know, tells you to go fuck yourself
<v Speaker 1>or something that's kind of funny. That's like a charming thing.
<v Speaker 1>I'd say, Aha, you know, that's that's a nice urban
<v Speaker 1>experience seeing a katoni aster, right, This fucking horrible horticultural atrocity.
<v Speaker 1>It's not something you want to It's not it's not
<v Speaker 1>a nice it's not a nice experience. There's no way
<v Speaker 1>to romanticize that, you know what I mean. This reminds
<v Speaker 1>you of suburbs. It's like spiritual death. And so anyway,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah, there was a spartium junsium Spanish broom that
<v Speaker 1>was naturalized too. But then again, coming up amidst this
<v Speaker 1>was just whatever remnant native vegetation had been able to
<v Speaker 1>survive the first donslaught of bulldozers and the planting of
<v Speaker 1>horticultural atrocities. There was a Bomara, that cool dahlia. There
<v Speaker 1>was a native clematis that the cloud forests are so
<v Speaker 1>cool because you're at these at these elevations where the
<v Speaker 1>climate never quite freezes, it gets damned close to it
<v Speaker 1>never quite freezes, and so you're getting all these lineages
<v Speaker 1>that are generally from North America, but unlike North American lineages,
<v Speaker 1>they've all got these vivid ass colored flowers. Like the
<v Speaker 1>dahlia had these vivid purple flowers. The bo Maria had
<v Speaker 1>vivid red flowers. The clematis it was a fucking clamatus.
<v Speaker 1>I don't wanna care for them too much, but had
<v Speaker 1>big leaves right, because it's super humid. It's a cool temperature,
<v Speaker 1>but it doesn't really freeze and it rarely ever gets
<v Speaker 1>over eighty And then everything's been selected for by hummingbird pollination,
<v Speaker 1>and hummingbirds like very vivid flowers. It's what they're attracted to.
<v Speaker 1>Saw Kevin Dishy up there too, in the eucalyptus hell
<v Speaker 1>and the eucalyptus dungeon. I shouldn't even say dungeon because
<v Speaker 1>the dungeon could be nice, like if I was in
<v Speaker 1>an orchid dungeon two days before in Bonios looking at
<v Speaker 1>this this slope of columb A basalt that was covered
<v Speaker 1>in terrestrial orchids. Right, But if if you're gonna see
<v Speaker 1>if Eucalyptus, I mean Euculudse globulus, the forests where their
<v Speaker 1>native are great, they're you know where they're they're not
<v Speaker 1>a monoculture, and there's all kinds of cool shit there.
<v Speaker 1>They've evolved therever millions of years. When you see a
<v Speaker 1>planted eucalyptus, hell, it's it's too miserable to even be
<v Speaker 1>called a dungeon. It's worse than that. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>fucking I don't know, it's like an office park. So
<v Speaker 1>that that's what it u. That's what that's what that
<v Speaker 1>was the background setting forever there's like ninety percent eucalyptus.
