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In this episode we talk with Makenzie Mabry, PhD, about the order Brassicales and all the cool and bizarre plants and plant families within it. We talk about the trend of polyploidy, whole genome duplication, the affinity for deserts and arid habitats, the evolution of succulents and the particular phytochemistry known as glucosinolates. 

We start off talking about the octopus plant that was recently discovered in 2020 in the salt pan deserts of Namibia, Tiganophyton karasense, and go through the entire phylogeny of the order, talking about little known families from disparate parts of the globe and why so many families only contain one species. 

In this episode we talk about the granite/gneiss knobs that surround the Atlanta, Georgia area and the cool plants that grow there, getting unintentionally shot at by morons at Arabia mountain, exploring limestone glades of Alabama with Kyle Lybarger, how much puke would it take to reach the confederate statue on the side of Stone Mountain if one were puking down from above, how important fire is to East Coast and Southeast ecosystems (especially for suppressing tick populations) and a ton more. 

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Plants mentioned in this podcast: 

Schoenolirion croceum 
Cotinus obovatus 
Packera dubia 
Polymnia laevigata 
Diamorpha smallii 
Tradescantia hirsuticaulis 
Ribes curvatum 
Chionanthus virginicum
Kalmia latifolia 
Neviusia alabamensis 

A 2 hour, unhinged livestream rant about ecological succession in lawn slaughter, book reviews, the deranged texas anti-plant bill (SB 1868), and more, all done while wearing a priest outfit.

Episodes of the Crime Pays podcast are available Ad-Free on the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't Patreon at: www.patreon.com/crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt

In this episode of the podcast we rant about a myriad of topics and also discuss 4 main habitat types of Costa Rica : 

Lowland dry forest, where you can get pissed on by spider monkeys and capuchins while photographing columnar cacti growing on karstic limestone dominated by Bursera simaruba. We also talk about the dry forest oak Quercus oleoides which tolerates a 6 month long dry season and doesn't even receive that much rain during the wet season since it tends to grow on thin-soiled limestone.

Montane Wet Forest dominated by oaks like Quercus insignis, which produces acorns the size of baseballs and grows with epiphytic orchids and bat pollinated Bromeliads.

Cloud Forest dominated by ectomycorrhizal trees such Quercus costricensis and Comarostaphylis arbutoides (Ericaceae), a kind of habitat which also contains tropical variations of plant genera that are generally more associated with temperate latitudes. 

Páramo habitat, where it's summer every day and winter every night due to the thin air at high elevations above 10,000' (3300 m) and plants produce layerings of hairs not to protect against drought but to protect against frost and increased Ultraviolet intensity. 

Rants about Mosquito Traps, Burrowing "toads" (Rhinophrynus dorsalis), Texas botanists' resistance to using scientific names, replacing windas, a new species of succulent bamboo from Laos, and more 

I recommend the hell outta the Biogents Mosquito Trap, which is a pleasant way to reduce mosquito populations in your area using a compound that mimics the smell of human sweat, attracting mosquitos, then sucking the little bastards into the netting. The netting can then be frozen for 20 minutes which kills the mosquitoes, then the mosquitos dumped out onto a sheet of paper and fed to your carnivorous plants (Dionaea, Pinguicula, Drosera, etc). For 20% off the trap use code botany20 at www.biogents.com

Podcast are available on the Patreon for a measly five bucks a month, so quit your whinin about the awful ads (as if you don't have fingers you can use to press buttons to skip through them) and sign up, where you'll have access to see early screenings of videos, photo dumps of rare plants, free literature, educational PDFs and more at www.patreon.com/crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt

Dr. Michael Powell is the curator of the Sul Ross Herbarium in Alpine, Texas and a proverbial wizard of West Texas Botany and Plants of the Trans-Pecos. In this episode we discuss 
how the endangered species act influenced the wariness of Texas ranchers and land owners, the current drought that Texas is in, describing new species of plants, the rock-daisies and cliff-dwellers of the Perityle clade (Asteraceae), limestone endemism among Texas plants, how to propagate Texas Madrones, how chromosome-counting was done using immature buds before the advent of PCR, propagating rare native plants of the Trans Pecos, botanizing Mexico in the 1960s and 70s, gypsophile plants, and how a single teacher inspired him to ditch baseball for Botany in the early 1960s.

