Botanist Answers Plant Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

hi i'm joey santor plant lover botanist and working class mooc today i'm here to answer your plant questions via twitter this is plant support [Music] okay this one's from cash smart llc maybe maybe this guy could do my taxes when we're done is it possible for humans to have a symbiotic relationship with a plant species it happens all the time you know there are plants who've had enormous increases in their distribution due to human beings cannabis is a great example of that cannabis now occurs on every continent except antarctica that's a great example of of humans taking a plant increasing its range increasing its genetic diversity many domestic crop species many of the plants we eat and even invasive weeds that tend to thrive in uh areas of human disturbance a great example of that would be something like tree of heaven atlantis altissima really thrives in our cities it can tolerate pollution it can tolerate drought it can tolerate growing out of concrete and it spreads by rhizomes so that's a great example uh the tree of heaven has benefited extensively from uh its association with human society okay this one's from uh dylan choli how the does mulch work if i was a smart ass i would just say you know you get a couple guys throwing logs and a wood chipper and then out comes all the wood chips but the the benefit of mulch like why you throw it in a garden is because not only does it protect that bearing soil from transpiration of water from losing all its moisture from getting heated up by the sun but also once it rains and that mulch gets some moisture fungi and microbes break it down and then add a bounty of nutrients to the soil that is then accessible to all the plants that grow in it so it helps retain moisture it adds nutrients and also it keeps other weeds down that might compete with the plants that you want to have in that garden this one from typhoon annie how tf can you over water a plant like just don't drink it little dude well typhoon it doesn't really work like that see a lot of plants depending on where they grow and cacti are a great example of this their roots soak up water like a dry sponge now this works for them because where they grow it's often very dry and it's often very hot so when moisture does seep into that soil it evaporates pretty quickly due to the heat you know you water a cactus in the winter it's going to sit in that soil for uh you know upwards of a few days before it evaporates and in doing so it's it's only able to soak up so much based on the metabolism that it's going the metabolic rate of course is dependent on the temperature so if it's too chilly it's just gonna sit in that water and it can't access the water it's already full and at that point it begins to rot this one's from uh melissa eileen wtf is an orchid the word doesn't sit right with me orchid sounds like a lot of hoopla drunk mel okay well although i am against drunk tweeting i do have to agree with you the word doesn't sit right with you because uh it's the greek word for testicle the reason the greeks named orchids after orcas the greek word for testicle is because in europe most of the terrestrial orchids do indeed have a little tuber that kind of looks like a nut this one's coming from at jackson rice do you have any idea how long it takes to grow peyote and here's a nice picture we've provided with the beautiful pink flower of a lofapara williamseye how peyote grows in cultivation is entirely dependent on the warmth that's provided for it get a little seedling heat mat get the plant's metabolism going remember plant metabolism is entirely dependent on temperature almost you have the right kind of warmth you get the right soil you know you can grow a seed to a golf ball sized little button in upwards of four or five years now jackson i i have a feeling as to why you're asking this question and you know it's probably has something to do with ingesting this plant and i don't blame you maybe you want to have a vision quest you know you want to have a little insight into yourself i would tell you there's probably easier ways to do it because these plants take a long time to grow and uh you gotta eat at least four or five of them to get any effects so uh would you really want to do that to a plant that took you five years to grow this is from uh alex garrard alex with no eve that makes any sense anthropos signed us a plant taxonomy wtf even is that that's one of my favorite subjects actually plant taxonomy is the study of classifying organisms and it might seem like it's a bunch of latin names that some dead european white guys made up you know 300 years ago what the does this matter now but actually it's a pretty beautiful system to organize things according to how they evolve and if you start to grasp this you can grasp how everything is related now a good example of binomial nomenclature in every binomial name as genus and species homo sapiens would be a great example of this a good botanical example is this guy right here this is clystocactus cola de mononus and it used to be in the genus hildewentaria until dna sequencing was done on it botanists realized that it was actually