<v Speaker 1>And then they had a Cacia melonoxalon too, which is
<v Speaker 1>invasive as hell throughout the bear as well. Very similar
<v Speaker 1>climate to coastal California, like a lot of the same
<v Speaker 1>horticultural garbage, horticultural atrocities. But there was a cavin this
<v Speaker 1>year there was a Govinia orchid which has that little
<v Speaker 1>like uh sickle shaped Labellum I guess or is there
<v Speaker 1>a soupin eight flower in their two sickle shaped dorsal sepals.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know either way, it's a once you see
<v Speaker 1>a govigna. They all kind of have the same gestalt
<v Speaker 1>and their flowers. So it was cool to see that
<v Speaker 1>there was still some stuff coming back, but overall it
<v Speaker 1>was you know, Oh, and there was a there was
<v Speaker 1>two Mimosa species, one with this orange, rusty pubescence, which
<v Speaker 1>I've seen in a lot of cloud forest stuff, which
<v Speaker 1>is remarkable. I wonder what selects for that, Like, we
<v Speaker 1>were seeing these cloud forest ingas you know, the genus
<v Speaker 1>of ice cream bean Fabasi, the leggum family, and they
<v Speaker 1>had this same thing, this orange pubescence. So what selects
<v Speaker 1>for that orange pubescence. It can't be the heat because
<v Speaker 1>it's not. It's never really hot there. Maybe it's a
<v Speaker 1>little dry, but it's a it's a bizarre habit, but
<v Speaker 1>it's it's really cool too. It gives the plants these
<v Speaker 1>really cool looks to them, right, like orange orange tiny hairs. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I'm getting carried away talking about Keto. That was just
<v Speaker 1>let's go back to the fifty foot layer of columnar
<v Speaker 1>jointed basalt, which is then topped by a three hundred
<v Speaker 1>foot layer of black more like a blackish ryolt. I
<v Speaker 1>guess it could be basalt. It looks it doesn't quite
<v Speaker 1>have the texture of basalt. It looks like it might
<v Speaker 1>be more intermediate like a true andesite, like a darker andesite.
<v Speaker 1>And then above that you'll have one hundred foot so,
<v Speaker 1>you know, one hundred foot of more volcanic rocks. So
<v Speaker 1>the whole All in all, you've got these six hundred
<v Speaker 1>and seven hundred foot tall cliffs of volcanic rock, all
<v Speaker 1>completely covered in orchids. There was Spanish monster, there was
<v Speaker 1>Telansia oostennioides there, which was wild. Must be a very
<v Speaker 1>different eco type. Well maybe not. Maybe it's just I'd
<v Speaker 1>love to do a study on that. Because Telansia oostenuoides
<v Speaker 1>can occur in New Orleans, or in the pine and
<v Speaker 1>oak forest of Nuevo Leone at six thousand feet or
<v Speaker 1>here in these chilly, scrubby habitats. It's like scrub where
<v Speaker 1>it's thinner soils and on rock and a dry site,
<v Speaker 1>and then like forest where it's you know, like you know, shielded.
<v Speaker 1>I don't. That's a good question too, because these habitats
<v Speaker 1>were weird. It's I mean, there was the Borza cactus
<v Speaker 1>area where the bores of cactus was growing. Borzic cactus
<v Speaker 1>was on like the west side of Banos. But meanwhile,
<v Speaker 1>the cloud forest is like five miles away, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And it's just it's like this micro climate, tons of
<v Speaker 1>micro climates, right, like lots of diversity of climatic setting
<v Speaker 1>in a in a very close area and like a
<v Speaker 1>small geographic area. And that's where the cool crotons were.
<v Speaker 1>There were like three different species of these, these shrubby crotons. One,
<v Speaker 1>like I said, looked like Framancia, looked like California flannel bush.
<v Speaker 1>The other croton meant the doris. All these shrub crotons
<v Speaker 1>were amazing. They were fucking beautiful. Man. It's the leaves,
<v Speaker 1>not the flowers, because the flowers on No one talks
<v Speaker 1>about the flowers on crotons right times. Can be large trees,
<v Speaker 1>they can be shrubs, they can be herbs, annual herbs.
<v Speaker 1>It's a it's a big ass genus in euphoury ace.
<v Speaker 1>But these were just again the orange pubescents. There was
<v Speaker 1>another there was a white one growing on this rock
<v Speaker 1>outcropping next to this sketchy road. Fucking roads are terrifying.
<v Speaker 1>No one slows down and you but you have to
<v Speaker 1>go to the rock outcroppings because that's where all the
<v Speaker 1>cool xerophytic shit is, you know, even though you're technically
<v Speaker 1>in a cloud forest setting. Yeah, really really cool. There
<v Speaker 1>was an a punthia there as well. Uh, there was
<v Speaker 1>what appeared to be Tacoma stands, but it looked slightly different.
