LEAVES LIKE SNAKE SCALES.
LEAVES LIKE SNAKE SCALES - the seasonally-dry, nutrient poor environment causes convergent evolution in phyllotaxy & leaf morphology.
A remarkable case of convergent evolution can be seen in the leaves of plants that have evolved in seasonally dry tropical and subtropical environments on iron-rich, nutrient poor soils with pronounced dry seasons. In the Brazilian cerrado of Minas Gerais, one can see an exceptional example of this.
The habitat here is so extreme and unique that it repeatedly produces the same vegetative trait in the plant lineages that have spent the past few million years evolving here : leathery, coriaceous and often sessile leaves lacking a leaf stalk (petiole) and having the consistency of cardstock paper covered in wax or a dense coating of short hairs. Often times the leaves are arranged imbricately on the stem, as well, almost like snake scales or roofing shingles.
The form of many of these shrubs tends to be bizarre as hell and out of a Dr. Seuss book - many of these are sparsely-branched, single stemmed shrubs with no leaves for the bottom 60-90% of the plant. This is called the Monopodial or monocaulous habit. I've seen it in New Caledonia before, and to a lesser extent in California serpentine chaparral, both habitats occur on iron-rich, nutrient-stressed geologies. In the Brazilian cerrado, however, this vegetative convergence repeateadly smacks you in the face. You end up seeing it in dozens of unrelated species from different families. It is if the landscape and environment itself is hand-selecting what forms work here and what forms don't, and actually, that's kind of what is happening. Its astonishingly cool to see multiple unrelated plant families all converging on the same vegetative traits.
Apparently, sessile and glaucous leaves & the monocaulous habit is what makes the most sense under these geologic and climatic conditions.
The ITCZ produces the dry season & the metamorphosed ("cooked") , thoroughly leached (because it's both old as fuck and the tropical rainy season can be VERY rainy) quartzitic sandstone produces the nutrient-poor, iron-rich substrate. The ITCZ is a result of Earth's axis causing the low-pressure zone to oscillate on opposite sides of the equator depending on which hemisphere is tilted towards the sun.
For identifications on these plants please use the “explore” feature on inaturalist. Set location to Minas Gerais, Brazil and select username joeysantore. Squarespace app is not letting me annotate photos right now because it's garbage (probably because they spent all their capital on shitty advertising rather than maintaining their software).
I can't add pics now cause the squarespace app is fucking garbage and full of glitches and bugs. My hatred for squarespace is superceded only by my hatred for banks and health insurance companies.
Not Your Midwest Ironweeds...
Maschalostachys markgraffii in the rockfields (Campos Rupestres) of Northern Minas Gerais, Brazil…
This one really stumped me. Generally speaking, seeing purple anther tubes on the florets of a plant in Asteraceae in Brazil is a good give-away for the ironweed subfamily, Vernonioideae. That's not saying much however, as that subfamily is exceptionally species-rich in the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes of Eastern Brazil.
What really blew my mind were both the habit of this species and the habitat itself. It was essentially growing in a quartzite sandstone boulderfield surrounded by drought-hardy aroids, orchids, and cacti.
This plant was basically a 20' foot tall monocaulous flagpole with no vegetation save for some leaves at the top. I was only able to inspect it by standing on the sketchy ledge of a huge boulder that it was growing at the base of.
The flowers themselves were syncephalous, which in Asteraceae means "a head of heads".... A flower head that is itself composed of flowerheads (capitula), each one bearing hundreds of tiny flowers with - again - the purple fused anther tubes that are usually (but not always) indicative of Vernonioideae.
I only figured out what this was after a friend who's a synantherologist (one who studies Asteraceae) at a university in Brazil told me the genus - Maschalostachys. The genus (as of now) only has two species in it. Both are from the Cerrrado biome, and both are weird as hell and incredibly cool.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331952463_A_synopsis_of_Lychnophorinae_Asteraceae_Vernonieae
Ecological studies of edaphic islands or WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS.