shared the same dna sequences as a genus that already existed called kleistocactus so chrysler cactus coladae menonas now you can also go by the common name monkey's tail but there's probably quite a few other cacti that go by the common name monkey's tail so if you call it monkey's tail it's kind of hard to know which one you're talking about if you're looking for specificity this one is from uk ed video what's the strangest plant in the world it's a good question and i have to give it to a plant called well witchy and mirabilis that grows in the fog deserts of namibia now it's a very old lineage of plant it's so old that fossils of it occur in south america before it had all that tectonic action that hot tectonic action split them apart and created the atlantic ocean so this is an old lineage of plant but it's a bizarre looking weirdo too can live for a thousand or two thousand years it's more closely related to conifers like redwoods than it is to uh flowering plants of course which evolved later and uh it has the same two leaves throughout its entire life they grow in very barren dry areas and most of their moisture does indeed come from fog off those cold ocean currents to the west all right this one's coming from uh icari mushrooms are an example of something i hate because i don't understand lol like how do they grow how are they so resilient why do we eat fungi this will really worth you out fungi are actually more closely related to us than they are to plants you go far enough back in the uh tree of life you'll see that it branched off within the last billion years but pretty far back what you see when you see a mushroom is just in essence the fruit of the fungus it doesn't hurt the fungus itself to pick the mushroom if you could anthropomorphize a lot of fungi would prefer to have their mushrooms picked because that's how they end up dispersing their spores around but the fungus itself the living organism actually consists of these things called mycelial strands a mycelium looks like this white webby material that basically spreads into a substrate whether it's a rotting log or the soil and looks for things to eat and the way it eats them is by secreting enzymes that in effect break down cellulose or lignin or in some cases human tissue to uh extract nutrients from them and this one's from botany rng what's your most interesting plant fact for me what got me really excited about learning this when i first did was that geology in some cases directly affects plant growth you get certain plants that occur only on a certain type of rock you know whether you get gypsum in the chihuahua desert or a limestone or in california a very odd and somewhat toxic rock that sometimes contains asbestos called serpentanite there are plants that only grow on that type of substrate you won't find them growing anywhere else they need the gypsum or they need the serpentine or they need the limestone and a great example of that is a plant called funeral sage you'll never find funeral sage growing anywhere else except on limestone where there's often almost no soil at all it's just growing straight out of these porous limestone rock and it produces very small purple flowers and the leaves are so covered in wool and fuzz that they look like pointy q-tips all right this one's from kathy casilda i learned that joshua trees are naturally spread by giant sloths eating the seeds and since there are no more giant sloths the joshua tree habitat hasn't changed is that true did i really hear that it's kind of iffy there was a paper that came out talking about this about how joshua tree seeds were found in giant sloth scat in a cave obviously joshua trees are still around and giant sloths aren't so something's going on here some other animals dispersing the seed turns out the animal that's most responsible at present for dispersing joshua tree seeds which just look like little black flakes kind of like agave seeds are rodents so there's rodents that will take these fruits bring them back to their little dens and homes crack the fruits open and then cash the seeds kind of stash them so they bury them like a centimeter under the soil but the thing is they don't remember where they put all of them so they forget sometimes and those end up germinating and turning into new joshua trees at one point the giant sloths were probably doing a lot of the dispersing but the yucca brevifolia the joshua tree's not too picky rodents can do it too or even in some cases humans this one from yumiko jabami flowers have ovaries yes indeed when you're eating a fruit you're eating an ovary now an ovary is just a kind of a vessel for the seeds and what's it's what differentiates flowering plants from other plants like ferns and mosses and conifers ovaries are part of uh the compound sexual part aka the gynoesium of a flower called a pistol pistol with two eyes not at all kind of counterintuitive so you've got the ovary which is uh at the base of that pistol and then you've got the style which is the stalk that holds up the stigma and the stigma is where the pollen lands so from the top down it goes stigma style ovary ovary being at the bottom and it's actually a very important diagnostic factor when you're