Episodes of the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't podcast are available Ad-Free on the Patreon.

Deb Manley is a naturalist and long-distance hiker who in March 2024 discovered a plant species that was entirely new to science: Ovicula biradiata (Sunflower Family - Asteraceae).

In this episode of Crime Pays we talk about the discovery, the unique flora of the Big Bend region, limestone deserts, the phenomenon of Sky Islands and more.

Episodes of the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't podcast are available Ad-Free on the Patreon, where your membership helps support free botany education, filming, lawn-killing, native plant awareness and land preservation.

Episodes of this podcast are available Ad-Free on the Patreon at :
www.patreon.com/crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt

Dr. Lynn Clark studies neotropical bamboos - bamboos from the Americas - specifically the genus Chusquea, which is highly diverse in Central & South America, from the Pine-Oak Forests of Western Mexico all the way down to the temperate rainforests of Southern Chile. In this episode we talk about Chusquea, why it takes 30 years for some species to flower, why the woody bamboos are monocarpic (they flower once and then die, like Agave), how it can take decades for a clonal stand of Chusquea to flower, what the hell "gregarious monocarpy" is, how a stand of individuals "know" when to all flower at the same time, and more. 

We also talk about the enormous bamboo species Guadua angustifolia, which can reach heights of 30 meters (90 feet), forms massive stands in the upper Amazon, and creates its own canopy ecosytem much like a redwood tree does. 

Later in the podcast we discuss the 4 species of bamboo native to the United States, the genus Arundinaria , and how a dispersal event from Asia 25 million years ago may have originally introduced bamboos to the Americas.

Vocab words from this episode : 

Arm Cells : the leaf blades of bamboos possess arm cells in the mesophyll, a character trait that sets them apart from grasses.  


Gregarious Flowering or Gregarious Monocarpy : synchronous flowering. extremely cool and mysterious stuff.

Buergersiochloa bambusoides - New Guinea Disjunct

Raddiella vanessae - the world's smallest bamboo species

icneumonid wasps - wasps that have an ovipositor that is able to penetrate the hard culms of the giant Amazonian bamboo Guadua angustifolia

The strucutre and morphology of the buds at the nodes of bamboo are highly diagnostic for bamboos identification!

Chusquea from Western Mexico : Chusquea septentrionalis

Link to Guadua angustifolia video : 
https://youtu.be/7v6nmIatSx0

Bruce Shoemaker is a researcher on natural resource conflicts and
author of the book "Dead in the Water", about hydropower projects and extractive predatory capitalism in Southeast Asia.

In this podcast we talk about turning monoculturres of pine plantations back into biodiverse forest in Northern California, the importance of fire in Northern California forests, as well as the completely disparate topic of forest clearance and exploitation in Southeast Asia, the family Dipterocarpaceae, 
the removal of the dams on the Klamath River in California, and more.

In this episode we talk about why the word "nature" sucks; how to use the living world to avoid focusing on doom and idiocracy; why aimlessly walking along power line easements, irrigation ditches and railroad tracks in order to look at "weeds" is good for your health; an Australian orchid (Rhizanthella gardneri) that doesn't photosynthesize and blooms underground, a Vanilla species (Vanilla barbellata) that grow in cactus forests; whether pollen grains are analogous to nut-sacks or sperm; why the Australian Acacias have flowers that don't produce nectar, and more. the last  90 minutes are a conversation with my friend the pollination biologist and author Dr. Peter Bernhardt.



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