Uebelmannia pectinifera is an endangered cactus species that occurs on exposures of quartz-rich, nutrient-poor sandstone that serve as rocky arid "islands" surrounded by an ocean of subtropical dry-deciduous forest in Brazil. This particular population has experienced a 98% reduction due to poaching.
It occurs with Kielmeyera (Calophyllaceae), Calliandra sp., Encholirium, a xeric Philodendron, a xeric Anthurium, Cipocereus minensis, and many more.
Spines occur on the margins of the ribs, and the sides of the ribs are coated in dense, speckled patterns of trichomes and wax.
What struck me most about its habitat is that there was virtually no soil here, except that created by the dead leaves of the dry-deciduous trees (legumes and Kielmeyera) and old armored leaf blades of the Encholirium.
Sadly, the poaching here has been extremely brutal. Reportedly there were once hundreds of plants covering these rock outcrops (which are only black because of the living crust of lichen that covers them), but nearly all of them have been stolen for sale to collectors. For many people, that primate brain of ours just HAS to have these plants in our collection. What good does it do to preserve intact habitat if it's so far away and all we get to see are pictures? Better to have the opportunity to slowly kill these plants over a number of years by having them in a pot while we struggle to re-create the specific and extreme conditions that they have evolved to over many millions of years.
Meanwhile, botanists in the regional localities where many of these plants grow struggle to garner public enthusiasm - let alone education that these plants even exist - among the people that live there, if only because very few modern societies express a values system that takes into account viewing plants via any ecological context as vital cogs in a living machine that we all need to have intact in order for our own civilization to function let alone survive.
Not a day goes by that I don't consider this.
Anyways, enjoy your morni
ng! GFY, BYE 😘
A Little-known Family of Resurrection Plants
Every once in awhile I hear about a plant family or group of plants that are so remarkable yet so little known that it makes me feel almost incredulous that more people dont know about them. What a tragedy of awareness.
Velloziaceae is one of those families. It is hard to overstate how infinitely cool this family is, not to mention how species-rich and diverse members of this family are in the tropics, esp in Brazil.
For being monocots that otherwise look somewhat uncharismatic when not in flower, their flowers are remarkably large & vividly colorful, having adapted to a diversity of pollination systems.
But members of this family hold a special secret - many of them are "dessication tolerant". That is, they are "resurrection plants". Though this is common to see in ferns, there are not many angiosperms that can claim this title.
There are over 200 species in this family in Brazil, mostly in the genera Vellozia & Barbacenia. Everywhere we went, especially in the rocky, thin-soiled "Canpos Rupestres" habitat, we saw a member of Velloziaceae. Being in the order Pandanales, they are distantly related to "Screw Pines", which are another bizarre plant that few Northern Hemisphere residents have heard of in the genus Pandanus.
The flowers of Vellozia are often large & showy, and the fruits (ala ovaries) are often covered in sticky, stipitate glands. In the pic of leaf rosettes, you can see the vegetation which appears totally dessicated & vrispy but is most assuredly NOT dead.
Species pictured here : Vellozia variabilis.,V. hirsuta, V. declinans, V. hirsuta, V. variabilis
Blue Cacti & Bat Pollinated Flowers
Emblematic Cactus of the Brazilian Cerrado, Cipocereus minensis is an endemic cactus that is ubiquitous in the Campos Rupestres biome of Minas Gerais Brazil. Campos Rupestres are thin-soiled rock fields full of tons of cool drought-adapted orchids, bromeliads, cacti & other plants that grow on the nutrient-poor quartzitic sandstone here. Many of these plants are known as lithophytes - plants that grow on rocks. Though the rainy season here can drop upwards of 20-30 inches of rain, the dry season caused by the ITCZ has caused all kinds of drought strategies to evolve.
Like many bat-pollinated flowers, Cipocereus flowers begin to open at night. Though the sepals and hypanthium are a beautiful blue, the flower itself is cream-colored (easier to see in the dark night) and produce prodigious amounts of nectar for its obligate bat-pollinators.