trying to look at a flower and figure out what genus or what family it's in indeed flowers have ovaries and when flowers get pollinated they mature into a fruit and that's exactly what a fruit is it's an ovary now this is a nice question this is from melanie restaurant can we please figure out how to harvest and process the kudzu that is killing trees here in america kudzu is a member of the pea family for basie that was brought over here from asia it's taken over completely covers trees smothers forests it thrives in the american southeast and it's very hard to control kudzu is causing a loss of biodiversity in many of these forests because nothing can out compete it kudzu is almost at the top of the food chain here's a nice example of it this illustrates the problem with a lot of invasive species and some people tend not to believe that invasive species are real you know a plant is a plant right what does it matter where it came from or what species it is just let it grow but unfortunately it doesn't work like that no species is an island species are members of things called ecosystems and they've evolved in those ecosystems for millions of years developing a relationship with all the insects and fungi and other plants and animals in that ecosystem and when you take a plant out of one ecosystem and bring it say 4 000 miles across an ocean to another ecosystem it ends up sometimes not having anything to keep it in check so the best we can do with kudzu right now is give the native plants the native species a fighting chance and just remove it by hand all right this one's from uh nordie pong mangroves help stabilize the coastline by reducing erosion caused by storms strong currents waves and tides how the way mangroves work is they've got these roots that kind of act like a cage it looks like a bunch of different curved pieces of rebar that form kind of an impenetrable thicket relatively close to the shoreline so when these waves come in you know you get a swell or a bad storm or something they hit these mangrove roots and uh the mangrove roots break up that kinetic energy of those waves thus protecting the shoreline from further erosion this one is from miss zoonosis why do leaves change color in the fall and that's a question we always we all used to ask as kids the reason for that has to do with different concentrations of pigments that occur in the leaves now what we see in a leaf is green that would be the chlorophyll but there's also other pigments present like carotenoids and flavonoids which cause the yellow and the orange color now as the winter approaches and the daylight hours decrease and the temperature decreases that chlorophyll starts to break down and uh basically degrade and as it does that it reveals the yellows and the oranges the carotenoids and the flavonoids at the same time sugar concentrations in the leaf are increasing and as a result of that you get the production of the red pigments aka the anthocyanin pigments you know you'd see in say a sugar maple leaf from uh at the aaron m lambert can you cross breed fruits like can someone work on a pla mango or pineapple cot for me just checking you can cross-breed fruits if they're closely enough related depends on how back how far back in time uh these two lineages diverged if they're in different families no way but if they're in the same genus you might you know like prunus the genus of cherries you might have luck with it now prunus is the genus of cherries and almonds and plums there's some wiggle room in there you know you could get across a plum with an apricot or plum with the cherry but again it's got to be in the same genus generally speaking okay this one's nice this is from goco sweets i must run a bakery or something also why are plant medicines so taboo with four question marks um it literally grows from the ground we live on this planet earth the same compound whether it's synthesized in a lab or whether it is biosynthesized in the tissues of a plant is no different those two compounds are no different from each other and often a lot of the compounds we use in pharmacology were actually first identified in plants and then scientists later learned to synthesize them which was a more efficient way to produce those compounds but some compounds we still can't synthesize or it's just easier to get them in the plant now the term plant medicine can be a little uh a little problematic sometimes because you know cyanide is a naturally occurring compound that you find in plants too as is arsenic as are a number of other highly toxic compounds so just because it came from a plant and it came from the earth that's not the best rationale to get it remember that scene in breaking bad where walter white extracts ricin from a castor bean great example of uh why we want to stay away from using that rationale but indeed some plants uh because of the compounds they produce often to ward off fungi or insects if those compounds are bioavailable enough in the plant and able to be utilized if they're ingested or extracted then humans can use them too and benefit from them and uh there's there's some real truth to that but people do get a little woo-woo about it i've certainly seen it happen i mean