<v Speaker 1>It looked like a tree. I'm not even convinced it
<v Speaker 1>was Tacoma stands. I don't know what the fuck I saw.
<v Speaker 1>It looked like Tacoma stands, big noniac catalpa family, the
<v Speaker 1>odd pinnate leaves, the yellow tube flowers. But it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>look like that Tacoma stands you're gonna see in Nuevo
<v Speaker 1>Leone or that especially the Tacoma stands you're gonna see,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in city of County, West Texas, where it's
<v Speaker 1>dry as hell, which never forms a tree. It was
<v Speaker 1>just it was such a bizarre Again, the more I
<v Speaker 1>travel and the more I see, the more I just
<v Speaker 1>start to give up on the idea of species. It's
<v Speaker 1>just this fluid, constantly shifting orb there's no boundary around it.
<v Speaker 1>But again it was what was really cool about this
<v Speaker 1>site was just, I mean, really interesting vegetation. Tons of
<v Speaker 1>tons of cool orchids, you know, these these scrubby habitats,
<v Speaker 1>and then you'd have these more forested settings on the
<v Speaker 1>slopes in you know, where there was any forest left,
<v Speaker 1>you know, consisting of clusia. There was a Serawias species
<v Speaker 1>actinidyac And then they were cultivating citrus. They were fucking
<v Speaker 1>cultivating citrus on these slopes, even though it never gets
<v Speaker 1>warmer than eighty degrees fahrenheit, so that it makes you
<v Speaker 1>wonder what the shit they're doing, and you know, Florida
<v Speaker 1>or South Texas, because citrus doesn't really seem to like
<v Speaker 1>it that hot, you know, one hundred degrees especially. They
<v Speaker 1>were growing citrus cat to see be on Lake Whale's Ridge,
<v Speaker 1>which is an extremely dry site in central Florida, and
<v Speaker 1>see that they were demolishing so much of that that
<v Speaker 1>built these shitty orange gropes, and that oranges somehow became
<v Speaker 1>the state logo of Florida, that god forsaken state, rather
<v Speaker 1>than any of the cool native vegetation they have there,
<v Speaker 1>tons of which I've still got to make videos about
<v Speaker 1>because I never got around to it. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you know, so what I would do is I would
<v Speaker 1>get things down to g I could always get things
<v Speaker 1>down to genus if not family, and then I would
<v Speaker 1>have to go on different websites. If you go to
<v Speaker 1>Symbiota dot org and go to portals, you'll get a
<v Speaker 1>list of all these different herbaria orbarium collection websites like
<v Speaker 1>Consortium of California or Baria or Sinat you know Southwest
<v Speaker 1>sw Biodiversity dot org, or in a BA which is
<v Speaker 1>the Ecuador site, or Red Day or Barrios Meicanos which
<v Speaker 1>is the Mexican side I was using when I was
<v Speaker 1>in Hidalgo. Super helpful. And then you would type in
<v Speaker 1>you could go to the map. You can draw a
<v Speaker 1>polygon around the area war you can type in a
<v Speaker 1>family or a genus, see everything that comes up, and
<v Speaker 1>then get that name and then go to uh, where
<v Speaker 1>would I what? What was the other website? Then I
<v Speaker 1>have to go to another website to look at orbarium
<v Speaker 1>digitize their barium specimens, the Neotropical Flora portal Neotropical dot
<v Speaker 1>Symbiota dot org. I'll put this stuff in a I'll
<v Speaker 1>put all this shit in the in the website description.
<v Speaker 1>If I don't, you could write me and remind me.
<v Speaker 1>But this is the way that I do everything because
<v Speaker 1>I don't use fucking I don't use flora's, I don't
<v Speaker 1>use get the key stuff out. That's nerd shit. I'll
<v Speaker 1>do that, you know, sometimes if I'm really unsure of
<v Speaker 1>the discrepancies between two species. But again, there's so much fluidity.