By morning, the flowers begin to close up. As the tepals and flower tube are blue and cacti have inferior ovaries, the fruits themselves are also blue when they mature and are edible (all cactus fruit is technically edible, though not necessarily palletable), reportedly having a taste and texture somewhat similar to kiwi.
We encountered Cipocereus frequently, always growing sympatrically with other wild-ass plants like drought-adapted Begonias, Syagrus palms, Vellozias, Encholiriums, spiny bromeliads, and other plants that are little known and would blow the minds of horticulturalists the world over.
Sadly, as all individuals of this species are obligate outcrossers and bats are basically the sole pollinators (rarely bees, as the flowers tend to close up by the time of day bees are active), if the habitat loses the bats, it will lose this cactus. This will of course cause ripples down the food chain, as the fruits of this cactus feed a ton of the local critters.
The blue color of the sepals/hypanthium is likely a way to protect the flowers from UV/Sun, since they are in bud during the day before they open at night.
Cippocereus minensis
New Zealand Botany: the convergent trait of RUSSETY Bronze leaf Undersides
More f*cking pictures of leaves...
But trust me, this is really cool.
Another trait I noticed among unrelated plants in New Zealand was bronze leaf undersides among a few of the plants there, most of them all "small" forest understory trees.
I noticed it first in Coprosma arborea, a wind-pollinated member of a very ubiquitous and species-rich genus in the coffee family, Rubiaceae. Not only did it look really cool,but it was extremely peculiar. Olearia rani, a member of the sunflower family, does the same thing. Carpodetus serratus, a small tree in the family Rousseaceae - same thing.
These subtle dark tones & bronzing made the leaves appear incredibly dark & indecipherable when viewed from below. I only noticed it because it was an absolute pain in the ass looking up to photograph them trying to decipher where the leaves were. It made the leaves appear incredibly dark. Then I started seeing it in a few different places & unrelated taxa.
When plant evolution seems to be repeating itself in a unique fashion in a particular location or environment, it is rarely ever coincidence. Carpodetus serratus, a little-known member of a family called Rousseaceae in the sunflower family order, Asterales, does the same thing (and also produces zig-zag, divaricate branching - see 2 posts back).
What could be selecting for bronze leaf undersides and what the hell would bronze leaf undersides do, anyway?
Then I remembered what a pain in the ass it was to photograph these leaves. The dark bronze tint to these leaves made it very hard to see them when I was trying to photograph them while looking up from the dark understory of a shaded forest. Could this to be a now-unnecessry adaptation to Moa? Hard to prove, of course, and there are no studies or research papers investigating it, but it seems highly plausible.
Zig-Zag branching (divarication), obvious differences in juvenile/adult leaf shape (heteroblasty), dark leaf undersides...
I love thinking about this kind of stuff. It is so fulfilling & almost somewhat beautiful - philosophically speaking - to see the living, vestigial result of what must have been an evolutionary arms race millions of years in the making.
Chonkosaurus, Legend of Cook County
Last Friday Al Scorch and I decided to rent a kayak and paddle around Goose Island in Chicago. It was the first warm day of the year, which is hilarious because it was already early May. We intended to just fuck around and do a plant survey and see what was growing on the remains of dead industry on a river that many have always known to be a smelly, polluted and foul body of water.
As a kid I remember almost falling in the water one time running from crackheads after painting graffiti. I remember feeding bits of bread to invasive Asian carp that would hang out around the pylons that protect the city's many bridges from getting hit by the errant river barge.
The full video is posted on the youtube channel, and of course most the plants that we observed were European invasives. The only native plant that was relatively common seemed to be boxelder, Acer negundo, in the Maple family, Sapindaceae.
What surprised us - as many people now know due to how ridiculously viral it's gotten - was the sight of what had to be a 60 lb snapping turtle perched on some gigantic rusty chains that were holding the rotting pylons together.
