Neotropical Oak Forests & Bush-Checking Becky

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
The genius of the crowd. There is enough treachery, hatred, violence,
absurdity in the average human being to supply any given
army on any given day. And the best at murder
are those who preach against it, and the best at
hate are those who preach love, and the best at war,

(00:40):
finally are those who preach peace. Beware the average man,
the average woman.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Beware their love.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Their love is average, seeks average. But there's genius in
their hatred. There's enough genius in their hatred to kill you. You
to kill anybody. Not wanting solitude, Not understanding solitude, they
will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own.

(01:14):
Not being able to create art, they will not understand art.
They will consider their failure as creators only as a
failure of the world. Not being able to love fully,
they will believe your love incomplete, and then they will

(01:35):
hate you, and their hatred will be perfect, like a
shining diamond, like a knife, like a mountain, like a tiger,
like hemlock their finest art.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Hello everybody, and welcome to the crime pace. What Body
Doesn't Podcast got back from Costa Rica two days ago
from uh from doing the little Tour from hosting the tour.
It's fun. It's like it's like a fucking it's like
field expeditions mixed with in the field teaching and learning
and then just seeing cool shit and uh, you know,

(02:18):
a couple dildo jokes here and there, you know a
little bit of turetts uh, you know that kind of thing.
It was. It was great. It was everyone that came
was was fucking wonderful. You know, there was everybody. They
all walks of life. People showed up and then we
just went. We were at high elevations the whole time,

(02:39):
didn't go into the lowlands at all. We were basically
above we were above nine thousand, We were above eighty
five hundred feet for almost the entire trip. So high up,
so high, high elevation cloud for us. And I loved it.
I had a great time. Man. I was sad to
see everybody go, you know, we had there were all
different kinds of people, young people, old people. It was

(03:01):
a it was a wonderful time. And we stayed at
two different spots, but again all and it was oak
forest and Paramo and those oak forests. Holy hell, it was.
It was so it was so nice, you know, that's
why you go out. You go out to those places
to try and bottle that stuff up so you could
take it back with you when you have to return

(03:22):
to the real world. Like yesterday, I was sitting in
the low income clinic trying to get tested for COVID
and flu because I caught something on the way back.
I had like a cough and just felt fucking out
of it. Now you know, my internet diagnosis has I've
arrived at coccidio mycoasis, which is a fungal infection of
the lungs. My dog had it at one point, Louis

(03:44):
had it. I had to get her prescription antifungals. I
had a GP at the time who was on the
level I had insurance back then, and I don't have insurance,
so I go to these miserable clinics. It was horrible.
It was a terrible experience, but a perfect welcome home
to South Texas. You know, I was sitting in the
clinic just realizing the futility of everything and how the

(04:04):
broken American healthcare system, and also kind of kicking myself
for not just going to the er and giving them
a fake name, which is not only ethical but feels
really good. To do. You know, it's it's like it's
those little things you can do, you know, chalk up
fifteen thousand dollars on a private hospitals, you know who's
certainly run by sleeves, bags on their bill, and then

(04:27):
you know, walk out with you know, it turns out
you were just being you had psychosomatic issues, you're little
paranoid whatever, you're a hypochondriact. But at least you got
to ring out fifteen k worth of charges and you know,
not incentivize a broken system, which is of course what
we have in the United States for anybody who's not

(04:48):
familiar how broken it is here anyway. But after the
after we left, after the tour was done, we went
to our fringe, Shankar's Reserve in uh which was a
little bit east, like these oak and magnolia forests, and
they were just I mean, it's fucking intoxicating. It's they

(05:11):
were so I mean I left. There was a different
species of oak and it was a little bit lower.
It was like seventy two hundred feet here. And I left,
you know, I was in the Houston Airport eating some
figurative shit on Sunday. The Houston Airport me have a
special relationship. It's like it's given me a new version
of hell to imagine, you know when I get there,

(05:31):
Like there's all these different versions of hell. I've gone
over this before. You think of what your own personal
hell would be, and you have fun with it too.
You know, what would be the shittiest, what would be
one of the shittiest situations I could find myself? And
like not just physically torturing, like you've got the hot
poker in the ass and everything as well, but but
spiritually and emotionally torturing too, you know, like just driving

(05:55):
down an endless I thirty five quarter where everything is hideous,
everyone is a money grubbing sleeves bag, everybody is a
member of the death cult that's been fully indoctrinated into
worshiping money and shining shiny things, zero substance, and it's
just an endless for eternity, just an endless scenery of
car dealerships and strip malls and billboards for personal injury attorneys.

(06:19):
That's a version of hell. And then of course, like
you gotta think music too, like the types of terrible
music you'll be listening to. What would the soundtrack to
this hell look like gets very excited, very creative. You
can run wild, like, yeah, what would be the worst music?
Like pop country? That song about the guy who you know,
he says money can't buy you everything, but it can

(06:40):
buy him a boat, you know, has a personality of
a fart that takes jim selfies probably something like that.
You know, I really go down a wormhole with this.
But anyway, you know, when I'm in those places like
the I thirty five Corridor or really any any major
commercial and densely populated thoroughfare in the United States, that's

(07:01):
when I need to pull out my bottle that contains
memories from the oak force of the San Jose Province
in the Talamanco range of Costa Rica. You know, I
can think about Quirkus sapotafolia and Quirkus copayensis and Anthurium
consonatum and the monsteras I saw growing epiphetically and these

(07:22):
massive oaks with buttress trunks like buttress trunks, like hourglass
shaped flanked trunks like a bald cypress, but they're they're
oak trees. And you look one hundred and twenty feet
up you can't even see the leaves barely, and you
could tell they're eden, they're very they're very chewed on
by caterpillars and all these surely what are all these

(07:43):
other cool organisms? Because these oaks are so immensely important.
And they were dropping acorns too, you know. I had
half a mind to smuggle some acorns back in the
old prison wallet, you know, but I didn't. You know,
it's always it's always easy going through customs. It's always
some nice I go through. I declare my specimens, you know,
because the customs people are just working class schmucks too,

(08:05):
you know, So I get on with them, and then
they just inspect my you know, dried pressed plants. If
I take some herbarium specimens, which I guess you're not
supposed to do, but I only took a few, and
they're going to an erbarium. You know, it's for science.
So I just didn't do the proper permitting. Maybe we'll
do that next time, and I would gladly collect for

(08:27):
the Coasta Ricaarbarium. I need to hit the I need
to hit the Coastal Ricarbarium next time I go, because
that's really the only way you can figure out some
with some of these plants. And there's so much diversity,
it's fucking insane. It's mind thembing Eric Casey alone. Uh
just wild Vaccinium constanguinium is on my hot list now,

(08:47):
you know. It's the shrubs, the small trees growing at
ten thousand feet elevation. Edible berries can also look like
Vaccinium floor abundum. The differences in the key are minuscule.
That's part of the reason I really don't fuck with
keys in most cases. Let's see what they are. Okay,
So this is from Flora manuel de plant as, the

(09:07):
costa rica volumin sinko that catalidneas eccludes the ac to
Gunner Racey. That's where Eric Casey is, between the seas
and the g's Cavin dishy is. There's so many Cavin
dishy is. How many times did I say woody ligno tuber,
which is of course the storage mechanism that so many
of these epiphytic members of the blueberry rely on for

(09:31):
the dry season. You just you'll be you know, you'll
just see this like giant, you know, football sized wooden
knob just dangling thirty feet up from an oak tree.
It's rooted into the moss and the thing and the
bar it's rooted into the moss on the bark, and
it's just like, I guess what the fuckay? Uh, They're everywhere.

(09:53):
I saw one that looked like the Baltimore fatburg. It
was growing on a camaro Staphlus arbutoides that was on
we did. We went to Vulcan POAs No, No, it
was Vulcan Erasu. It was Irazoo Volcano and there was
the mass the most massive woody ligno tube where I've
ever seen. It was like the size of like a
baby carriage, just just fucking massive. And I believe it

(10:15):
was Macleania, which is another genus of eric Casey. I
gotta find I gotta find someone who studies these fucking things.
The neotropical eric Casey are insane and they're something I
first learned about and uh, just from seeing them in
the cloud forest areas of the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden

(10:35):
or the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Do you want to
study cloud forest stuff or you're curious what it looks like,
go to those places. I've I heard. San Francisco Botanical
Garden got liquidated and they started doing the East coast
botanic garden shit, you know where they plant like all
the tasteless shit like the petunias, and you know the
Hallmark Gardens. You know, instead of it being a museum
for science, it's more of just like something for rich

(10:57):
weddings and you know, genteels and shit to get there,
their uh lily white photos taken in front of you know,
that kind of lame shit. They fill it up with
lame shit that looks like the Home Depot garden section.
Speaking of which Fort Worth Botanic Garden has Nandina domestica
is a specimen plant. They're botanic garden. I couldn't believe it.

(11:17):
Maybe they removed it. I don't know. I was there
in twenty twenty one. When the fuck was I there
twenty ninth? I can't even remember when it was, maybe
twenty nineteen. It was a long ass time ago. But
they had they had invasive species planted as specimen plants.
It was fucking brutal. Oh my god, I dream. I
dream of stealing a riding lawnmower and just go into
botanic gardens like that and just just making salad out

(11:41):
of all this shit they got planted. These old lady
rich old lady, excuse me, rich old genteel gardens that
are just you know, they mimy. They echo everything from archaic,
you know, aristocratic European nineteenth century bullshit. It's fucking oh
oh oh, it's so terrible. I would that's another version

(12:03):
of hell right there. I ared you know, that's what
it is. I'm stuck in a garden like that. I
get stuck in, locked in after hours night at the museum.
Instead of night at the museum, it's night at the
fucking East Coast Hallmark style botanic garden, and that, you know,
all the shit comes alive, these horticultural atrocities. Nandina domestica.
There's these little goblins sticking hot pokers in my ass

(12:25):
and flagulating me with Nandina Domestica, beating me with the
fucking Siberian elms and the boxwoods and the crape myrtles,
and fuck you just made me think of something horrible.
I blame you, the listener, Okay, anyway, let's get back
to Eric Kogano kaelks oh, that's a lovely or let's
get the vaccinium. Let's look at how how how useless

(12:46):
the key is. I just looked at this so Vaccinium consanguineum,
which is up in the paramo. It's a blueberry vaccinium,
just like cranberry, same genus, and it grows to these
fucking things and get upwards a twenty or thirty feet tall,
but they can also be five feet tall. There's lots
of plasticity, and you'll see that with camaro staphlus too,
the arbutist relative. It looks like a madrone. Are beautiful

(13:07):
fucking trees, so gorgeous and a lot of cool Michael
Riisel mushrooms of course, under these things like like sign
a Monte Cola, which I did a short video on.
I mostly did shorts. I didn't do many long videos.
I just didn't have it in me. I don't give
a fuck. I got videos left from Ecuador and Chile
to edit, and I'm just not there. I'm so burnt out, man,

(13:27):
you know, I'm in the Houston Airport of the mind.
I was sitting in a fucking what is it, some
cafe for four hours, which is sitting still sucks too,
but I was sick, so it was easier. I was
sitting in a cafe and I got like a Portobello
burger and just rotted there. I had a six hour
layover on this Sunday and it was just, you know,

(13:52):
it was an experience. It's weird. The Costa Rica airport
is all Americans. It's fucking crazy, man. It's you feel
like you're going to Gringo Landia. It's very you know,
I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'm glad
that they're getting out. I'm glad the Americans are leaving
their own country. But it's still it's doesn't It feels
weird and everything's expensive as fuck. Costa Rica is expensive

(14:12):
as fuck anyway. Okay, Vaccinium constanguinium, but it can look
like vaccinium flora bundum. I mean they I'm sure I
probably miss messed up the two identifications on. I don't
really care, you know. All you gotta know is the
big vaccinium is Vaccinium constanguinium flora bund Them supposedly tops
out at a meter meter and a half. But let's

(14:33):
let's look at the differences in the key. They're right
next to each other in the key. Where the fuck
did it go here? It is? Yeah, the vaccinium page
two seventy nine at volume five A manual day plant
that's day costa rica vallumen shinko the code and lay
donais no donaas Donaus said, fucking you know, I missed

(14:53):
up the My Spanish is sufficient, but I really fucked.
They want okay uh vaccinium consanguinium. Plant that's henaald mente
or bustos or or bullies, shrubs or trees, rakis dayla
inflorescence one to four centimeters ped bedissilo's one to two millimeters.

