Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

Rants about South Texas Geology, Geologic Timeline Apps for your D@mn phone, why its better to water before a freeze, being dragged by a freight train leaving Ft. Worth Texas, how much self-hate someone must have in order to lower themselves to the point of patronizing Subway Sandwich shops, and more.

Rants about freezing while trying to sleep in the back of a truck in Lordsburg, New Mexico, why Agaves are monocarpic, the importance of having a "target list" should you ever get diagnosed with a terminal illness, fruit dispersal in Frankenia johnstonii, how rhyolite is just like Satan's play-doh, the biogeography of peyote gourds (Lagenaria sp.), microdosing LSD in the arboretum, and more

Thumbnail pic is Pellaea truncata (Pteridaceae)

A roughly 77 minute rant about how an Australian plant in the legume Family named Crotalaria cunninghamii "looks a like a bird" but only to humans who have smoked copious amounts of weed and certainly not as a product of natural selection, how glyphosate works and why it's the lesser of two evils when used for restoration and invasive plant management, and how dwarf ponies dressed in Hawaiian shirts could be used for the eradication of invasive grasses in desert habitats.

Michelle Cloud-Hughes is a Cactus researcher, botanist and Desert Rat who specializes in one of my favorite cactus genera - Cylindropuntia: the genus of the dreaded Chollas. She has described a new species of Cholla, Cylindropuntia chuckwallensis, and spent 2 decades trudging up mountains and rockscapes of the Mojave, Sonoran and Baja Desert. In this podcast we talk about how Chollas bang, why deserts are some of the best places to study plant evolution, and why the sh*t they can't put solar panels on top of the parking lots of any of America's vast and expansive shopping and automobile culture slums.

Jim Mauseth is a wizard with a microscope and a retired professor of plant anatomy at UT Austin, where he taught for 30+ years. Jim is an expert in Plant Anatomy with an emphasis on Cacti. In this podcast we talk about anatomical adaptations of cacti and why palms are not true trees.

Dr. Peter Breslin is a Botanist out of Tucson Arizona specializing in Cacti, and recently did time in Brewster County Jail for "trespassing" to photograph some rare endemics that only grow on Novaculite (ancient biogenic silica) soils in West Texas. He also helped elucidate some of the evolutionary relationships between species that were formerly classified in the genus Mammilaria but are actually more closely related to the Baja genus Cochemiea, which specializes in hummingbird pollination.

This conversation was fun as hell, and we talk about why nomenclatural change-ups and classifications of this sort are important, and how they tell a story about how organisms (including humans) move and migrate across continents and landscapes, and how the environment (which consists of geology, climate, presence of certain animals, etc) SELECTS for various traits in plants.

We also talk about DNA and transcriptome analysis, and how it clears up some of the evolutionary relationships between plants and how transcriptomes can actually change depending on what habitat conditions an individual plant is in.

We talk about the remarkable genus Pediocactus, a genus of the frigidly-cold high desert in the American Southwest and the radiation that it has had there, as well its ability to pull itself into the ground during the dormant season, effectively "hiding".

LAstly, we clear up some of the confusion around the extremely bizarre and endangered Mexican genus Pelecyphora and how it's related to plants in the genus Escobaria that grow all over North America, including in some very cold climates.

A discussion about Peyote conservation being done by Morningstar Conservancy in Tucson, Arizona and the ethnobotany of the Peyote Meeting, as well as what it means to "listen to the plant".

In this episode we rant about :

Rescuing and digging thin-soiled limestone prairie plants from a soon-to-be-destroyed site in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area weeks before the bulldozers come by to erect a data center or some other obscenity.

Moth pollination in deserts, the chemistry and familiar smell of moth-pollinated flowers.

West Texas sand dunes

Limestome endemic plants like Encelia scaposa and Echinocactus horizonthalonius

Limestone cacti in Southern Arizona, which is a landscape composed almost entirely of volcanics or intrusive igneous rock

Jeremy Spath (owner of Hidden Agave nursery @hiddenagave) and Kevin Krucher (@crazy4cactus) talk about a recent trip through the states of Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Coahuila to document and explore desert plants and their ecology, including tons of rare species like Lophophora williamsii, Stenocactus phyllacanthus, Astrophytum asterias, Obregonia denigrii, Ariocarpus scaphirostris, Agave Montana, Agave albopilosa and more.

This entire podcast is about the Poison Ivy & Mango Family, Anacardiaceae. Susan Pell , Executive Director of the U.S. Botanic Garden & John Mitchell from the New York Botanic Garden both specialize in the systematics and phytochemistry of this incredible family of plants.

In this episode we talk about the active compound in Poison Ivy, Urushiol, as well as some of the cool adaptations that dryland and desert-adapted members of the family have evolved to cope with their unique environments. We mention a ton of cool plants species you've never heard of before, some edible and some toxic, and spend 80 minutes discussing how cool this family of plants is.

Plant in the thumbnail is Actinocheita potentillifolia from Puebla, Mexico.