<v Speaker 1>Often the people who are writing these floras are people
<v Speaker 1>that don't get out much. They couldn't describe the gestalt
<v Speaker 1>of these different species or the different habitats. Right, They're
<v Speaker 1>just fucking nerds, no fence. They're just fucking nerds who
<v Speaker 1>aren't feel botanists like they're internbarium looking for whatever micro
<v Speaker 1>characters they can to try and differentiate between two sets
<v Speaker 1>of pressed plants. Right Whereas if you were to talk
<v Speaker 1>to someone on difference between this species and this species,
<v Speaker 1>someone might say, well, this is more of a zerophytic plant.
<v Speaker 1>This is a plant this is whereas this plant's one
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna see in more in cloud forest and this
<v Speaker 1>one they can look a lot alike. But the you
<v Speaker 1>know this the petiole often as this orangeesh pubescent senta
<v Speaker 1>where the petiole on this one's glabrous. You gotta look closely.
<v Speaker 1>They often, you know, one is prescribed to a different
<v Speaker 1>habitat that you'll frequently see growing with a suite of
<v Speaker 1>other plant species versus this is more of this kind
<v Speaker 1>of habitat or habit like it'll you know, like soacritiax
<v Speaker 1>horiza and Iriardia del tody the two species of walking
<v Speaker 1>pums that don't walk. Iriardia, they both send out prop
<v Speaker 1>roots right. Iriardia looks much more like a dong, it's
<v Speaker 1>more phallic. Socritea has these little pins that come off
<v Speaker 1>of the roots that are sharper. Socritilla sends out adventitious
<v Speaker 1>root bud six feet up, whereas Iriardia rarely ever sends
<v Speaker 1>roots out from more than a meter high up. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's it's stem right. But both are palm quote trees,
<v Speaker 1>not real trees. They don't produce secondary but but you
<v Speaker 1>know what I mean, you know, so I don't use
<v Speaker 1>I don't use the flora's that much because there they're
<v Speaker 1>not helpful. They're not fucking helpful, and they're not it depends.
<v Speaker 1>Some can be really helpful Powell's trans pecos h Flora,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or flora. The trans Paco's helpful because he
<v Speaker 1>actually goes into describing the habitat, and he took the
<v Speaker 1>time to write, you know, descriptions as if you were
<v Speaker 1>talking to him and he was described and he knows
<v Speaker 1>the plants, he knows the habitat, he's seen them, he's
<v Speaker 1>been out. You know. There's nothing I can't stand more
<v Speaker 1>than fucking armshair boon. It's no fence. I have people
<v Speaker 1>who talk a lot of shit and act all cocky,
<v Speaker 1>but have never been out into the field. They have
<v Speaker 1>never seen these things. They've never eaten shit, they've never
<v Speaker 1>sweat and fallen off cliffs nearly and cut themselves or
<v Speaker 1>gotten stung or bit or you know anyway. So that's
<v Speaker 1>what I'm doing. I'm going through all these press plants
<v Speaker 1>trying to figure out what the fuck species you know,
<v Speaker 1>and put labels, and then I'll go in later and
<v Speaker 1>describe the habitats best I can. There's nothing worse than
<v Speaker 1>just the dry, bare bones are buried. Label. You really
<v Speaker 1>got to you want to describe things. You want to
<v Speaker 1>make sure if someone's reading that fifty years from now,
<v Speaker 1>when you're dead that they're going to be able to
<v Speaker 1>get a good, good you know, idea of what the
<v Speaker 1>habitat was like if it's still there, and it probably
<v Speaker 1>it probably won't be because you know, the whole human
<v Speaker 1>tumor thing. Right, Oh guy, here we go back to
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. Back on the way to South. They spent
<v Speaker 1>the night in San Antonio last night, flew into the
<v Speaker 1>hobbies in Austin. Spent the night in San Antonio. WHI,
<v Speaker 1>there's a nice town. They got a lot of old warehouses,
<v Speaker 1>old infrastructure, their train tracks. Uh and uh. And then
<v Speaker 1>now I'm back to set back to South Texas, towards
<v Speaker 1>the Rio Grande Valley heat island of billboards and car
<v Speaker 1>dealerships and asphalt where people hate the street trees because
<v Speaker 1>the concrete is so clean. It's so clean. It's all
<v Speaker 1>it's not messy, it's clean. Oh god. Anyway, it was
<v Speaker 1>funny talking or when I got on a plane out
<v Speaker 1>of Keto, there was an astonishing amount of culturally of
<v Speaker 1>the whites, the cultural whites, people who are culture really white.