(15:14):
And then the difference is plant this henteral mente, herbo suffertessent,
herbs or shrubs, rakis dayla inflorescence hasta okay one point
five centimeters. Okay, So the difference is that the rakies,
the the inflorescence rackis is on constantinium it's one of

(15:36):
the four centimeters, and on flora abundant it's one point
five centimeters. The fuck it? How helpful is that pedicels
one to two millimeters on constanguinium, pedicels one point eight
to five point five millimeters on flora abundant. So the pedicals,
the stalks that hold the flowers are a little bit
longer on on flora bundum. That's fucked. That doesn't help

(16:01):
me at all. They're a little bit longer the pedicels
and it's generally shrub. But again phenotypic plasticity if you
hit you know, if you're looking at a consanguinium, a
plant that can get a turn into a tall tree,
but it happens to be growing dwarf because it's a
new tree and poor boggy soil sphagnum soil and the parmo,
then it can be misleading. I think the inflorescences are

(16:23):
generally longer, much longer on Consanguinium, while the pedicels of
the flowers are longer on the floora. But this is
why it doesn't. You can't sum up a gestalt of
a plant and a flora. Floras are helpful sometimes, you know,
I don't it just and they're fun to have and read.

(16:44):
This thing costs one hundred bucks by the way, too,
there's that thing too, And it's not online because that
would make too much sense if you put in PDF
fourm put online that would be too easy. So you know,
and then the asta ace section is fucking massive. It's
another tome. This is like a fifteen pounds. There's a
fifteen pound book ten pounds maybe I don't know, but anyway,

(17:06):
but these these oak forests were just fucking incredible. H
And then you're in the oak forest, and then of
course above that you hit the parmo and there's still
little bits of the tree line. There's still there's still
trees around. There's Corcus coasta rickensis up there, just really
cool kind of curve. You know, they look like ovate

(17:28):
oak leaves, but the margins are revolute, so it looks
like it's kind of a concave lens in the margins
of the leaves kind of fold under a little bit
and not fold under, but you know what I mean.
They got they got a lip to them. And then
you know, it was really curious too because chiscaa uh
what was it? Subtessalata is the main it's a bamboo

(17:49):
that just scays. If you didn't listen to the Chisca
interview with doctor LYNK. Clark, you should because they're fucking awesome.
The the neotropical bamboos are incredible. You know, they're not
hollow like the Asian bamboos, which makes much better for caning.
You know, if you ever need should you ever need
the cane someone or if you're into being caned whatever,
I'm not kink shaming here, but Ciskea subtests a lot

(18:10):
is everywhere and it dominates in these open areas. It's
a bamboo, but it only it tops out of like
six feet tall, and it forms these little colonies. But
then you know, and then you've got all this other
interesting shit growing around it. Pullyadessa larioides. You got these
like these little ponds that fill up that are maybe
only a foot and a half deep, and they've got

(18:34):
this sedge growing in them Heliocarius acicularis. It looks like
an isoheedes almost it looks like like an upside down
octopus if the tentacles were just straight and kind of spiny,
and it can be fully submerged or sticking out of
these ponds. And the ponds they're only yeah, again like
a foot deep maybe if that you know, they were

(18:55):
dry when I was there in April. But but it's
just the most bizarre landscape. And I say, cloud forests
and parma are probably some of my favorite plant habitat
after deserts. They're just incredible, more than thorn scrub I
love these places because it's pleasant to be there. You
don't feel like you're gonna keel over from heat exhaustion
and the parmo. But the diversity is just it's mind blowing. Man.

(19:21):
And so the chiskea, this bamboo is everywhere, and you
look at it and you kind of try to you're
trying to figure out what keeps the trees from encroaching.
We're up here at ten thou five hundred feet thirty
three hundred meters and the trees. I mean, it's not
altitude or excuse me, elevation alone that is keeping the
trees away, because the trees can clearly grow. You could

(19:42):
see them off one hundred yards to the distance, same
elevation growing. There's a forest there, it's you know, got
a fifty foot tall canopy. But here in this open area,
the chiskeaya is dominant, and it's this acidic soil. I
looked at one of the rocks. It felt kind of
like gabbro, like an intrusive the intrusive igneous version of basalt,

(20:05):
which is extrusive igneous, so iron rich black. That gabbro
is a mafic rock, so it's got high iron content
in it, so in high rainfall it probably weathers to
red very iron rich, leeched nutrient poor rock. Maybe it
had said, I assume it's something to do with geology.
But you'll see these vast expanses of Chiskea punctuated by

(20:25):
esclonium or tillioides, another tree or Hesperomilees obtusifolia, which is
generally a much smaller tree, but only a few poking
up out of the chiskeya. You know, Oreopanax or a
chef fleira. I don't know the differences between the two
because it's a real clusterfuck. You know, they rarely ac
ginseng family is another thing. It's hard to find inform.

(20:49):
The differences between these genera are not They're very subtle.
It's hard to figure out. They're inflorescence differences in inflorescence architecture.
I don't know. It's a fucking nightmare, and especially when
the thing is like, you know this Oreopanicx can get again.
On these dwarf soils, it could be eight to ten
feet tall in the forest down below. On a richer

(21:09):
soil it can be forty feet tall or oreo panics
I guess, but they all got glabrous leaves, you know,
And I guess they produce a berry. But but I
assume it's geology that keeps the paramo the paramo. But
whatever it is, it's this very low growing plant community

(21:31):
filled with interesting shit, probably very acidic soil. The puya
is probably one of the coolest things, you know, a
pineapple relative. Oh, they were flowering two They had little
blue tube flowers and the hummingbirds were hitting them just
you know, these large green hummingbirds hitting these things large
for a hummingbird, just fucking just incredible. Man. I didn't
expect them to be blooming. And then there's Phagnum magillanicum,

(21:55):
you know here and there bright red Sphagnum moss very
wet too, like the soils, very wet. And we were
there for the mushrooms mostly. And yeah, we saw like signum.
We saw a lot of micael rhizel stuff with the
kamaro Staphilus and the vaccinium and the corcus. The oaks
were fucking wild down at lower elevations. A few days
after the tour ended, we saw Amanita coast three keensis cool.

(22:18):
Amanita looks like it's got all this, uh looks like
it's got lint hanging off the margin, like the way
that the the I guess it's the veil. Allen will
probably correct me if I fucked this up. But the
way that the veil, the remnant veil hangs off the
cap the margin of the cap is just incredible. Makes
it look like lint. You know, it is a micro

(22:39):
hizl mushrooms. So these are all you know, fung guy
that are symbiotic with these oaks. And there was a
book that I actually ended up downloading called what was
it called? It was by uh who is it? By
Martin kappel Ka P. P. E. L. L. E. Called
the Kalga and Conservation of Neotropical Montane Oak for us

(23:00):
with a photograph of some of the habitat that we
were in. But you know, these these there's so much
it's such a mystery to me. Still. The cool thing
was the Chiskeaia. You know, this is a boggy area
with a lot of peat. You can feel it's like
a squishy soil up in the parmo and the peat
is created by the dead roots of the Chiskeaa. Of

(23:21):
these massive colonies of Chiscaia. When they die, the roots
turn into this peat and they don't really decompose, and
that gets this spongy thing that you're walking on. There
was erringium humanly up there too, a relative of rattlesnake
master and carrots. The plant known in the Midwest colloquially
is rattlesnake master. It was a small herb. It only

(23:44):
got about six to eight inches tall, but there was
there was so much, so much good stuff there. And
then of course there's these salamanders I guess that have
some sort of relationship with the puya. There was a
paper done on them, and one of the places we
were staying, the guy told us that the researchers had
actually accessed the Parmo through their land and the Parmo

(24:05):
habitat that we were visiting. I mean, the Parmo is
in some cases right off the highway, you still have
to hike to it. But this Parmo was, you know,
it was it was like a two or three mile
hike in, and it was pretty pristine because of it.
And there were just these massive PuYas everywhere, looking like sodalls,
looking like dasilerian ah. And the whole you know, everything's

(24:29):
got fuzz on it because of the intense uv and
the frost, and it was it was really really pretty remarkable.
So we were in the Parmo for a day or two,
maybe a day and a half, and then we were
based that We stayed at like two or three two
different spots on this tour. One the last one, the

(24:51):
last one we stayed at, you know, it was a
it was I think it was at like ninety three
hundred feet. It's fucking chilly, but you could see the
whole Milky Way at night, and then there were are
enough trails there to just go fuck around here, go wherever.
There was so much to see on this this property
that these people owned, and it was cool. The people
that ran this spot were basically from the US, but
they dipped out in the sixties because it's you know,

(25:13):
to avoid the draft, because they knew that the country
was going to ship and that Vietnam was bogus, so
they dropped. They they moved down to Costa Rica and
just basically started a homesteadying and set up and then
now that's just where they live and they have a
They got some nice dicks. It's nice. They built their
They built their own house out of local lumber. Yeah,

(25:34):
it was cool, but you know, the plant communities there
were just wild. So you get oak forest, this high
elevation montane oak forest where you'll see orchids. And we
saw Telepogon coast three councas, which is a really peculiar
little orchid that mimics uh female. The flowers mimic female
attacking it flies and you could see it when you

(25:54):
look at them, like the center of the flowers, like
this black fuzzy thing mimics female attack and it flies
to get the male fliers to try and hump it,
thus pollinating it, and it seems to work pretty well.
So sexual deception and orchids. How many instances of this
are there? It's so common, it's great. There's gonna be
thousands of cases of thousands of different species that use

(26:16):
sexual deception and insects for their pollination. Then there was
Anthorium's growing there too, and it was this forest was
interesting because it was mostly dominated by oaks. There was
Escalonium martilioides, which I mentioned before can also turn into
a big as tree, but you know in the paramode
only tops out at ten or twenty feet, which is
really peculiar to me. The tree cover here. It's so variable.

(26:38):
The same species can have such it can grow so differently.
Saw Nasa speciosa, which is in the velkra Le family.
Lois Sace it's his stinga. It's things you big orange
flowers and it's things like hell. And most of the
stinging members of that family are from South America. You
get Menzelia and unite in North America, the rock net

(27:00):
and blazing star whatever the common name is from Menzilia.
I used to see them all, the Menzilia what is
it leptocullis, the big one in California is a showy
best You to see that around the Mount Shasta area,
like right off the highway, right off five five. But
and then there was a Budlaya but leya scutchy eye,
which is like an eighty foot tall bod lay You know.