Though snapping turtles can tolerate some notoriously shitty water, it was still exhilarating to see such an old and large one hanging out right in the heart of the City. Not only that, but we saw evidence of beavers as well, and the people I spoke with at Urban Rivers who are installing a native plant bioswale only a half mile from where we saw the snapper told us that they've seen beavers and a wide variety of native fish species returned to the river in the last few years. It is great to see things that lived here for hundreds of thousands of years beforehand slowly come back to the place that they used to call home. Now, all someone needs to do is go in and cut back and remove the invasive Buckthorn and plant some native Chicago plants in their place. It's astonishing how quickly wildlife comes back once you plant native plants. All you have to do is plant the natives, and everything else will slowly return.
Chonkosaurus tshirts/hoodies available here : Chonkosauurus Hoodies/Shirts
“Edaphic Aridity As a Factor in Angiosperm Evolution “
Great paper by the well-known botanist of the late 20yh Century Daniel Axelrod regarding how dry rocky microsites can serve as sites of plant speciation, containing a cast of species that completely differs from the surrounding more mesic, wetterforests.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I8koFJEqeue2azVnoSx54EHbq2fAxYNS/view?usp=drivesdk
Lupine diversity in Florida
Here's three species of Lupine that can be encountered in the Florida Panhandle. Statewide, there are 8 taxa that occur natively. Many of these have “quasi-unifoliate” leaves consisting of a large leaf with two heavily reduced, “vestigial” leaves at the base of the single leaf on either side.
The three species here are :
Lupinus villosus
Lupinus westianus (shrub)
&
Lupinus diffusus.
Taxodium ascendens in the Florida Panhandle
One of three species in the genus, Taxodium ascendens has spiraling sprays of appressed scales and forms extensive groves of dwarfed trees with bottle-shaped trunks in 24 inch deep water.
The trees are covered in both Tillandsia usneoides and the lichen for which aforementioned member of the Bromeliad Family was named, Usnea sp.
Included in this post are images of dissected flowers of Nymphaea odorata, a basal angiosperm with an odd pollination biology consisting of protogynous (female first) flowers temporarily trapping beetles and then becoming male (staminate) on the 2nd and 3rd day, after which the entire flower sinks and the fruit matures below the surface of the water.
The Rarest Milkweed in Texas Just Got An Endangered Species Listing…
The words “Prostrate Milkweed” don’t roll off the tongue so easy, but I guess it’s easier for most than “Asclepias prostrata”. Whatever you call it, it’s one of the rarest and most elusive members of the genus in North America, and it’s specialized to growing on the sandy, dry soils of the thornscrub landscape of the South Texas Borderlands.
The genus Asclepias has 140 species in it - some are common, some are rare. Asclepias welshii, from the coral pink sand dunes of Southern Utah, is another bizarre one. Then there is the clade of 4 species of “Dwarf” milkweeds from the Four Corners Region. Asclepias meadii is another extremely rare one from the midwest, which has lost a lot of ground to habitat destruction (ie conversion to agriculture, human sprawl, and cancer-like growth). But Asclepias prostrata is certainly one for the evolutionary record books. Why exactly did it evolve this creeping habit? Where is the adaptive benefit of staying so low to the ground? How about those undulating leaf margins? Do they serve some purpose in mitigating leaf exposure to the hot South Texas sun? And what about those underground tuberous roots that enable it to go dormant during bust cycles of long drought and heat? Why does it sometimes disappear for two years, apparently laying dormant, only to suddenly re-emerge with the onset of cool rains?
The stems and leaves of this plant are covered in tiny hairs. This pubescence of course mitigates leaf temps and increases boundary layer humidity, preventing evapotranspirative moisture loss from leaf stomata. Like most milkweed species, I assume the pollinator to be some kind of large bee or wasp, drawn in by the nectar in those five hoods (the teeth-looking appendages) and the sweet and fragrant smell they produce. A foot of one of these insects must slip into that trapdoor of the stigmatic slit, pulling a pollinium out with it and transporting it to another flower. Milkweed flower anatomy is a whole other world, replete with its own vernacular. I did a video on it a few years back for the curious.