you really want to go down this wormhole open up a organic chemistry textbook you know rather than uh watching some hippie snake oil salesmen on youtube all right moving right along next one we got is from jordan twitter plants loose what is this cute little dude uh they need some tlc but i can't figure out what the type is help please well normally when you're trying to identify a plant you need a picture of a flower reproductive structures whether it's flowering plants or ferns or conifers are integral to diagnosing species because you know leaves aren't really a good classification system you know the same genus can have species with entirely different leaves from one another but in this case i already know this one uh and it's a plant in the genus euphorbia and it looks like it's from south africa it's a stem succulent and it looks like it's not getting enough light you got to get this guy into a better well-lit window or something the defining features of succulents whether it's cacti or euphorbias or crassulas or sedums or whatever is that they're able to basically store water so that's an adaptive benefit in the dry climates through which most of them have evolved most succulents come from very arid climates where water is in short supply so they need to be able to suck up that water quick and store it for later in essence turning themselves into little batteries that can weather the storm of drought and heat perfectly this one's coming from real life xo does anyone know of any plants that can grow without sunlight on any windows in my room indeed there are quite a few plants that can grow without sunlight one group of them is known as mycoheterotrophs and their plants that parasitize fungi you got a lot of members of this group in the blueberry family eric casey also plants that parasitize other plants oftentimes they don't need any sunlight and they've entirely lost the ability to produce chlorophyll at all there's no green in them whatsoever and you can tell these things when you find them in a shady forest for instance because they often occur in shades of white they're pink but again there will be no green in them whatsoever if you're looking for a plant that can grow in an apartment that's not that well lit there is an answer for you though the best family of plants that's most tolerant of uh human living conditions i.e sometimes dry air lack of water and lack of light is uh members of the family eraser also known as the airoids and again you'd be looking at plants like monstera and philodendron because these are plants that in their native habitat they grow in these really shady hot forests in the tropics where it might rain a lot but it's so hot that that the rain evaporates pretty readily that moisture evaporates pretty readily and so because of that this family of plants is tolerant of both poor light conditions and poor moisture this one's coming from han chappelle dick do plants need real sunlight or does artificial light work this might be why my dorm room plants keep dying poor things no plants don't need real sunlight all they need is the right wavelengths that would be wavelengths of the visible light spectrum between the blue and the red of course they're not utilizing the green that's all they're reflecting back to us but as long as he got blue and the red in there and everything in between except for the green they'll do fine you know you can get that from a t5 fluorescent light you can get it from uh sodium lights or even better yet if you're trying to avoid a high energy bill leds all right this one is from uh silver sage witch how can you tell if a plant is poisonous most poisonous plants tend to have a very bitter smells to them to the leaves bitter tasting alkaloids another good way to tell if a plant is poisonous is to know for instance that most members of the milkweed family also known as the oleander family the apostolacy tend to contain heart toxins called cardiac glycosides so if you find a plant and you know just from looking at the flower that it's in the apostolacy the milkweed family you know you probably don't want to be putting it in your mouth any time soon because you might die you know many many plants that are poisonous a great example is many members of nightshade family will produce fruits that aren't poisonous but to make it even more confusing some of those species even the same genus will produce fruits that are poisonous so the same genus will produce fruits that aren't poisonous like tomatoes in the genus selenium and it will also produce fruits like deadly nightshade also in the genus selenium that are poisonous so the best thing to do is really just identify your plant figure out what you're looking at they got a number of apps that can do this now and then just read up on it before you go stuffing it in your mouth this one's coming from cornell c-a-l-s why does the corpse flower stink actually that's a good question and it might surprise you a lot of flowers produce these putrid smells because what pollinates them are beetles and flies that would otherwise be eating carrion aka corpses from wonderbot how do plants breathe good question well you see plants have these things called stomata that are mostly