(27:21):
Bud Laya the genus of quote butterfly bush horticultural atrocity,
bad invasive out east in the East United States. It's
from Asia. But uh, you know, here's a here's a
species that's native to Central American cloud forest and can
get eighty to ninety feet tall, massive trees. And I
finally got to see Cilandra bracket calyx, which is a

(27:43):
night shade leana. It's not really vine leana. Leannas are
like leannas are a whole different habit than vine. They're
much generally much bigger. They grow in tropical areas. They
you know, the nodes tend to be further apart, because
these things go eighty feet up a tree to reach
for light, and so so Landro bracket kalyks I had
because I'd gotten seed from Martin Grantham who had one

(28:06):
at his house in Emoryville, and I had planted it
at my house in the ground and it ended up
almost wrapping around the entire house. And to get these
giant yellow flowers on it. You know, it looked like
night shade flowers probably ten inches long and six inches across,
pollinated by bats. And then when they're pollinated they produce
an edible fruit. That is, the flowers are supposed to psychoactive.

(28:28):
Who the fuck knows, I don't know if that's if
that's true or not. But the fruit looks like a
giant yellow tomato, but it tastes sweet and it's guy.
I don't have, however, many seeds inside, and those you know,
those are really easy to germinate and one plant is
all you need. They're self fertile. So I would grow
the shit out of that and I'd give it to people,
and it did great in the Bay Area climate. It

(28:49):
just needed summer water because it's not from a Mediterranean
climate like California's from the cloud forest. There is so
much parallel in climate, at least in temperatures, between the
Bay Area of California and the cloud forests of any
cloud forest is Central America, whether it's Mexico or or
some of the South American cloud forests. I mean sometimes,

(29:12):
like when we were in the Parma it reminded me
of living in the Sunset District. I didn't live there.
I was. I was staying on someone's couch, but I was,
you know, for a while I lived there. I just
wasn't paid rent on the Sunset District of San Francisco,
like foggy on the foggiest, chilliest summer day. Right where
was that quote? Mark Twain said, the coldest winter I

(29:34):
ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. That's what
it's like. Four pm it's foggy as hell. Everything's gray,
it's windy, it's cold, it's damp and wet. It felt
so much like that, And then it made sense to me,
why you know so much of the cloud forest stuff
is planted at San Francisco Botanic Garden, or you see Berkeley.

(29:54):
You see Berkeley's a little further inland. They you know,
they it's they're still marginal there, but you could still
get a decent amount of fog. And it was I was.
I felt lucky to learn botany in those areas too,
because these are such unique habitats. These are these are
plant communities and habitats that few people in temperate latitudes
even though exist. I mean, where you can see oaks

(30:18):
growing with you know, orchids and aeroids and all these epiphytes,
and just it boggles the mind. It blows, it blows
out of the water any conceptions you have about what
plants quote should be. It's so fucking cool. And again,
the selection pressures that are being operated on, that are

(30:38):
being worked with in these these communities are cold and wet,
like an increased UV. You're so high up that there's
the ultraviolet radiation is more intense and so these you know,
a lot of plants are hairy at is protection against
cold acting you know, Harry is acting like a frost cloth,
and protection against ultraviolet light. So yeah, it was you know,

(31:01):
every time I go to the fucking Parma, we're going,
I guess we're doing an Ecuador thing in November, a
post details as I learned them, Mandy plants, all this stuff.
But uh, but yeah, it'll be fucking great. And it's
you know, it's Alan handles, the mushroom stuff. I had
all the plant stuff and it we're given presentations and

(31:22):
just talking. We're like, you know, just showing like projector
projector presentations at night and just shooting the ship. But
open questions, you know, not like grueling and boring. You
don't have to stay if you don't want to. Uh.
But just what's important to me is that people learn
stuff and get a greater concept of the of the
world around them. And these really unique plant communities that

(31:45):
exist where you have a mixture of Southern Hemisphere stuff
and Northern Hemisphere stuff from the temperate latitudes growing at
a tropical latitude, and it can do so because it's
so fucking high up It's just incredible, man. There's so
much diversity. Much less diversity than a low and tropical forest,
but still a lot of fucking diversity, especially if you're
used to, you know, the diversity that you might get

(32:07):
in you know, the United States or another temperate latitude, Europe. Whatever. Anyway,
another nice plant that I seen down there, and this
was a pioneer species because it was on my friend
Sean's land. His grandpa Zona had spot for fifty years.
He's owed this fucking spot seventy five hundred feet up
in a mountains with that, that's where I saw the

(32:27):
oaks with the buttress trunks Quircus suppotafolia. An incredible forest.
There were these glass winged butterflies flying around everywhere. Looked
it look jibby deed. But on a way up there
was fucking viburnum. There was a viburnum, a pioneer species, Viburnum.
Oh god, what was it? S the Lato tomantosum I

(32:48):
think was the species. And then there was what I
thought was a hackberry. It looks just like a hackberry,
but it's in a different genus, and it's in a genus. Hackberries,
of course are related to cannabis. They're in the cannabase.
They related the pact and they got similar they got
similar chemistry due today fact. But they're not producing DHC,

(33:09):
but I guess they produce CBD, which is sold in
every fucking sold in all these like they sell kombucha
CBD in Coasteca. It's crazy. You go to like I
went to like what was the equivalent of an oxo,
And I go inside the market and there's like healthy
shit there, like healthy shit to eat. Like they've got

(33:31):
all the poison and garbage and sugary shit too, all
the stuff you can get in Mexico. In Mexico it's
really bad, all the oxos, so fucking poison, And of
course it's bad in the United States. You know, we
got a lot of fatties here, you know, people who
get poisoned. Then we got the driving culture too, at
least in Mexico. You know, you gotta walk a lot
of places. Still cars aren't as normalized as is here,

(33:53):
at least the driving slum, you know, the the I
thirty five corridor equivalent. There's nothing that hideous in Mexico.
Go they like to burn their garbage, though I could
smell it. I'm so close to the border. I could
smell the burning plastic every night. It's a long infection.
It's cock city on my coass. But anyway, but I

(34:14):
went in. They sell CBD in like CBD kombucha, all
these CBD drinks and anyway, it's but there's healthy food
in all the corner stores. You can go in there
and like you can get green tea. It's fucking It's
always blows my mind how fucked we are in the US.
The lack of healthcare, and then of course the poisonous,

(34:36):
the garbage food. Like I remember going into Brazil seeing
truck stops right they had buffets full of salad, greens
and like good shit shit that tasted good, you know,
like cooked spinach, seasoned and shit tastes fucking delicious, you know,
Like I couldn't believe I was in a truck stop
that was in Minas your eyes, Brazil. But I mean,

(34:56):
it's you know, the US is just so fucking you know,
peop people don't realize how much they're getting fucked. It's amazing.
Ugliest landscape in the first world, billboards, shopping slums. Anyway,
you've heard this before. I won't go off on us again.
You know, you like some people like the rants other
but they get a little excessive sometimes. But Trima Micrantham

(35:18):
looks like a Celtic. It looks like a hackberry. It's
got the alternating leaves that are almost so close to
look opposite. They got that scabbard texture. Axillary berries berry
fruits like down here, and the berries turn orange, just
like Celtic pallada, which is a desert hackberry. We also

(35:39):
get Celtic slave agata in South Texas. What's the Celtic
that you get up in Illinois? I know there's a
hackberry in Illinois that pops up along the railroad tracks.
One of the few natives. But these, of course hackberries
are ruterl plants, so they're pioneer species. But being ruteral
means they grow in areas of human disturbance. And that's
what was growing here. This is a beautiful hackberry. And

(36:02):
it was all covered in ousnia and you could see
the fog coming up through the canyon, all this water
vapor channeling up through the canyon, and shit fuck it
was arethrena po piggy I po pig who was pope?
He was some German guy. They named the cactus after
this fucking prick too. Maybe he was nice, maybe he
wasn't a prick. I don't know. Oh, let's just assume
he was a prick. You never know everyone's an asshole.

(36:23):
They'll proven otherwise. That's the way I work, right, I'll
be nice to everybody, but I'm gonna assume they're a prick,
and then you gotta work up. You know, if if
you meet someone and they are warm and kind or
just defensive, you know a little bit. I give people
a better of the people. It's it's people are normal.
It's that's this human nature to be an asshole. I think,

(36:47):
at least around until you get to know someone better. So, uh,
maybe Popig was an asshole. I don't know. You gotta
loosen everybody up, you gotta warm them up. You know,
I'm an asshole. I got spines, but and I'm soft
on the inside. I get a soft center. I'm a soft,
squishy guy on the inside. Once you get the spinzo
out of the fucking way. I had to fucked up

(37:07):
childhood anyway. Uh. Trima Micranthum, I guess it's a source
of CBDA. Trima Micrantham. There's an ecotype that grows in Florida.
But but yeah, it's got these uh these axillary fruits.
They come out right where the petiole of the leaf
meets the stem, the branch, whatever, and then they they're

(37:27):
green and they turn orange when they're ready. But that
was fucking great to see. I almost forgot that genus existed.
And this thing was massive. The whole thing's pubescent. The
stems got little fuzz on them, covered in oosneach in
growing right with Clybatium, which is another which almost looked
like the viburnum and had opposite leaves. But Clybatium is
a species in the sunflower family and astraci. It produces berries.

(37:51):
It produces blue berry like blue edible. They're squishy. I
don't know if they're I didn't taste one. I should
have put one in my mouth. I put one my ass.
But I've evidently they've you know, Clybatium has evolved. That
is a method of bird disporslain. It works for it.
I didn't know there were any astoracious things anything in

(38:13):
the sunflower family that produced berries. That was wild. It
was cool to see. If you know, there's another plant
in the sunflower family to produces fucking berries. Let me know,
because it's weird that you take that. You take in
a keene or a sipsla, a single seeded fruit, and
it it evolves the morphology. Some part of that single
seeded fruit, maybe the para carp or something gets fleshy

(38:37):
and U it's wild. I didn't know that could happen.
Just like there's conifers that produce berries, the potocarps in
that case, what is an epimadium. It's like a swollen,
juicy scale that that's brightly colored. And and then the
the and is at the base of the seed. So

(38:59):
you know, the seed is the outermost part, at least
in the POTOCARPEESI the old the ancient conifer lineage, the
seed is the most the outermost part. You know, potocarps,
you've probably seen them in a horticultural atrocity garden before.
They're common in the lower latitude US. I know Chicago
Botanic Garden had some in their glasshouses. But that was

(39:20):
cool to see because you know, you can't really they're
not cold tolerance. You can't see them in Chicago. Otherwise
you got to go to the Glasshouse. I used to
love that Glasshouse in Chicago Botanic Garden and the Reagan Stein,
the Reagan Stein Library. If you're out there in Chicago
Botanic gar go hit up that library. They got a
lot of cool books in there, and they'll let you
hang out in there even if you're a bum but u.

(39:43):
But it's it's weird. Yeah, So poto carps do that.
And then it's another thing you wouldn't expect. It's technically
a cone, it's a naked seed, but it's it's got
this bait berry potocarpees So like Pectinopotis stanley i, which
is also in Costa Rica, and and there was no
Pectanopotus in these forests though where I saw that viburnum

(40:06):
on Shan's Land, where his grandpa has been there fifty years,
there was no Potocarpus or Pectanopotus. They're much higher up.
They're like just below the paramo. They like it a
lot colder and wetter. Mandy found a Grifola frontosa my taki.
She found my taki growing on Pectanopotus stanley eye formerly

(40:28):
Promnopotis Stanley one of these ancient potocarps I've been running
my mouth about which was wild. These things get fucking massive.
To some of these trees, they're absolutely massive, like eight
feet diameter breast height. They can probably some of these
trees are probably fifteen hundred or two thousand years old.
And again I had no idea that they existed till
I was in the high forest up there, and it's weird.