Anyway, does the endangered species listing MEAN much? Not really, not in the state of Texas, where property rights trump everything and many people will see little point in keeping anything around that doesn’t directly benefit humans, at least in the short term. Yet it still draws attention to this plant, and this plant needs all the attention it can get. Recently, botanists from San Antonio Botanic Garden collected fruits and seeds of this plant before it got its endangered species listing, and had a contract grower for US Fish and Wildlife Service grow them out. Plants were then accessioned at the botanic garden. A few other native plant growers in the region of South Texas have also propagated this plant and so far, have had luck with it. Sadly, like many species in the region, the true hope in protecting this species now seems to lie in its ability to tolerate human cultivation, as ex-situ conservation seems to have a lot more potential to save the species than preserving habitat. Habitat for this plant is certainly NOT protected, and populations of the plant have recently been destroyed for both border fence construction as well as by inadvertent road-grading before the plants were able to set seed. Making more people aware of the plant, and showing them how cool it is and why its worth being proud of and trying to protect, is all that can really be done at the moment since habitat is on the chopping block as the population of the region grows and commercial retail and tract house sprawl spreads out.
Peyote (& other cactus)POLLINATORS of South Texas
Acmaeodera is a genus of wood boring beetle that was recently observed on flowers of Peyote and Thelocactus in the South Texas borderlands. I assume this species of beetle also pollinates many other species of cactus. The type specimen was originally collected on a Opuntia flower in 1966, yet this is the first record of it on a peyote. The larvae bore into dead wood of Karwinskia humboldtiana (Rhamnaceae), Prosopis (Fabaceae) & Vachellia rigidula (aka Blackbrush”Acacia”, Fabaceae).
Quite likely the beetles are in the flowers eating pollen and floral parts, yet in doing so they inadvertently transfer pollen from anther to stigma, and ideally between respective flowers of different individuals for cross pollination. As Peyote flowers are self-fertile anyway, however, even transferring pollen between anther & stigma of the same flower would ensure higher seed production.
Seeing relationships firsthand and then wanting to know more eventually leads to understanding that indeed, everything is connected. It creates inadvertent ecologists out of us. In order to have the beetles, one needs the shrubs (Karwinskia, Vachellia, etc.). Everything in an ecosystem has a function, though we may not understand how all the pieces fit together at first.
LIVING RELICTS OF THE DISTANT PAST
On a bizarre geologic formation in West Texas grows the only population of a rare oak species known as Hinckley's Oak. It forms extensive thickets here on a geologic formation known for its many nooks and crannies due to a magma plume that swelled up beneath it like a bubble in a pizza crust, distorting & exposing all the successive layers of sedimentary rocks beneath.
This oak doesn't get tall here - maybe 3' tops. The leaves themselves resemble little spiny blue holly leaves, leathery with red petioles.
Plants with really small geographic distributions are always fascinating. Such is the case with this rare oak. In the case of Quercus hinckleyi, it's whats known as a paleoendemic, meaning that in the distant past it was once more widespread, but as the climate shifted & the surrounding landscape became hotter and drier and generally more inhospitable, populations of this tree at lower elevations died out and it became relegated to this higher, somewhat shadier and cooler "sky island".
Whats even more bizarre is that in cultivation this oak reaches heights of about 20' tall, like at San Antonio Bot Garden but here in the mountains of West Texas near the Mexican Border, it tops out at about 3' tall, & many individuals are no taller than 12 inches, forming little colonies with multiple stems, each colony likely a single genetic individual growing up through fissures in the limestone substrate below.
Standing up here on this slope as the sun hung low in a murky sky, I tried to imagine what a woodland composed of these oaks must've looked like 12,000 years ago & how the climate & surrounding desert must've changed since then. Moments like that are one of the most addicting things to anyone interested in botany - Gaining an understanding and a knowledge of the land you live on & how all the different organisms & environmental factors in it interact is part of what seems to make a fulfilling human life. It gives us a contextual setting in which to put ourselves & our own conscience & sentience, so that this often fucked up, insane world begins to make sense.
Pollination via goth butterfly
POLLINATION VIA GOTH BUTTERFLY
Spend some time in the Chihuahua Desert & aside from the abundance of limestone one of the first things you'll notice is a lot of plants have long, narrow tube-shaped white flowers & bloom or at least stay open past dusk.