<v Speaker 1>You could be Mexican and you can be culturally white.
<v Speaker 1>You can be any any quote race. Remember, race doesn't
<v Speaker 1>really exist it's just human phenotype as a result of
<v Speaker 1>natural selection from a population being at a certain latitude
<v Speaker 1>and the vitamin D and vitamin BAT deficiencies that afflict
<v Speaker 1>human populations at both high and low latitudes, respectively. But
<v Speaker 1>but you could be any color, and you can be
<v Speaker 1>culturally white. And there were a lot of people that
<v Speaker 1>were culturally white. They were also you know, phenotypically white
<v Speaker 1>Caucasian on the plane, but they were culturally white, and
<v Speaker 1>they were all they were in first class. And it
<v Speaker 1>was like, I think maybe because the plane was going
<v Speaker 1>to Atlanta. It was like a Keto to Atlanta flight,
<v Speaker 1>and so you know, it's a bunch of rich cunts
<v Speaker 1>like in a first class it's and it's funny that
<v Speaker 1>they put them in first class so that all the
<v Speaker 1>peons have to walk by and judge them, like I
<v Speaker 1>like I did. I was very I was very obviously
<v Speaker 1>judging them. You know, I don't know why you would
<v Speaker 1>want to fly first class. You're gonna pay an ass
<v Speaker 1>load of money for five hours of comfort. Really, you're
<v Speaker 1>that much of a fucking pussy You can't take being uncomfortable,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, being stuck up right in a seat
<v Speaker 1>that doesn't recline sniffing someone's ass in front of you
<v Speaker 1>for five hours, because that's what it is. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's face to ask on these airlines today, right the
<v Speaker 1>way they packed people in there. You can't you can't
<v Speaker 1>tolerate that. You're so much of a fucking princess you
<v Speaker 1>need to fly first class. But it was it was
<v Speaker 1>it was like it was a very culturally white setting
<v Speaker 1>and it felt I mean, it was so culturally white.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it's just because it was going into the South
<v Speaker 1>or something. I don't know. Look, I'm being regionally racist
<v Speaker 1>here that it felt like, you know, a plantation cosplay,
<v Speaker 1>like in a Civil War reenactment. You know, that's what
<v Speaker 1>it felt like, you know what I mean, like the
<v Speaker 1>primpt and proper puckering, puckering crackers. Oh, I can't believe
<v Speaker 1>they letting the Negroes vote now, Like it's that kind
<v Speaker 1>of shit you'd expect to hear from this demographic, all
<v Speaker 1>fucking buttered asses, you know, all primped and fucking pampered.
<v Speaker 1>It was funny, man. I uh, I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna be like to grow up in the South.
<v Speaker 1>Should ask some of my friend, you know, what was
<v Speaker 1>it like? Growing up there. It's a fucking weird place.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure there's I'm sure there's charm about it. I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure there's a lot of weird shit too. It's like anywhere,
<v Speaker 1>it's just different flavor, right, what is the flavor like there?