(40:51):
On one side of this ridge, you've got you know,
the Pectanopotus Stanley eye, you got the fucking Potocarpus coast
three these old conifers. And then on the other side
of the ridge, same elevation, it's completely different forced composition.
It's it's more of the oak dominated Esclonium murtalloides dominated.

(41:14):
And I finally got to see uh uh Solandra bracket klyx,
which is a climbing leana. Aleana's like a more robust vine.
You live in the timber latitudes, you think of a
vine as being something that climbs up a chain link fence.
You get some invasive morning glories and shit like this. No,
Aliana is a massive fucking you know, in the tropics especially,

(41:39):
they're common because the canopy is so fucking high up there.
And everything's wet, and there's so much competition. There's epiphytes
on everything. There's moss orchids, ferns growing on everything, on
the barks of trees, aeroids growing up everything. Even though
it's nine thousand feet and it's got the climate of
coastal San Francisco, you know that you still got it.

(41:59):
You got to get tall. So the leanas are like
they're more robust, taller growing vines that can get really thick.
And that's what soilander is. The nodes are a foot
or two apart, so it's got like kind of like
a it's not it's a sparse arrangement of the leaves.
It's not super dense. You know. Like this is a

(42:21):
leana that gets ninety feet up an oak tree, these
tropical oak trees, and then puts out this yellow flower
the size of a football that's pollinated by bats and
then produces fruit that's edible. It's like a tomato. It's
like a sweet tomato. It's like a sweet, mildly sweet,
fleshy tomato, which I didn't know was edible until I

(42:44):
was taking the seeds off of my friend Martin Grantham's
taking them out of a piece of fruit I play
plucked off the vine that he had at his house
in Emeryville, California, which is a similar climate he grew.
You know, a bunch of botanists in the Bay Area,
California would grow cloud forest stuff. Some of the best

(43:04):
research you know done by like breed Love, et cetera,
was done out of California Academy of Sciences, striving ourbornum
whatever about cloud forest plants. You know, Breedlove is the
guy that discovered Deppy's Splendi INDs that member of the
coffee family that's fucking extinct and habitat now. My friend

(43:25):
Don told me about going back down to Chiapas to
find it with them, and they went to the forest
where it was and it was it was all cleared,
it was gone. They fucking torched it and then they
put up cornfields. Brutal. It's like destroying It's like destroying
a museum of masterpieces to put up a dollar general.
But anyway, and Deppies splend ins, but it's still in cultivation.

(43:48):
It's like a common plant, and cultivation in the Bay
probably an up and Humboldt County. Humboldt County's got a
very pleasant climate for for cloud forest stuff. If you
live out there, you got to go check out the
cloud forest, the cloud forest areas of the Arboretum of
UC Berkeley, of SF Botanic Garden, whatever, because fuck man,

(44:09):
it's there's so much amazing stuff there. Martin, my friend Martin,
he moved to he moved to Eureka. Now he bought
a house some guy killed himself in so it was
cheap on the market, you know. I remember I was
in his house when he told me that, and they
were were laughing about it. No offense, not at the
guy's expense. It's terrible this guy killed himself. But that's
how you get a cheap house in California these days.

(44:31):
There has to have been some sort of murder, double homicide,
a grizzly suicide, something, and that's how you get the
price the price drop. You know, you know, bad things happen,
but the fucking real estate market is still what it is.
Am I wrong? Huh? You know these pig investors that
have driven rent prices up. Okay, anyway, but I got

(44:53):
to see Solandra Bracket Klyx a night shade, and I
love this thing. I grew it. I grew tons of them.
I gave them to people. I fucking had one in
front of my house in Oakland. The pag investors that
bought that I was probably ripped everything out. Hopefully the
madrone is still back there, but the the soilandra was.

(45:18):
It was such a fucking cool plant. And it's you know,
where roots into the ground. It can be ten inches across,
it can get it turns into a thick, almost treelike.
It's like a cross between a tree and a vine.
But in this oak it was going ninety feet up
and then it just you could see fruits way up
at the top. And I knew it was there because
friends of mine that we were on this trail walking

(45:42):
through the cloud forest would find the you know, the
flowers after they get pollinated, the ovary and the style
stay on the what was the flower, but the corolla
and the stamens fall off. And so they were finding
these giant yellow flowers all over the ground and couldn't
see where they were because the canopy so high up.
And one of them showed it to me and I said, oh,
this is fucking Silandro. Holy shit, I gotta find this thing.

(46:03):
So right where the trail ended. There was an old
oak tree right next to a dogwood too. There's a
dogwood species there. What was the dogwood species, Cornice disiflora.
I was using a checklist, which was super helpful, a
checklist for that mountain range, because I would tell I
could tell something was in a family or a genus especially,

(46:25):
and then just go look up on the checklist and
see what grows there. And the checklist was annotated too,
so it had everything by elevation, you know, And so
I would look, you know, if there were multiple species
in a genus, and I knew I was looking at
something in a certain genus, I would go to whatever
elevation I was at, which in this case was you know,
nine thousand feet the twenty twenty seven hundred meters whatever.

(46:48):
That is super helpful. It was like the checklist of
plants of amistide. You got to look it up in Spanish,
but u but yeah, there was a fucking dogwood there,
like massive dogwood. Crazy. And so anyway, the trail ended
and now and then it opened up on these hills
that have been cleared for pasture. But you could see

(47:08):
over the whole valley and there was just all that
I mean, it's again, it's a cloud forest for a reason.
There's all this water vapor moving through the sunset was
going down. It was fucking beautiful. And I looked up
the ninety feet this tree and I saw, I mean,
I knew the leaves of this thing because I grew
it for you know, eight years. Martin Grantham got me.
Martin Grantham had all the coolest shit in his yard,

(47:29):
all the cloud forest stuff, all stuff, all seas are
spores he'd collected. And he's just a really good botanist,
knew everything. You know. I've put him on the Patreon before.
He's a he's got a very Uh, he's got a very.
He's one who talks about the darkness of reality and
of modern humanity and you know, the sociopathic nature of

(47:50):
modern capitalism. Other fucking psychos always, you know, end up
being in positions of leadership and power and authority and
talks about it in a lighthearted, cheeky way, and it's
it's I enjoy him a lot. Anyway. He got me
into a lot of cool stuff. And so this I was.
I was stoked to see this fucking cylinder and I
could see the ninety feet up this thing. There's the

(48:12):
way up in the canopy of this massive oak. At
the edge it is clearing where the forests stopped was
u and the rest of the forests protected, thank god,
because you know humans be no humans doing what they do,
they would take everything, just keeps the tumor just keeps growing.
It's cut down the forest and we're going to graze
cattle here. Fuck it. You don't like it. Uh. And

(48:33):
of course there were like, you know, thirty other species
of plants growing epiphetically on this oak tree, ferns, aeroids,
all kinds of cool shit, tons of orchids. There were
orchids up there. Just a marvelous fucking Again, this is
the kind of shit because you mentioned low latitude places
to people in America and I'm sure much of Europe,
and they think jungle and tropically. They don't have any

(48:54):
idea that. I mean, it's you know, you get nine
thousand feet at low latitudes and it's it's not jungle
at all. Man. It's a fucking it's something you couldn't
even dream of. It's it doesn't really freeze too hard.
I don't think it. I don't think sometimes you get
a frost maybe at ninety five hundred feet, but probably
not in the canopy of these or not not in

(49:14):
the understory of these forests. But everything's I mean again,
these are things that would not do well in a
tropical climate. Their metabolism is adapted to the climate of
the SF Bay area or a Humboldt County, you know,
cloud force, chili wet, not too hot, marvelous fucking anyway.
And then there was Corone a crossoverwhere too, which is

(49:36):
a cool parasite, a chlorophilis, so it lacks chlorophyll. It
looks like a little red, swollen knob. And it took
me a while to figure out what was going on
with these plants, because it's just a knob. There's no leaves.
It's a generalist. It taps into the roots of anything
around it, whether it's an oak tree or a pectanopotus whatever,
and then it puts out these knobs. Once it's stolen

(49:56):
enough carbohydrates, it puts out these swollen knobs, and it's
got a ligno tuber that it can dive back to
that just keeps producing these knobs. Probably got a bunch
of dormant buds on the ligno tuber and when it flowers,
it sudds up this knob that's about six inches literally,
it looks like a knob, looks like a pink potato,
and then the scales fall off. It's got these protective

(50:19):
scales on it, probably because it's got to push up
through the duff. The scales fall off like pentagonal scales,
and then the knob is either male or female. And
it took me a while to figure out what the
flowers were, so I had to. I'm looking at it,
and I'm like, what the fuck is this? These are
like these pink little hairs, They're like, I don't know,
five to eight millimeters long. It turned out those were

(50:41):
the female flowers. I thought those were the male flowers
because it looked like filaments and anthers. But then I
found a paper on a closely related species, Helosis cayanensis,
which I think, where is it Argentina? Where's a native
to somewhere in South America. It's not in Central America.
It's not in Coaswhega. And what I was looking at
when I thought were male, were actually female. When I

(51:01):
thought were female flowers were actually male whatever. But uh, anyway,
but it took me a while to figure out what's
going on with this thing, because I would see, you know,
I saw, I would you'd see it a lot in
the understory, and I would trying to figure out am
I looking. You know, it's like anything. Most of the times,
you can figure out whether you're looking at a male flower,

(51:21):
a female flower, or a perfect aka bisexual aka or
amaphroditic flower, because the stamens will be much more numerous.
They'll have the general structure of a filament and an anther,
you know, like the little rod that holds the anthra up,
and then there'll be no ovary on there. And then
of course the female flower, they'll be an ovary. It'll
have a stigma something that looks like it's, you know,

(51:43):
meant to capture pollen, and they'll only be one of them,
or in some cases, yeah, like one ovary. But then
maybe it'll have three lobes or something, you know, three branches,
like an uphour bac. But this thing defied all fucking
I don't know either way, it was still really cool
to see, and I was seeing two different versions, and
I saw probably seven or eight plants during my time there.
And then they weren't flower when I was there in April,

(52:05):
but I saw seven or eight plants during my time there,
and then finally figured out, okay, it's not only are
the little knobs are unisexual because I would only see
one kind of flower, but they both knobs can occur
on the same plant, so it's moniches. And yeah, you'd
see them on every they were all over the place.
They looked really cool. They're like bright pink, very conspicuous,

(52:29):
you know, a bright pink potato attached to a rod
at the base of some fucking tree or something. I'm
really dropping a lot of f bombs. I'm sorry, you know,
if that's if you're listening to this, it's some sort
of you know nsf W. But yeah, Corinea crassa bilano
four ace, which is a marvelous family of tropical parasitic plants,

(52:54):
one of the coolest of which is dak Talanthu's taylor
ie from New Zealand, which is pollinated by bat. So
these bats actually crawl on the ground and hit this flower.
But of course everything's been fucked up post colonization with
you know, especially introduction of feral cats and all the
other stupid shit that people bring with them, you know

(53:14):
they Have you heard about the speaking of feral cats? Oh,
there he goes again. Have you heard about the feral
cat issue on Hawaii? It's in Hawaii? There's yeah, what
what island? Uh? Specifically it is, but it's a there's
an Instagram page called Nane dot org and it's it's
n E n e dot org and Nane is a

(53:35):
is an endangered Hawaiian goose. And these fucking cat people,
these feral cat people, like cats are great pets if
you keep them inside, you build some cool shit from
the climb on, you know, wonderful. They're wonderful, They're sweet.
I can't touch them because I get allergic. But every
time I pet a cat, I'm like breaking out in
hives five minutes later and then it lasts for three hours.
But uh, but you know, but when they're loose, they're

(53:58):
fucking vermin. They're just like rats. You know, rats are
great pets too. I had a rat named Lenny Bruce
when I was nineteen. Fucking thing used to crawl over
me come when it was called. She was great. She
was a great rat. But you don't want street rats
in your you know, it's a different thing. You don't
like them when they're after They can do some heinous shit,
both street rats and and feral cats. But these fucking

(54:19):
feral cat people are just absolutely nuts and they they're
fucking rabbit too. I think a lot of them probably
of toxoplasmosis mentally mental illness for sure, whether it's you know,
whether the mental illness is genetic or whether it's caused
by the Toxoplasma gandhi a parasite whatever, But there's a
it's been funny watching they're they're trying to get a
bunch of people who are concerned about the endangered birds

(54:41):
and the fucking endangered marine life because the cat shit
that contains toxoplasmosis, the toxoplasmosis spores washingto the ocean and
it's completely lethal for Hawaiian monks, seals and sea otters
and other shit. It's wonderful, huh, because they've never experienced before,
you know, like some you know, nut jobs can be.