Oenothera, Mandevilla, Acleisanthes, Amsonia, Datura - all dusk-blooming flowers that are pollinated primarily by moths. Moths are everywhere, but few people ever think of what they're doing or how important they are to the ecology of these fragile, beautiful, rocky places.
Moths do a lot of pollinating in the desert, & in turn they have driven the evolution of a lot of the plants that occur in these places. It's so hot during the day that - if you're a plant - to expose delicate floral tissue to the intense ultraviolet and infrared energy requires some costly evolutionary advancements...or you can just take the easy way out, avoiding the sun altogether & blooming at night.
Salvia whitehousei grows on the undulating limestone hills where the Edwards Plateau starts to turn into the Chihuahua desert. Like many plants here, the leaves are narrow & covered in hairs that make them appear chalky white. Like many moth-pollinated flowers, it has a long narrow tube flower with an opening that's much too small for a bee or fly to crawl inside. Most Salvias are pollinated by bees or hummingbirds, especially, but Salvia whitehousei is pollinated by moths.
As the flowers stay open during the day, they can also surely be pollinated by butterflies or long-tongued flies, but as I photographed this incredibly cool plant from a banger fucking landscape, I heard the pattering hum of sphinx moths, & watched them hit the flowers, hovering like small hummingbirds.
A moth-pollinated Salvia. Moths drove the evolution of one of my favorite genera of plants. I didn't know this when I came out here to look for it. As this is an uncommon plant with a narrow distribution, I didn't see anything regarding moth pollination of this species in the literature. But standing here at dusk in the desert I clearly saw moths pollinating this species. I started laughing. How fucking cool. Evolution is a fantastic beast.
Central Florida Sand Scrub
Dickinson State Park (named after a dead honky who wrecked his ship here four hundred years ago) North of Ft. Lauderdale is a gem of vestigial habitat left amidst what is generally a huge autoslum. It hosts a number of incredible plant species as well as the endangered Florida Scrub Jay.
south Florida Swamp Botany
A few photographs of various taxa I encountered while filming “KILL YOUR LAWN” in South Florida last month. I realized that the only other place that I have seen of these genera was in the Dominican Republic, most of them being tropical and Carribean/ Central American. The Carribean islands are basically just stepping stones between South America and Florida.
Ancient Irises of Tasmania
Isophysis tasmanica is a dinosaur among Irises.
Ancient Irises, Ancient Soils..
Isophysis tasmanica is the sole species in the genus Isophysis, and the sole species in the subfamily Isophysidoideae - an early-diverging lineage in the Iris Family, Iridaceae.
It grows on acidic, nutrient-poor, water-logged sands in the mountains of Western Tasmania along with Blandfordia punicea (a red-flowered, bird-pollinated monocot in its own family in orde Asparagales) and the extremely bizarre Dracophyllum milliganii, of the blueberry family, Ericaceae. The entire habitat here is dominated by the smallest Eucalyptus species in the world, Eucalyptus vernicosa and "buttongrass", Gymnoschoenus sphaerocephalus (Cyperaceae), which forms a peat-like mat with its many dead and living roots. The soils it grows in here are basically white sands weathered from billion-year-old sandstone.
Unlike all other members of the Iris Family, Isophysis tasmanica produces a superior ovary, meaning the ovary (aka the fruit) matures above the point of attachment of the tepals/perianth.
I had been wanting to see this weird and beautiful bastard for a few years, especially after seeing the incredible amount of Iris diversity in South Africa and then reading about how DNA sequencing had determined that this species, Isophysis tasmanica, was the oldest extant lineage of the family, which makes sense, because many ancient lineages of plants Gondwanan relicts seem to have Western Tasmania as the only current place that they can be found, presumably having gone extinct everywhere else in their former range.
Filming and photographing this day, we got dumped on with intermittent ice storms. It would clear up and the sun would come out for five minutes, then it would raining freezing drizzle or tiny hail pebbles the next minute. This occurred on and off the entire morning, which is perfectly normal Tasmanian mountain summer weather from what I understand. Thanks to my friend @isophysis for the lead on the phenology at this particular location.