<v Speaker 1>But it was fucking where. There was some guy reading
<v Speaker 1>that he had a break. He was clutching a brand
<v Speaker 1>new copy of Bill O'Reilly's new book. You know. It
<v Speaker 1>was It's like, it's just hard for me to be
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's hard. It's hard. I judge not. I'll
<v Speaker 1>be nice to anybody, but I'm just saying, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the ship you could made, expect to hear some of
<v Speaker 1>those anyway. Whatever, Okay, moving right along. It was odd
<v Speaker 1>for me, guy, I guess because I hadn't I hadn't
<v Speaker 1>been around culturally white people in quite some time, you know,
<v Speaker 1>especially where I live. I mean, the only time you
<v Speaker 1>see Anglos where I live in general, not even culturally
<v Speaker 1>white anglos. Uh. You know, when the Mormons are coming
<v Speaker 1>to Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses are coming to pray on
<v Speaker 1>you know, poor Hispanics where I live, which is that's
<v Speaker 1>what they do. They come and they prey on them.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you take advantage of someone's low economic status
<v Speaker 1>and the fact they might be more willing to believe
<v Speaker 1>bullshit than you know, your average schmuck who might be
<v Speaker 1>better educated and have you know, more of an economic
<v Speaker 1>footing to stand on, and you pray on them. That's
<v Speaker 1>how you get them to join your cult. So but anyway, okay, listen.
<v Speaker 1>Uh So I went into fucking I went into Atlanta,
<v Speaker 1>and I didn't even get a chance to declare my
<v Speaker 1>barium specimens because they just take a photo of this dude,
<v Speaker 1>this surly dude who looked like he was very unhappy.
<v Speaker 1>He was working for Customs and Border Patrol, so that
<v Speaker 1>might be the case. He told me to stand in
<v Speaker 1>front of a camera, and a camera takes my photo,
<v Speaker 1>you know, presumably using the face recognition software. You don't
<v Speaker 1>even get asked if you can declare anything, because I
<v Speaker 1>always declare my specimens. And then and then they fuck
<v Speaker 1>can they just shuff with They spitch you out and
<v Speaker 1>you go get your bag and that's it. So it was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it was surprising. It was the technology is
<v Speaker 1>replacing the Uh, I guess it's just gonna be the
<v Speaker 1>norm now. They take a picture all the face recognition. Shit,
<v Speaker 1>what how if you get if you get like lip
<v Speaker 1>injections and the facelift, how does that affect the face recognition?
<v Speaker 1>Can face recognition take that into account, like for mar
<v Speaker 1>A Lago face and shit, wouldn't it be funny? I
<v Speaker 1>like to do one of those face tune apps where
<v Speaker 1>I inject my own face with lip filler and it
<v Speaker 1>looks like I'm just making duck lip selfies all the time,
<v Speaker 1>Like what is it like? Bezos his wife? Have you
<v Speaker 1>seen her? She's hilarious, you know, she got the whole
<v Speaker 1>It looks like a fucking wax mannequin like it that
<v Speaker 1>like partially melted. It's amazing though, It's really hilarious. So
<v Speaker 1>I'd like to I do that occasionally. Sometimes you can
<v Speaker 1>download the face tune app and do that to yourself
<v Speaker 1>to see what you look like. Anyway, Okay, I think
<v Speaker 1>we're almost here. I will say the Amazon was really nice.
<v Speaker 1>I you know, you have to be in a mindset
<v Speaker 1>to be in that kind of setting just because of
<v Speaker 1>the high amount of swamp ass and schiggers that one
<v Speaker 1>encounters there. And but and it's remarkable, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>and also I mean, tropical plants, a lot of them
<v Speaker 1>look very much alike if you don't have reproductive structure,
<v Speaker 1>so it kind of forces you to focus more on
<v Speaker 1>very subtle leaf characteristics like is it petiolet, how long
<v Speaker 1>is the petiole? What's the margin? Like, of course opposite
<v Speaker 1>are alternate leaves, but that's a given anyway, Venation I
<v Speaker 1>was doing a lot of I was paying a lot
<v Speaker 1>of attention to leave venation because you know that you
<v Speaker 1>don't have much to go on. You don't have much
<v Speaker 1>else to go on it because the s A lot
<v Speaker 1>of shit's not flowering because it's on the understory, there's
<v Speaker 1>not much light, or the reproductive structures are way high
<v Speaker 1>up if it's you know, a leana, a robust mine,
<v Speaker 1>or if it's a tree, so you know it's it's
<v Speaker 1>a whole different mindset. And then yeah, there's chiggers on everything.