(55:02):
But a lot of these nut jobs are probably infected
with taxoplasmos as too. But but it's not lethal for them,
you know, it just makes them do crazy shit like
obsessed about feeding feral cats and public and you know
some of these fucking women. It's mostly women. Oh my god,
did he really say that. Yes, it's mostly fucking it's
mostly the crazy cat lady trope is real. But most
of these, most of these nutty fucking cat ladies. I

(55:26):
bet there's one or two in there who's killing kids
and cutting up little kids. The feet that these cat counties,
you know, just like that Dead Kennedy's song Deer Abby.
Yeah ever listening to that? It's the good ones about
Reaganomics in the eighties, Same things going on with these
feral somebody, these feral cat ladies. But they're doing it
with kids and they're cutting them up. They dehydrate it,
they mix it in with the kibble. No one ever know.

(55:48):
You never know. Oh I just love my little kid.
Oh I love my kiddies. And if they argue with
any of these nut jobs too, then they I got
my first death threat from one of them because I
can't keep my fucking hate. I hate these people, I
really do, you know. And they're like, oh, Tie, there's
the way to go. TNR trapped you to return is
just an excuse for feeding. If sterilizing feral animals worked anywhere.

(56:12):
It would be done more, and it's not. It would
be done with pigs, pythons, rats, it's not done with
any of them. But anyway, I got my first death
threat like a month or two ago. Very charming, it was.
I was stoked to see it because someone had just
ridden me a lady in Australia who does bat rescue.
They got all these endangered fruit bats. And she's like,
has anyone written you death threats yet? And I said, no,

(56:34):
not of the feral cat people. I think I've been
told to kill myself a number of times in the comments,
but no one's ever like ridden me a DM, you know.
And I got my first DM. Tell me it's always
the same shit. It's, you know, some lady with like
three hundred followers who's fucking pictures of cats or whatever.
But she told me to kill myself, or she said

(56:56):
she hopes I'd catch a bullet. I don't know what
the fuck she said, you know, fuck, it's the parasite talking,
after all, you Swiss cheese brain up there, fucking a
you know, her whole here her a CT scan of
her brain probably looks like a fucking, you know, wonderful
polka dot uh partition, like a wonderful polka dot linen

(57:16):
print or something, you know, or maybe like that the
classic Italian tablecloth, you know, with the designs on it.
Her she's got all kinds of shit going on upstairs,
you know. The MRI. When they took an MRI of
her brain, it looks like a fucking you know, piece
of gorgonzola or something with some feta anyway, But yeah,

(57:37):
it's nuts. It's nuts that like that. You can't that
that it's legal to feed these feral animals that prey
on not only prey on endangered wildlife, but are shitting
into the ocean too, and like spreading parasites Toxoplasma gania.
The only place that can sectually reproduce is in the

(57:57):
gut of a cat, of a feline, so it can
also infect mountain lions and bobcats too. Obviously they don't
they don't have those in Hawaii. But you know, and
one of the things these feral cat nut jobs always
say is you can always you can get you can
contract taxo plasma from eating undercock's meat. Well, how do
you think that? How do you think the livestock whose

(58:19):
meat you're eating got got it in the first place.
They contracted Toxoplasma gandhiy from inhaling catshit or drinking water
with catsit in it anyway. But yeah, so that's currently
going on Hawaii, and I guess they're trying to, uh,
you know, wildlife conservations are trying to pass a bill
that would make feeding illegal and these somebody's fucking cat

(58:41):
ladies are gonna lose their mind, which is hilarious. I wish,
I wish I could get it on tape because it's
so funny. It's so it's fucking amazing to watch them
spin their wheels. I mean, I can just read, I'll
type in all caps, you know, just humans are the problem.
Bis of shit, You fucking asshole, a fucking ceial, gonna

(59:02):
be a fucking serial killing You'll like cats anyway, cock
city on my coast. Okay, so where were we so
Landrobracket Klyx. Oh, yeah, I was gonna. I was talking
about that plant trema which is in cannabase and uh,
Trima micrantham in this case, and it's u Supposedly there's

(59:23):
an article that came out in Nature saying Trima trima
micranthum has emerged as a promising new source of cannabinoids,
including cannabideo CBD. Given the substantial medicinal demand for cannabinoids
and the regulatory challenges associated with cannabis sativa due to
the presence of nine tetrahydro cannabinol Delta nine, this study

(59:48):
sought to explore the presence of CBD, TAC and their precursors.
All right, we'll skip to the results. We don't need
to read about the methodology. You can look up the
paper if you want. Uh, but results in discussion. Fytal
cannabinoids usually biosynthesized as acids. Neutral forms are produced through
non enzymatic decarboxylation. Nice That nice, wasn't I added that

(01:00:09):
in at the end. That wasn't. That's not in the paper.
Cannabig girl, canna bid canna bid gyro lick, canna bid
gerro lick. What the fuck is that? Cannabig geralic acid
is the CBGA that's just called CBGA is the bioprecursor
of other acidic cannabinoids and the plants, which is delta

(01:00:30):
nine THHC and cannabi cannabidiolic acid. These substances give rise
to their respective neutral forms THHC and cbd. Subsequentially, isomerization
and oxidation products are formed in the present study to
confirm the presence and estimate the concentration of the cannabidoids cbd,
thhc cbda, and thhd aa in trema micrantham, its fruits inflorescences, branches,

(01:00:55):
and leaves were analyzed, the extracts were obtained. Following we
could get to the fucking point. Come on, I thought
this was the results. This is brutal, and they got
they got some nice grapts. Okay, there we go. Conclusion
analytical methods using high resolution mass spec allowed the identification
of previously undetected cannabinoids in trima micranthum. The use of

(01:01:18):
standards for cbd, thhc, ZBDA, and thhc AA facilitated excellent
resolution of the cannabinoid isomers with realt well resolved peaks
for the neutral compounds. It means it was detected CBD
and THHC and their ascidic precursors. Consequently, the identification of
cannabinoids and the samples were achieved through accurate mass attention time. Okay,

(01:01:39):
so it sounds like maybe they can use trema for this,
which again it's a pioneer plant and it's a tree,
and it can grow a lot, a lot faster. Okay,
and I guess, I guess trima is uh. I guess
the berries are not edible. They're bird dispersed, but there's
some metabolite in there, or some compound in there that

(01:02:01):
is not palatable to people that the humans metabolize. It
can be somewhat toxic supposedly. And then there's other species
of trema that I thought, wait, that makes sense. You know,
the birds have different much different metabolisms and digestive systems
and humans. So that's why you know you're gonna poison
yourself with berries. It's going to be a berrier that

(01:02:21):
was meant to be dispersed by birds that involved with
bird dispersal, but not mammal dispersal, so you know. But anyway,
so these these compounds THHC and CBD are are in
this plant in low quantities. So you bry me like
a dump truck load to make some sort of gummy
or so. I don't know. Some company just sent me

(01:02:42):
a yerba mate THHC drink and I was smart enough
to pour out half of it. Because I don't smoke weed,
I don't really get but I must have gotten dose
with like three milligrams and it actually was really really
pleasant as I went on a bike ride with my
daughter and then we went to the playground and uh,

(01:03:02):
but I definitely did not you know, towards the end,
I was ready to get off. I was ready to
get off the merry ground figuratively speaking, which is how
I feel about weed in general. I don't like you know,
once in a while, it's nice, shakes you out of
a gets you to look at yourself, you know, can
almost be mildly psychedelic. A little bit of self insight,
gets some compassion, calmed down at the end of the day,

(01:03:23):
feels really good to stretch. But I don't know how
people do that ship every day. No offense to anybody
who does. But if you do do it every day,
maybe you want to think about, you know, cutting down
a little bit. You know. Anyway, So let's uh another
We're gonna take a break from from Costa Rican cloud forest.
We're going to talk about Uno confused about resident she

(01:03:44):
lean young. Her front yard.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
Is beautiful, It's a very natural long island.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
You got a native plant. It's not just some correct
they don't like, but her village mayors. Is it very
It looks like he manages quiznos. Yeah, so this guy
looks like he manages a quiznos. He's wearing some slacks,
he's wearing some navy slacks, some dockers. He's standing in
front of what appears to be a mural in the
city hall building. Where is this in Long Island. I've

(01:04:13):
never been to Long Island. It looks like a place
I probably get kicked out of, or you know, get
into a fight with someone. And he's wearing a nice
blue button down shirt. Again, looks like he manages a quiznos.
Looks you know, slightly overweight. He's got some fucking extra
jowlage in there, and uh widows peak and he he's
Let's see, let's hear what this guy has to say,

(01:04:34):
this purveyor of fine taste. Let's hear what he's got
to say about this woman's native plant gard. You right here,
we go see's it very differently? When ugly? Is that overwhelming?
You have to call it what it is. That front
yard looks hideous. It's the out That front yard looks hideous.
Dad looks hideous. I said, wow, how can he dead?
Front yard looks hideous? I mean, with all due respect

(01:04:57):
for fuck's sake, for I mean, it's freaking hideous. What
are you doing over you? It looks freaking hideous. Now
my rectum is bleeding. I got, I got, I've got
horrible hemorrhoids. I've been eating to a lot of try tip,
a lot of summer sausage. It is this summer. I
believe in doing things for the right season. You know.
I ate a roast last night. I just live on

(01:05:17):
a diet of meat and mayonnaise in butter. Huh, you're
fucking sicko. Huh. Well, you you know, like lawns. Hey,
you're fucking sicico. You have fun with the ticks. This
is the kind of This is the kind of shit
you get from the cult of the lawn. And it's
so hard for me to especially to not to not
get into with these people, like when they comment on
something on a face crook that that venue. You know.

