Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
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An antidote to nausea caused by life in modern society via explorations of the cast of plant species composing the "living skin" of Planet Earth.
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
5d ago
A long-winded rant about the social media phenomenon known as Instagram Drug Bros™️ and trying to encourage them to seek spiritual refuge (como se dice nice) in education about plant ecology and evolution rather than just the hoarding and collecting of plants that may have been sourced through somewhat unethical means. Why is plant habitat just as, if not more important than the plant itself? How is the ecological context in which a plant evolves inseparable from the plant itself? Can we get Instagram Drug Bros ™️ to start studying and collecting data on things like native solitary bees ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2w ago
This is a science-heavy episode with Dr. Michael Windham, specialist in Cheilanthoid Ferns curator at Duke Herbarium. Even if you're not interested in this group, they're a great case study in numerous fascinating phenomena including convergent evolution, biogeography (dispersal vs. vicariance), why DNA sequencing is important to taxonomy, self-cloning to escape the limitations of being a fern in a desert, etc.
"Cheilanthoid Ferns" are a remarkable group of ferns - they grow in habitats where ferns seemingly shouldn't be able to grow - out of cracks in rocks and cliff faces in regions ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2w ago
This episode consists of a rant about code-switching and friendship/cordiality through friction and being a pain in the ass, along with why dissecting flowers (and not just taking them at face value) with a razorblade or knife is important for understanding evolution, plant breeding systems and pollination ecology, what being "protogynous" is and why so many early-braching angiosperms do it, trying to offend advertisers, helping cacti bang in order to produce seed, and how an undescribed Gymnopilus species found growing on a shrubby Ambrosia species in the Baja California Desert (thumbna ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
3w ago
A conversation with Tony Figueroa, Senior Manager for the Invasive Plant Program at the Tucson Audubon Society (no affiliation with the National Org) about preventing Buffelgrass and Stinknet from smothering fragile Desert Ecosystems in Arizona. We also discuss why some in the "online permaculture community" (oh gahd) have such an aversion to any and all glyphosate use due to a misunderstanding about how it's used. Other topics include using an electric chainsaw to vandalizeCallery Pears and Crepe Myrtles and other hotricultural atrocity street trees, Why Texas is so uptight, how an invasive a ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
3w ago
A conversation with Dr. Kathleen Pryer (Director, Duke University Herbarium) and Dr. Michael Windham, (Curator of Vascular Plants, Duke University Herbarium) about the University's Decision to cut costs by closing the herbarium as well as the general trend in modern US Academia of failing to recognize the importance of Botany in society as a whole as well as other attempts to defund it.
We also touch on the cheilanthoid fern genus Gaga, named after both Lady Gaga and a section of the roughly 1500 base-pair-long MatK plastid gene region and why cheilanthoid ferns (aka desert ferns) are so damn ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
1M ago
A long, disjointed rant about using and writing Dichotomous Keys and why it's sometimes a process of grasping for straws or throwing a bunch of stuff to a wall to see what sticks, what an ideal floral key might look like if it were written by a neurotic, rambling schmuck fixated on ecology and biogeography. Other subjects include the gradation between ecotypes and species in Fremontodendron as well as the mycorrhizal associations found with Ornithostaphylos oppositifolia (Ericaceae, Arbutoideae) in the chaparral of Baja California, Mexico ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
1M ago
More Deranged Rants, this time about Javelina Management, Getting City Approval for Cactus Restoration and Street Trees, growing endangered plants from seed, Eocene Sandstone, growing xeric ferns from spore, working the Ozol Local and running freight trains along San Francisco Bay and much more ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2M ago
Rants about Montezuma Cypress on the Rio Grande, Cool Desert Ferns in West Texas and the Subfamily Cheilanthoideae of the fern family Pteridaceae, DEA permits for Peyote, Mountain Lions vs. Auodads, kind Caucasian Birders behaving at the Mexican border, funding the research station in South Texas with the nice bathroom, and more ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2M ago
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 ..read more
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2M ago
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 toxi ..read more