<v Speaker 1>You've gotta get chiggers. You go to the Amazon, you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna get schigers. But I can see falling into that
<v Speaker 1>mindset of like lowland tropical botany, because not all tropical
<v Speaker 1>botanies alike. Obviously, there's a range of elevations that dictate
<v Speaker 1>the different different environmental pressures in different settings. You know that.
<v Speaker 1>I'm definitely like the higher elevation stuff more. It's more
<v Speaker 1>more of a temperate setting, you know, climates that rarely
<v Speaker 1>exceed eighty degrees fahrenheit, and the thin air causes more.
<v Speaker 1>You know, that thin air too causes a wider it
<v Speaker 1>means the you know, obviously, the the air can't hold
<v Speaker 1>onto as much heat at night, so it cools off
<v Speaker 1>wider fl sluctuations between temperature, which is when you've got
<v Speaker 1>day and night temperatures, you know, varying so much. That's
<v Speaker 1>a unique suite of environmental pressures that then select for
<v Speaker 1>different traits right where you get the fuzzy leaves, you know,
<v Speaker 1>increased UV because there's less atmosphere. I like all that stuff.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's a it's something that people who have only
<v Speaker 1>ever practiced botany or you know, paid attention to plants
<v Speaker 1>in the temperate latitudes. It's a suite of traits that
<v Speaker 1>they may not be used to and that they you know,
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't foresee. It's a whole different fucking ball game. But
<v Speaker 1>I like that the higher elevation stuff you'd have to
<v Speaker 1>get in a whole different mindset to do to do
<v Speaker 1>lowland tropical botany, and maybe one day I'll be in
<v Speaker 1>air for it. You know, maybe one day I won't
<v Speaker 1>care if my ass has twenty chigger bytes on it
<v Speaker 1>all the time. You know, you'll like one heels and
<v Speaker 1>stop stitching and you just get another one. That doesn't
<v Speaker 1>mean you know, you just you always have chigger bytes
<v Speaker 1>on your ass, or you're you're you know balls, or
<v Speaker 1>could you get chigger pikes in your laby? I hope
<v Speaker 1>not that you know. See, we asked the important questions
<v Speaker 1>here at crime pace. Guy, what a fucking chiggers are horrible, man, horrible?
<v Speaker 1>And I still haven't found a way to get rid
<v Speaker 1>of them? If anybody knows of a way to prevent them.
<v Speaker 1>That's not just permethrin. We all know about permethrin. What
<v Speaker 1>do do you take vaciline? Can you make a concoction
<v Speaker 1>of vaciline and sulfur and slather it on? What do
<v Speaker 1>you do? Because they crawl up your pants and then
<v Speaker 1>they'll go in your fucking waistband and your shirt and everything.
<v Speaker 1>You can't even see the little fuckers. And then what
<v Speaker 1>are they doing when there's no people around? They're mostly eating?
<v Speaker 1>What are they what are they parasitizing little rodents and
<v Speaker 1>reptiles and shit? I don't know. Keep thinking back to
<v Speaker 1>that pristamanthus frog we've seen with the tadpoles on its
<v Speaker 1>back because it's so cute, or excuse me, it was
<v Speaker 1>an ecuador a poison frog. It was different genus, I believe,
<v Speaker 1>but I had the little tadpoles on its back. She
<v Speaker 1>was carrying her tadpoles on her back. Isn't it cute?