Full video out in three weeks. Pic 6 shows a burned "forest" of the shortest Eucalypt, Eucalyptus vernicosa, with Dracophyllum milliganii and Isophysis in the “understory".
Identity politics as the new astrology
Identitarianism has become the new astrology. On its own it’s completely understandable - in a homogenized consumer society where the physical landscape is the same assortment of parking lots and consumer retail everywhere, no place in the United States seems to have much of its own individual identity (or culture) anymore. Youth growing up in this kind of bleak landscape are understandably grasping for some sort of self-validation or self-identity that will form the foundation of their understanding of the world around them. Born out of a reasonable attempt to come to terms with a long history of human injustice, genocide, oppression, & European colonialism, and given the current cultural landscape & the recent Advent of social media, identity politics has now morphed into a take on human beings and human societies that misses reality entirely, yet plays into our worst, age-old tribalistic urges to divide into opposing social groups. Mix this with the reality of an eroding middle-class, go-nowhere suburbs and go-nowhere jobs, and…
Philosophically, this is an existentialist nightmare - like something out of the most dystopian version of an Albert Camus novel.
Social media has made an already bleak and depressing cultural situation all the more deranged, offering young people endless opportunities to compare themselves to one another through the distorted and completely inaccurate lens of handheld pocket computers, each equipped with a camera that can record video. Young people growing up in this landscape are facing an uphill battle in terms of their psychological development. The utterly deranged venue of social media accounts and one’s self-image as filtered through the number of acquired likes has become the mirror for this generation, yet the image it reflects back to the viewer is highly inaccurate, formed by a collective aggregation of the viewers that have interacted with it. This puts a whole new spin on the human group dynamics and social behavior, and more importantly - the development of the self.
It could almost be argued that it would be extremely hard for true self-awareness and genuine self-development to be able to occur in this kind of atmosphere, at least while psychologically plugged into social meia. Rather than developing organically on its own, with the constant infusion of social media into daily life the sense of one’s self now develops with near-constant self-consciousness due to the ability to sculpt one’s image in the eye of the ever-watching audience. I feel like some of the dadaists - and later the situationists - saw this coming.
The plant known as “strawberry pine” (which isn't a pine at all)
A "living fossil", now restricted to cold windswept mountains of Tasmania. This plant is a classic case of PALEOENDEMISM.
Microcachrys tetragona is a strange conifer colloquially known as "strawberry pine" , though it bears no relation to pines, which evolved much later than this family of conifers - Podocarpaceae - which occur primarily in the Tropics & Southern Hemisphere.
Microcachrys occurs at elevations of 3,000' or more, where it sprawls over rocks as a creeping plant, never taller than a few inches. The relatively modest elevation is high enough to be alpine here, as we are at roughly 43° South Latitude. Two weeks from the Southern Summer solstice and soon after I took this picture, we got hailed on. The temperature was about 38° fahrenheit.
The red cone (not a fruit, because this is not a angiosperm) is edible, but according to Woody tastes somewhat insufferably like conifer resin, though initially it was somewhat sweet.
Last photo is of the habitat, and a stand of both Athrotaxis cupressoides and Athrotaxis selaginoides, which are another ancient lineage of conifer.
I couldn't help standing here and thinking that at some point Microcachrys, as well as Athrotaxis, Nothofagus, many of the Epacrids (bluebe family, Ericaceae) and some of the alpine Eucalyptus (such E. coccifera and subcrenulata) MUST have composed some of the plant community of Antarctica before it fully froze over a few million years ago. And indeed it did - fossil pollen of both Microcachrys & Nothofagus are ubiquitous in Antarctic rocks
It's such a bizarre plant community, and the Highlands of Central Tasmania act as a time capsule to preserve so many of these species of conifer that were surely once more ubiquitous (or relatives of more ubiquitous taxa) and far more widespread, eons ago.
Getting this perspective on life on Earth is much do what we got me hooked on Botany in the first place.