(01:05:41):
I do Facebook for the for the I don't know
why I'm on a Facebook pat I don't have a
personal page, but of course I do the crime pace page,
and I put a photo of a native plant guarden
that was featured and Kill Your Lawn season two, which
of course no one can watch. Someone needs to pirate that. Well,
someone pirate that. They had somebody put it up on
you Tube, and then earth X the network that they

(01:06:03):
might as well. They might as well have just buried
the fucking show under one hundred feet of concrete, like
buried the the hard copy tapes, because you know no
one can watch it. But I think you can watch
it if you sign up for Filo or some other
weird named app streaming app, but watch it with ads.
But anyway, it was on YouTube for a while, and

(01:06:26):
then now now the show is in the YouTube AI
copyright detection, so if anyone tries to upload it might
just get struck down again. They came after promotional videos.
They said I could put up anyway, so I think
torrents are what you got to do. But either way,
one of the yards that was featured in there was

(01:06:47):
was my mom went by it, so I guess it's
been two years now, no a year and a half.
She went by it the other day. It looks fucking great.
She took send me a bunch of photos. I put
that up on the Facebook page, you know, for the
boomers and shit and whoever else. I don't know who
looks at Facebook. You know it is it's addictive. It
is meant to suck you in watching videos of whatever

(01:07:08):
dumb shit they put up there. But you know, but anyway,
and I posted the photos because the yard looks fucking great.
There's Joe Pieweed, you trochy him everywhere, there's fucking big
sylph you know, Sylphian portfoliate, a Midwest Prairie native plant garden.
And of course there's always that one guy. He looks
much like the guy who commented, looks like he manages
a Quiznos too, or a fucking Papa John's. You know, no,

(01:07:31):
there's no shade to these establishments. I wouldn't eat there,
but you know, uh, you know, unless someone was, you know,
threatening me with putting the red hot poker in my ass.
But either way, you know, the look right. Or maybe
it manages pay Less shoe store. You remember pay Less
shoe store at Old Shaine. I think they're out of business.
I don't know, but they got he's got that look
to him, and he was, you know comment thinking would

(01:07:51):
have fun with all the vermin I just you know
this again, this this idea. You're so afraid of nature.
You're fucking moron, you know. I gotta com I get
worked up. I said, Maybe he's not a moron. It's
impolite to in sell people. Maybe he's just has had
a different experience than you. I don't know. He's a
fucking jab anyway, fucking jag off. So this you know,

(01:08:15):
and he's this guy's like, I like mowing. How do
you like? You know? It's fine? I said, why do
you comment to you? Obviously don't follow the page in
the first place. I mean, you certainly don't look like it.
How to fuck how'd you get here? And why not
you commenting? Like, don't comment? I'm gonna I'm gonna mouth
off to you. If you not, you must not know me.
Now I'm gonna mouth off to you and all the

(01:08:36):
dumb shit. It just it's crazy. Blows my mind. The
fucking cult of the lawn thinking that nature is messy, Like,
tell me you don't go outside you know, or better yet,
name five native shrubs in your area. I know more
about your own fucking region than you do. Huh, Johnny boy,
fucking Bob Derret. What's what's his name? Bob Steve John?

(01:08:59):
I don't fuck no, you know these guys, these fucking guys,
these fucking American guys. Ah. Anyway, manage a quiz noos,
that's what you were born to do. Manage the benigans.
They still have benigans. Manage a uh TGI Fridays or
Applebee's or something. You know. My friend Benny told me
one story. One time when he was a kid, he

(01:09:20):
jacked off under the table at apple Isn't that sick?
Kind of sick? Fuck? I don't know why that came up,
But now whenever I hear the word Applebee's, I think
of that. I think if Benny jacking off under a
table when he was like that, it's horrible. It's isn't
that terrible? Who does that? But I guess that's what
Applebee's are for anyway, they're not. It's it's you don't
go there anyway. Yeah, So this that that sets me off.

(01:09:42):
But it's the tide is changing at the same time too.
There's a lot more people doing this because it feels good,
and it really does. You just gotta you know. And
now my yard is at the point too, where again
it's it's ecological secession. I'm in the third year of
secession here, I'm starting to remove certain trees when other
trees get big. I planted dense, knowing I'm gonna have
to remove shit later on, limbing stuff up, raising the canopy.

(01:10:06):
So it's you can walk under there, and it's beauty,
it's lovely. It's I got, you know, no hot sun
baking the ground. That's the main thing where I live.
You want to get that sun hitting the leaves, not
the ground, because when they hit the ground, that's when
you get that heat charge, that heat battery effect. You know,
the ground turns into a space heater. So anyway, this

(01:10:26):
is this is change. It's the prairie shit, especially man
seeing all those because prairies are dense, but everything dies
by November, and then of course it would be burned
by indigenous people or or just slowly decomposed and build
that wonderful black soil that made it on the chopping
block for soybean and corn farms by a honkey duck
cult later on, you know what I mean. So you know,

(01:10:51):
to see the density of a prairie and just think
it's messy, and there's ticks. You know, the ticks are
out of control because of fire suppression and overpopulation, a
deer and eradication the predators. Horrible management, horrible bad land management,
ecologically illiterate and intellectually you know, depoperate land management. You
know that's discordant with reality. Fire suppression, eradication of predators,

(01:11:15):
and not managing deer populations. You gotta colum. There's too
many deer, right, that's just what happens. Kibob Plateau in
the nineteen thirties, famous ecological experiment, So, you know, but
to see that and just to have never experienced the prairie,
they're all gone except for like point zero three percent,
and then think that it's messy, that that plant growth.

(01:11:36):
That's fucking crazy to me. It's wild and prairies are
So that's some of my favorite habitat too. After deserts
and cloud forests and paramo, then comes prairies, prairies anywhere Argentina,
fucking you know, Illinois, Iowa where you can't get any
good acid. Who's do I know any acid chefs? And
iwa are there any acid chefs? And who's an acid chef?

(01:11:59):
And Iowa put a sh yoda. I guess I can't
do that. You probably don't want the heat. But you
know what I mean, you know, let's be honest about that, Yad.
You know, Yad looks hideous, okay. And you know I'm
no purveyor of fine taste myself, as you could tell
by the maronaa stains on my polo shit, yeah, in
my caky's, you know. And you know every time I

(01:12:19):
don't shake it off perfectly, I get a little dribble.
There's a stain there in the crotch of my khki pants.
My doctors you could see that right there. I got
some nice loafers on. But this yard looks freaking hideous.
I mean, let's be honest to you. What am I
an asshole? Eh? Yeah? God, plants are messy. Concrete and

(01:12:40):
asphalt is cleaning. Plants are messy. Okay. Let's get back
to the time. We're talking about the oak force, we're
talking about neotropical oaks, and we're talking about the order
for gailies. Let's look at the oak family, of course
is forgacy. Marilla is in uh uh mirror casey, which

(01:13:02):
is of course its own family in the uh the
order for gailies. Uh, and it's uh, but you know
a lot of them are nitrogen fixing too. Yeah, it
looks freaking idiots. A lot of the a lot of
the the members of Mirra Casey are are nitrougen fixing.
The wax myrtles, as they're colloquially known now, the genus

(01:13:22):
Morella used to be Mierica. There was Miraca californica. It
was the first one I learned that on the west coast.
You know, it's a shrub, it's got a look to it,
but it's in the oak order, right, just like castrie ac.
The she oaks which look like pines, they're all Southern Hemisphere.
Just like the oaks the beaches. The walnuts family Jugland

(01:13:45):
they see is in the oak order. Did you know that?
Did you know walnuts and pecans are related to the
oaks Southern beaches, not the fagacy those of course Southern Hemisphere.
And yeah, Mirra Casey and the birch family libulecy birches,
which is uh, that's what allness is in. It's what
all alders are in. Alder is A is a ruteral

(01:14:08):
plant too, it's a pioneer species in uh, Costa Rica,
and then of course you get one. What do you
get in Columbia? Is that that's all? That's acumen? Out
of the two most common members of the order for
galilies in Colombia, which is as far south as oaks go,
I think Alders might go a little bit further south
thn Columbia. How far down to Alders going to South America,

(01:14:31):
I don't know, But the two dominant members of fagalies
are the Andy and oak Corcus HUMBOLTI, I boy, I
love the seed, ohs eh. When I'm managing my apple Bee's,
you know, I managed I managed twenty employees in five
kitchen staff at the apple Bee's located off a New
Jersey Turnpike, where I perform auto filatio on myself in

(01:14:51):
a backroom. Sometimes when no one's there anymore, I go
into the freezer. I lock myself in a freezer. I
have to call somebody and him come get me out,
But it's all part of my kink. I locked myself
in a freezing and I perform auto filatio and a
little sling that I've got hanging up there with all
the frozen meats and stuff, you know, frozen meats, frozen vegetables.
And that's that's what I do after hours when I'm
managing the applebee's. But let's be let's be honest. This

(01:15:13):
lady's yead looks freaking I mean it's it looks freaking hideous.
You know, it's overgrown. It's messy. It's a messy yad.
It's a messy yad. Speaking of sale it, I need
someone to toss my sale it anyway, quirkers from both
the eye Andy and oak, Andy and older, all this acuminata.
You know it's not fair. It's not just the andies
because a cumenata all the older, the accuminate older. You

(01:15:35):
get in Costa Rica too, But this is are you
having your mind blown yet? Jug Lands Neotropica. The Andyan
walnut sounds it should be someone's nickname. Yeah, we got
Joey Chestnut, the Andy and walnut over here, also known
as the Andyan walnut. It would be like a poor

(01:15:58):
name or like a wrestling by away. Hulk Hogan died. Wooo,
what a piece of shit that guy was. Union Crushia
a Trump voter, a Trump uh, you know, encouraging people
to vote for the Orange Man and crushing unions. Do
you ever hear that that piece of just even Tura
talked about Hulk Hogan crushing unions snitching out to Vince McMahon. Crazy,

(01:16:20):
what a dirt bag? That makes sense? So anyway, okay,
so back to Colombian members of fagilias. Ooh, all this
glutenosa is that down there? Really that might be a
miss identification al faroa will yamsey eye that looks like
uh oh, Quirkus polymorpha. No, that's got to be planted out,
you gotta, I'm just looking at aina. You gotta take

(01:16:41):
this with a grain of salt, obviously, because Heinach will
show you invasive things. And oh but now they've got
these little up in the corner of the thumbnail for financeralists,
they got you know, native endangered and a pink invasive
flag like for the river SiOH Cassarina cunning Hemi. Cassarhinas
are invasive as hell in Mexico and uh in many

(01:17:04):
places throughout the neotropics. Anyway, this is a nice one.
Trigano Balinis excelsa Colombian black oak. But it's not it's
got different fruits that doesn't have acorns. It's a really
peculiar fucking what is this related to? What is Trigono
balanus related to? And how did it get over there?