<v Speaker 1>Or is it the males that do that? I don't
<v Speaker 1>fucking know anyway, But you know, the the lowlands, that's
<v Speaker 1>a whole other world. You gotta prep yourself. It's hard
<v Speaker 1>to go back and forth between the different mindsets of
<v Speaker 1>mid to high elevation tropical botany and then true low
<v Speaker 1>lowland rainforest tropical botany. I'm here for it, though, man.
<v Speaker 1>The amount of fucking Leanna's so many, so many leanis
<v Speaker 1>down their roebust vines, right climbable vines. So anyway, I
<v Speaker 1>gotta go to thorn Scrub. The bobcat was at thorn
<v Speaker 1>Scrub last night. We've had a pig. We've been trying
<v Speaker 1>to kill it as as well. That comes through, but
<v Speaker 1>good luck because they are. The pigs are so good
<v Speaker 1>at avoiding being detected. I think Javier said that when
<v Speaker 1>him and his friend were down there, they had luck
<v Speaker 1>doing a call like mimicking an injured animal, and that
<v Speaker 1>actually helped bring the pigs in. Because the pigs are
<v Speaker 1>looking for shit to eat. They think they can eat
<v Speaker 1>an injured animal. They're gonna go for it, so that
<v Speaker 1>that might work, But then you would need some sort
<v Speaker 1>of normal scope or something too. I just can't wait
<v Speaker 1>to shoot one of these motherfuckers. I hate the fucking
<v Speaker 1>I hate feral pigs. They're just they're so damaging, so
<v Speaker 1>fucking damaging, way more so than Havelinus could ever be,
<v Speaker 1>and way bigger than Haveleena could ever be as well.
<v Speaker 1>Hopefully that bobcat was eating some of the rabbits, though,
<v Speaker 1>we get the little desert cottontails. You know, there's a
<v Speaker 1>relative of wolverines that lives in the rainforest as well,
<v Speaker 1>like a lowland tropical wolverine relative. What is that? I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what that is. Anyway, we'll end it there.
<v Speaker 1>Thanks for listening. Hopefully you know the background noise. I
<v Speaker 1>wasn't sitting at home in my office with the nice
<v Speaker 1>mic you know, I'm just recording the shit on my phone,
<v Speaker 1>so hopefully the background noise was okay. Were you okay
<v Speaker 1>with it? Are you gonna be okay? Huh? I still
<v Speaker 1>hope you got something out of this. I'll be in
<v Speaker 1>Saint Louis. I'm giving some presentation on the twenty eighth
<v Speaker 1>of February or March first. I forget what date is.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I gotta look at my calendar. I'm
<v Speaker 1>doing a number I'm going. I'll be at the Carnivorous
<v Speaker 1>Plant Society in May. I'll be at the Aeroid Society
<v Speaker 1>presentation in September. I'll be where else am I going?
<v Speaker 2>Oh?
<v Speaker 1>I'm doing some book thing at the end of April.
<v Speaker 1>I'm supposed to speak on April eleventh at the San
<v Speaker 1>Antonio Book Fair, but I'm probably gonna go to the
<v Speaker 1>Philippines instead because I got invited to go and out
<v Speaker 1>of San Antonio book for it. They're not paying me
<v Speaker 1>enough for my time up there, you know, let's say,
<v Speaker 1>because I got to drive and everything, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>I forget what else. I'm gonna be doing a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of other things too, but I forget, who gives a
<v Speaker 1>shit whatever? You'll catch me around sometime sooner or later.
<v Speaker 1>I hope you're having a good day. I hope you're
<v Speaker 1>having a real nice time, and I mean that genuinely,
<v Speaker 1>even though it sounds like I'm being so casting. Have
<v Speaker 1>a rest of your day, and again, I'll put some
<v Speaker 1>resources in the description here for Ecuador Botany, as well
<v Speaker 1>as the course materials folder. That's all I got. Go
<v Speaker 1>buck yourself by