(01:17:25):
Shouldn't it be, you know, because some of the uh,
some of them the balanus that that word balanus. Wherever
I see that, I've seen them mostly in Asian members
of UH. Let's do a little search here. Oh, that's exciting.
So the genus Trigono balinus, at least according to the
IGH naturalists, I haven't done a proper ass uh exploration

(01:17:45):
of the genus. This is just using II naturalists. So
if it's super rare and it's special, if it's a
species that superraria hasn't been observed, it won't be popping up.
But the genus Triganobalanus has two species in it, Vertissilata
and Excelsa. Excelsa's in Colombia and Vertilalata that only has
two observations on iinat is from the Melee Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi. Goddamn,

(01:18:10):
that sounds that sounds really fucking cool. But this is
a weird genus and what the what clade is it in?
I don't know. We're about to find out. There's a
paper called Phylogenomic Analyses highlight innovation and introgression in the
continental radiations of Pagaesi across the Northern Hemisphere. And so,

(01:18:31):
for those that don't know, introgression is the transfer of
genetic information from one species to another as a result
of hybridization between them and repeated back crossing. So two
different species are technically supposed to be unable to mate,
to bang and to exchange genetic information. Right, So say

(01:18:51):
you got you know, population A of a fish that's
got orange stripes on it and glowing the dark eyes,
and then you've got population B fish that's got spiny
stuff on it and you you know the environment. What
would be most selective is if you could combine those
two traits. But you can't do that. You can't get
get the glow in the dark eyes with the orange

(01:19:12):
stripes to mix with the spiny stuff on it. So
what are you gonna do? How are you gonna get
those how are you gonna give the what? You're using
the hybrid not you, this is what happens, but you
get it. Just work with me here. You're using the
hybrid as a medium to exchange genes so so that's
basically what's going on with introgression the hybrid, because a

(01:19:34):
hybrid will eventually be able to or in some cases
will eventually be able to mate with both species. You know.
That's that's what's going on. So you know, but two
species just say they can't bang for whatever reason, they
can't exchange genes. So it's it's back crossing. That's the
key word, back crossing, which is the same thing they
were trying to do with the American chestnut. You know,

(01:19:57):
they were trying to confer resistance to the Chryphenectria parasitica
chestnut blight fungus. The resistance is in the Chinese chestnut.
There's no resistance in the American chestnut. And they were
trying to do that by hybridizing the two and then
selecting the trees that looked like Americans but were hybrids,

(01:20:19):
you know, but they had the traits of the American
and the traits of the uh the tall stature of
the American chestnuts, but the resistance of the Chinese, and
then back crossing it with pure Americans until they would
get something that looked like an American chestnut but had
many of the alleles or just genes in general that

(01:20:41):
confer drought resistance to or not drought resistant, fungal resistance,
excuse me, blight resistance to the Chinese species. So basically
trying to get the blight resistance from the Chinese into
the American without you know, making a American chestnut a short,
squat less stature tree like the Chinese is because the

(01:21:02):
Chinese chestnuts don't get too big for whatever reason. I
don't know if that, you know, was a trait that
accompanied the blight resistance there just happens to be due
to whatever, you know, whatever benefit that might confer Chinese
trees in their native anyway, the fucking point is, that's
what introgression is. But we're not even talking about introgression now,

(01:21:22):
we're talking about oaks. This is just the title this
paper I'm about to read you, so shit the fuck
down and don't get too worked up, and just you know,
but if you're in introgression's exciting, you should read about it.
And that's that's basically what it is. And it's used
in genetics quite often, especially you know, in some plant
genera that are super species rich, where certain species are

(01:21:44):
unable you know, they're genetically isolated, they're not able to interbreed,
but every once in a while they can form a hybrid.
You know, tudas think species mate, they produce hybrid offspring,
though in many cases these hybrids are often less fit
or sterile, you know, like mules, right, mules, or a
hybrid and then back crossing. Occasionally a hybrid is fertile

(01:22:06):
enough to mate back with one of the parent species,
and that's when the gene transfer happens. If this happens repeatedly,
you know, over generation, small pieces of genetic material from
one species can introgress into the other species gene pool.
So you know, it's a way to overcome reproductive barriers

(01:22:26):
like why two species like a two species may not
be able to mate anyway, but yeah, anyway, so the
and it can create a third species, which is so
it can lead to speciation. Okay, but anyway, let's I'm
getting I'm fucking up here, We're getting We're getting distracted.
So let's go back to this paper. Northern Hemisphere forests

(01:22:48):
changed drastically in the early seen whoa, this is going back.
This is we're talking fifty five million years here, with
the diversification of the oak family for gacie cooling climates
over the next twenty million years. Fussed that spread at
temperate biomes that became increasingly dominated by oaks and their
chestnut relatives. But there's a fucking nice cladogram in this paper.

(01:23:10):
If you want to read this again. This is by
Biao feng Zhu. Apparently it's Chinese. A lot of good
botanists in China because they actually fund science over there.
I want to go over there. You know, how is
it over there? What they throw me in a can?
Over there? What do you? I don't think so. I'm
watching this fucking anol do push ups outside my window
right now? Why do they do that? It's a carolina
and nol too. I have carolina and cuban and noles here,

(01:23:33):
and uh, you know, I don't think they can Speaking
of introgression, I don't think they can breed, can they?
I don't know? It's cool though, there's okay anyway, ad D.
Sorry didn't take my meds today, Biao feng Zhu. Uh,
Phylogenomic analyses highlight innovation and introgression and the kind of
radiations of fagaci across the northern hemisphere. Here we use
phylogenomic analyses a nuclear planted genomes to investigate the timing

(01:23:58):
and pattern of major macro evolutionary events in ancient genome
wide signatures of hybridization across figaci. Do you want to
take a ride, We'll go get a con innovation related
to see this. Persia is implicated in triggering waves of
continental radiations, beginning with the rapid diversification of major lineages

(01:24:22):
and resulting in unparallel transformation of forest dynamics within fifteen
million years following the KPg extinction. That's the dinosaur extinction, asshole. Okay, hey,
if you want new windows, they're going to lead in
some new windows. You need some new windows insurance fraud.
We detect introgression at multiple time scales, including ancient events

(01:24:46):
predating the origin of genus level diversity. This is already
going to be a good paper. I'm getting fucking hot.
As oak lineage has moved into newly available temperate habitats
in the early Miocene, okay, secondary contact between previously isolated
species occurred. This resulted in adaptive introgression which may have
further amplified the diversification of white ooks across Eurasia. Eurasia. Fuck,

(01:25:10):
I don't want to hear I don't want to read
about your Asia. We're talking about the neotropics. Goddamn it. Anyway,
let's just skip all of this. Let's get down to
the clatagram. Okay, let's see Corcus. You got subgenus Carcus
and subgenus Cirrus, right, So it used to be that
these two different subgen era of oaks were. I did

(01:25:30):
a podcast with a gentleman on this last year. You
might want to go back to that. That would be
the because he's you know who was that, Andrew? Yeah,
that was Andrew Hip from August twenty second, twenty twenty four.
It's called oaks are the beasts of an ecosystem. But
we we really get into the weeds on that. But anyway,

(01:25:53):
so it used to be the two different subjer and
I think that the main morphological features are not in
the leaves anymore. I think subgenus Corcus is the New
World clade or high Latitude clade, primarily consisting of species
from the Americas, with a few found in Eurasia and
northernmost North Africa. And then you got subgenus Cirrus c. Rris,

(01:26:16):
which is often called the Old World clade or mid
Latitude clade, which is exclusively native to Eurasia and North Africa.
But let's go back to this that Old World New
World thing that still trips some people out. I think
I haven't heard it in a while, but it does apply.
Old World where humanity came from, New World, where humanity

(01:26:39):
migrated to. Even if you're going back to indigenous Americans,
there's still thirty thousand years not that long. It's not
that long. It's not that long compared to how ow
okay anyway, So where the fuck is? Uh? God, damn it?
Oh this really, this is a bit. It's all blurried.
A PDF for this beautiful philology they used is all blurry.

(01:27:02):
Corcus subgenus, Corcus subgenus serious anyway. Then we got no,
the lithocarpus, which is California tanno. Ooh it makes me.
That's a beautiful tree, you know, northern California. What is it?
Two ecotypes there was the tall one and then that weird,
the weird shrubby one from northern California. Uh. And they
got like little the acorns look kind of spiny, the

(01:27:25):
cap to the acorn and then we got Lithocarpus Chrysolepis.
Uh what is this? What what chrysil Oh yeah, Chrysolepis chrysophola.
Those are the chinkapins and Chrysolepis sempervirans, which I miss
those trees. Those were in California, too, delicious nuts and

(01:27:46):
they grow. They're really hard to grow. I got one
growing in my I collected a ship tennessees in the
Santa Cruz Mountains once and and grew a bunch. But
they're supposed to be really hard to keep alive, which
I think is what I experience. Then a bunch were
dying there was that was kind of an endangered tree.
Chrystlipis superveians as the dwarf one too, But they make

(01:28:09):
like spiny birds, you know, make spiny birds. You gotta
wear leather gloves, you gotta wear put your leather on
to take him out. God, this woman's yard looks freaking hideous.
It's just cool what it is. Might put my auto
fillatio sling on and the meat freeze at Applebee's where
I work, and then I'm gonna you know, they've been
thinking of running for maya at its town mayor Maya

(01:28:31):
of Long Island. What do you think of that? God,
this woman's yiad looks freaking hideous? Okay? And then cast
Anopsis castania, and and Trigono balanus that's where it is,
excelsa Okay. So Trigano balanus is way out there. It's
kind of like on its own branch. What is its
sister to, it's sister to the rest of the entire

(01:28:53):
rest of the clade. Oh, this is a this is
exciting now. So then you gotta think, how did Trigano
balance to go one species in Colombia and the rest
are in Asia. What's going on there? How did that
dispersal happen? You know we talk in like pre breakup
of gondwan or what this is where I like thinking
about how did all these things get there? Like how
did pectinopoti is Stanley I, you know, a Gondwanan conifer,

(01:29:19):
how did that get up to the highlands of Costa Rica?
And what Pectanopotus species once grew an Antarctica before it
froze over. So anyway, yeah, so that's where that's where
Trigono balanus is. Trigonobalanus I guess why is it called Trigonobalinus.
There we go. Yeah, trigon meaning three angled or triangular.

(01:29:40):
Sow that coming, that's what the fruits look like. And
then balanos meaning acorns. So it does. It looks like
a three angled fruit. Doesn't really look like an acorn
all it looks looks more like a beech fruit kind of,
but it's got three angles. Oh well, how about that
Trigonobalanus is a genus genus of three species. Yeah, there's
a third species that just hasn't been observed on naturalist yet.

(01:30:01):
What's up with the old Caucasian men hating not I
naturalists too? By the way, have you noticed it? I
noticed that a friend of mine hate was hating on it.
I don't fucking get it. It drives me nuts. God,
it's horrible that people could learn. You know, I'm gonna
shame that right away. I'm gonna shot all over anybody
who who who uh shits on? I neet? What a

(01:30:24):
wonderful what a wonderful platform, wonderful venue. It so goofy.
You know you're worried abou it's gonna give your locations
that you like the gate keep away or like the
general idea you can obscure everything you can put locations private.
And all the old men that ship on this don't
even know how it works, which also fucking drives me nuts.

(01:30:44):
If you're gonna shit on something, know how it works. No,
educate yourself about it, dummy, don't just you know, Botany's
only reserved for professionals and experts. Anyway. Okay, so trigon
balance is a gene. I'm really into this now too.
In Southeast Asia. Yeah, one in northern South America. That's

(01:31:06):
really exciting, that's cool. I want to see that Columbia here,
I come Colombia were coming down there. So anyway, but
this this this book, I was reading about it. I
guess from pollen. I guess you know. Oaks have been
in Mexico for ten million years, long time, long fucking time,

(01:31:29):
epicenter of diversity. That's what kind of what you would expect.
But oaks and olders have only been in Colombia by
let's see, the Isthmus of Panama is thought to have
closed between five and three point five million years ago,
not that long ago. And as it gradually closed, of course,
he had the Great American Interchange, which is when you

(01:31:51):
know plants and animals from northern hemisphere mingled with the
Southern hemisphere and the marsupial tiger that used to be
in South America one extinct and was you know competed
by Smilodon. Okay, I guess they're calling it the Great
American biotic interchanged now, Gabby, And this h it occurred

(01:32:13):
three million years ago, and it was, you know, one
of two continents when this Missispanama closed and you know,
I'm putting on a west side geriatric Italian, you know,
flea market voice right now or like the wind a
salesman you want to buy some windows. Anyway, it began, yeah,
around five to three million years ago, and it led

(01:32:33):
to a dramatic exchange of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, even fresh
water organisms between isolated continents and so it was a
big mix up. It was probably like a micro example
of what happened of what humans have done in the
last one hundred and two hundred years, moving shit around
the globe. It's moving like, you know, all these plants

(01:32:55):
and animals from the continents, from the European and Asian
continents to Northum to the Americas and you know, fucking
up Australia as well by you know, basically invasion biology.
This is like a key it's a key point. I wonder, yeah,
I wonder what happened because I mean a lot of
shit one extinct. I mean, there's you're merging the the
ecosystems of two continents together. Now they can and all

(01:33:18):
this stuff you're all put into floodgates. All this stuff
from North America can flood into South America, and all
this ship from South America can flood upward. There's gonna
be winners and losers. As you know, some ranges, some
species are gonna have both plants and animals are gonna
have ranges that expand, and some are going to have
ranges that contract. And so what happened? But I'm sure
there were you know, birds have always been flying north

(01:33:41):
and south doing the amphi tropical distribution thing. There's many
plant genera that occur both, you know, for example, on
the coast of California and the coast of Chile. Facilia
meant Zilia, lots of members of Baragnac. The uh, oh, god,
damn it, what was the what was the cryptanta? That

(01:34:02):
was it? I can't believe I forgot Ryptanta. I haven't
seen one in so long. We don't get many in Texas,
but you know birds have been. And then of course
there's like even a there's a hibiscus species in Texas
that is rare Hibiscus striatsking. It's a big fucker too,
and get like ten feet tall that grows in their
corpus christie. And also occurs in like a bog some

(01:34:25):
bog areas in Argentina, not bog marshy areas in Argentina.
So you know, one example, there's quite a few others,
so but always at similar latitudes, and then nowhere in between,
you know, like thirty degrees north, thirty degrees south, et cetera.
But that you know, now when you're collect connecting land,
now you're can have a lot more transfer. And then

(01:34:46):
of course there's animals moving stuff, and they're fur whatever
moving seeds in their first So anyway, the Great American
Biotic Interchange, significant geological and biological event curred three million
years ago and and I think what is it. Let's
see here on this book. It's substantiated by the first

(01:35:07):
appearance date of two trees, allnu and Qurcas, and that's
when they reached south America. The funds of one pollen
record from the basin of Bogota shows that all this
immigrated in this area about one point one million years
before present and Quarcas around four hundred and seventy thousand
years before present. And I guess is this is measured

(01:35:30):
from fossil pollen. Yeah, pollen, some micro fossils of pollen
very reliable, so we know that not the vegas used
to grow or was growing in an arcticle until about
two million years ago when it finally got clipped out. Okay,
let's take a break because I know, you know we're
working with the short attention span generation. Let's take a
break to something more lighthearted and funny. And when I

(01:35:54):
say funny, I mean I was goddamn rolling on the
floor left. I couldn't stop laughing about this last night.
You know it is it's a it's a it's a
real of some lady freaking out. You know, she looks
like an unhealthy white woman. And there's a few of all.
I've seen fewd thos in my life, you know, angry,
these just these fucking miserable people. You could tell they're

(01:36:15):
fucking miserable, and you almost feel bad for them, but
then they act like cunt, so it doesn't matter. You know,
it's a non gender specific cunt. You know, if people
are still getting upset about that kind of thing, I
hope not. I hope we have a bigger fish to fry.
And you're not you know, you're you're, your lily white
thin skin. Isn't getting offended by using the word cunt.
You know in Australia to use the word cunter for
it everybody? Huh. I thought I thought I filtered most

(01:36:36):
of you out. I thought I turned most of you.
I drove you away. Anyway, Let's watch this video because
this is really this is funny. It starts off a
little upsetting and put a trigger warning in there for you,
but it gets really good, gets really fun. Let's watch this.
Here we go, where is it? Where? There we go?
And I got you on video that you're destroying my

(01:36:56):
So this lady, she looks like she's kind of gangly,
you're gangly, pale, this neighborhood. She's banging hammers on this
Latino woman's car probably got toxic playing. She looks like
one of the cat feeders. I'm colling.

Speaker 1 (01:37:12):
Don't worry.

Speaker 2 (01:37:13):
She probably got toxo because she's hitting the garbage can
because my labor has herd go back to Mexico. There
we go. Okay, that fits the bill I would expect.
Let them know that she really looks unhealthy. She doesn't
look healthy. And now she's in a headlock. Is that

(01:37:34):
a problem, motherfucker? You can over tell me she's getting
read the riot. She's in the headline. Off turn that
motherfucking hose off mother to be played with. This is

(01:37:58):
so good, you understand, it's so filling. I want to
watch this every morning. Your carpets and Becky, she called
her Becky.

Speaker 1 (01:38:09):
How sticker you oh stick.

Speaker 2 (01:38:13):
She's still in a headline, and then boom, she just
chucks her into a bush, chucks her into a bush. Boom,
just like that, just like she's throwing her down a
garbage shoot of an apartment complex. Fucking terrific. I watched
that probably seven times last night. I was chuckling. I
was laughing my ass off. God, that was good, Oh god,

(01:38:35):
it was good. You one more time. Thank you caught
the fuck out of her, put the fuck out of
this neighborhood, got the fucking shit, fucking ship. I think
this is California. Judging from the plants I see every
the landscaping. Just those are California horticultural atrocities or a

(01:39:00):
mental pillows. Spore them in her goddamn hand, and she's ault.
Oh she doesn't look well. She's definitely got toxo to
Moses brain season on video. Oh it's good. You got
a problem, pitch, Oh that's nice problem. Do you have
a problem, pitch? Do you have a problem? Motherfucker. I

(01:39:24):
don't know what was up with this. She was on one.
She did take her meds. Tell me this last time.
I'm only doing this twice. I promise you, I promise myself.
And like nine nine bitches in there she uses nine.

(01:39:51):
Throw her in at the bush. Here we go, check
her into the bush as in the whole lands. Boom,
just like that and through a juniper. God, that's solid
as hell. Okay, let's get back to the task at hand. Now.
You know, I spent a lot of days sucking on futs,
trying my water filatio sling and the meat freeze at

(01:40:11):
Applebee's where I work. That I mentioned, I'm running for
Maya next to you. Have you seen this woman's yacht?
I mean, hey, let's be honest about this woman's yacht.
It looks here to you's okay, hey, hey, okay, anyway,
I think we'll wrap that up there. That's a good
that's a good ending spot. I'm gonna be speaking ah turets.

(01:40:32):
Someone wrote me upset that the fucking the fucking people
that write me sometime, I don't get it. Someone wrote
me upset that I had that I joke about having turets.
I don't even know if I'm joking anymore. If you
spend any days around me, you hear the fucking singing,
the nonsense, the bullshit that comes out of my mouth,
you know, because I just don't like the silence, and

(01:40:53):
I like making some people uncomfortable, depending on who they
might be. And I just like I like a little
I like a little song and dance too. You know.
I don't know. Maybe I do have tourets. But someone
wrote me trying to make me feel bad about joke
on having thurets. I said, listen, how the fuck I
don't know. I don't know. Everyone's got such sensitive feeling.
I know this is such a cliched thing to say.

(01:41:16):
And this is also like a right wing talking point
to try and get away with saying racist shit. That's
obviously not what I'm doing. This is got, This is
fucking ridiculous, though, I'm still amazed at some of the
people that write me. You're you think I'm being ablest
towards you because you because I joke about having turets.
Come on one, you just you gotta fu you have
a funny uh disability. I'm sorry, I'm just really digging myself.

(01:41:42):
I'm just I'm just fucking hunkering down. I'm just doubling down.
I'm really settling in this. Touretts is kind of funny.
You could joke about it. It's fine that someone else
wrote me, uh saying that I shouldn't straight people shouldn't
wear drag. First off, I had a good ten year
by curious period, so fuck right off there. And in second,

(01:42:06):
anybody can wear a drag, you know, really, fuck you.
It's just that's it's unbelievable. They were They were set
because me and Al no actually just me dressed in drag.
Oh no, al did it too, when we dressed as
old ladies and kill your lawn, which no one can watch.
I don't even know where to I don't even know
where you can where can you even pirate that they
shut it down. You're really gonna get offended because someone's like, fuck, oh,

(01:42:31):
that is when you lose me. You know, someone needs
to kick in the balls or non ball whatever whatever
you identify as. You need a kick in your growing
area if you're going to tell someone they can't wear
drag anyway. Okay, so now that I've offended more people,
I'm gonna be speaking at the New Mexico Mycological Society
in beautiful Krout cloud Craft, which is at like eight

(01:42:53):
thousand feet elevation with UH and Alan's going to be
the Alan and Mandy are going to be the two uh.
I'm gonna be doing a presentation of lawn and Killing
and then talking about New Mexico native plants, and then
we're doing I think we're doing another Ecuador trip. And
I'm excited because there's a really cool botanist that I'm

(01:43:16):
gonna hit up when I'm down there. She lives in
Banios and she studies mo Nina, which is the genus
in polygalaci. It's gonna have her on the podcast. Maybe
I'll do what I'm down there anyway, and then we
got a bunch of Ecuador in my collegists are gonna
be working with us, and it should be a good time.
But we're doing another Ecuador. We're doing an Ecuador trip

(01:43:38):
November eighth to like twenty second. I'll be posting it
in Instagram stories whenever tickets are available, whenever deets are available,
and we're gonna be in the Parmo and then also
in the upper Amazon, so like thirty eight hundred feet.
You know, it's the tropics, So elevations everything, diversity of climates.

(01:44:00):
Always ask whenever someone tells you where, you know they're
they're telling you where something is in the triphes you
always got to ask what elevation at that certain latitude?
A wide range of elevations, and it's going to mean
different conditions, but certainly lots of rain. I think Novembers
of rainy season still probably, And so that'll yeah, that'll
be November eighth to like twenty first to twenty second,

(01:44:22):
maybe a little bit longer, I don't know, but it
should be fun as hell. These trips are always fun.
Teaching exploring turetts, which you can't joke about anymore, I guess,
and and singing lots of nonsense. It'll be great. And
then pre order for the book is going to be
available in August. I guess for Concrete Botany, which is

(01:44:45):
not due out until April, but you know, do me
a favoring goal, pre order it. It's really good. We
get in. I get into biogeography, speciation, what makes the
plant native versus invasive. The chapter four is all about
on killing and shitting on modern horticulture and horticultural traditions

(01:45:06):
and horticultural atrocities. And I get a little bit into
how I got into the body and what made it exciting.
I talk about the Illegal Garden and Mandela. I think
it's one hundred and eighty pages. I forget how long
it is, but it's it'll be it'll be great. I
think you'll like it. I think you really enjoy it,
so I'll cut it off. There ain't I don't know.
I'll check you next time. Have a good I'll be

(01:45:26):
on the road the next two weeks. If you want
to order stickers, it's twenty bucks now for nine okay,
and it'll be that the venmo Is Society as hell.
No purchase protection. Leave your full name, your address, and
your zip code. Some people forget the zip code. They
put the city in it. They put the zip code,
and I gotta go look it up. And it does
end up to be a pain in the ass after

(01:45:47):
a while or or it gets returned whatever, and uh,
and I think that's it all right, it's all I
gotta have Grasty diego fox up by that and I
have her on video. You got a problem, bitch? Is
there a problem? Motherfucker? You put your mother fucking shit
on me. I can't bitch, tell me to go to

(01:46:10):
fuck backs overhere, Pitch, tell me, tell me, bitch, tell
me now, tie that motherfucking holes off, bitch, fust shut
up your fucking half. Do you understand me, bitch? I'm
not a motherfucker to be playing with. Do you understand me, bitch?
So you fucked up your car, bitch, and you think

(01:46:31):
that shit is cute? Bitch by the day, Becky, mother
fucking race the bitch you praise this mother fucking I'm
sticking you, bitch. I'm sticking you, bitch. Do you understand me? Bitch?
Do you understand me? Pitch? And I got you on
video that you're destroying my car? Thank you put the

(01:46:52):
fuck out of this neighborhood, you fucking shit.

Speaker 1 (01:46:57):
Yep, cool Lady,

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