on the undersides of their leaves what they are is microscopic pores through which carbon dioxide gas goes in and oxygen and water vapor go out like i said there are generally more located on the undersides of the leaves because this reduces transpiration of moisture through said pores okay this one from basin my nine-year-old's question at breakfast how do plants evolve if they don't have a brain see this is what we humans tend to do we tend to anthropomorphize okay nothing really intentionally evolves it's all just a chance game of random mutations interacting with the environment the environment being geology climate presence of herbivores etc so you know you get genetic recombination i.e sex pollen grain lands on a stigma pollinates the ovary and then of course the resulting seeds that you get in the fruit have a somewhat different phenotype than the parent plant a phenotype is a set of observable characteristics in a species and sometimes within those resulting uh seeds that germinate within those resulting plants you get a random mutations and those mutations can either thrive or fail most of times they fail but when they do thrive it's because they generally have an adaptation that benefits the resulting plant in the environment all right next question from mr cowman why are california's redwoods and sequoias so big and tall so getting big and tall is certainly an adaptive benefit in a shady environment like a forest that allows you to out-compete other species of plants that might be growing uh sympatrically or occurring with you co-occurring with you you know in the case of coast redwoods that would be trees like oaks which don't get very tall compared to redwoods and in the case of giant sequoias it would be plants like white furs and ponderosa pines which again don't get anywhere near as big or as tall as redwoods so the adaptive benefit in getting big is that you can out out-compete your neighbors and also i'll compete them not just for sunlight but also for moisture that's available on the ground all right next question and this one's from ruth mkb question is this some type of liking and it's a picture of what appear to be a cluster of shelf mushrooms growing on what looks like a dead stump well ruth you're close but not quite this is actually a species of basidiomycin fungus aka just a mushroom now interesting enough what i'm liking is a lichen is also a fungus but a lycan also has two or three other organisms in there you might have a cyanobacteria or an algae doing the photosynthesis and then of course you probably got a yeast in there too obsidio might see east lichens of course take a long time to grow though and what a liking is it's a great example of mutualism so all the organisms in this arrangement are standing to benefit they're all living no one's really losing but they don't like air pollution though so they can't really grow in too many cities but i was close maybe there's a like i'm sure there's probably a liking on that stuff too i just that's not what i see a picture of from two nine swank i don't know what that uh kind of a weird name to each their own how do i become a botanist now some people think you got to go to school for it schooling does help a more structured environment can be very conducive to learning the best thing to do to become a bonus is just go to a botanic garden or go out into even an empty lot start taking pictures of plants we got these phones in our pocket take pictures of stuff you don't know what it is ask questions imbibe yourself with curiosity about the world download a plant observation app like i naturalist then uh every question you have will get you an answer if you get and that answer itself will open up 10 more questions think about things think actively about the things you see and observe learn plant identification learn some plant taxonomy and learn uh that flowers are the ways in which we group plants together in genus family order etc this one's from uh demigod kid can you interbreed or cross breed carnivorous plants absolutely i got friends that do it they run carnivorous plant nurseries and some of the cultivars which is a word for a phenotype that humans have created some of these cultivars look incredible unlike anything you'd find in the wild you know you cross one species of pitcher plant and the genus saracenia with another species of pitcher plant and a genus saracenia and you get some wild that pops up you know all different colors of pigmentation and those pitcher leaves different kinds of flowers etc okay this one's from mpi simba what's the rarest plant there was a plant i saw in the deserts of baja california sir called uh in celia densifolia i think there's only a hundred plants in existence now is it a neo-endemic i.e it evolved recently and just has a restricted range or is it what's called a paleo endemic it's a a relic it basically evolved a long time ago on the entire rest of its population has been wiped out for whatever reason climatic change or habitat loss or whatever save for this little pocket where it grows okay this one's coming from uh taylor posting is there something dangerous about durian why does it smell bad now the smell in durian is due to a sulfur compound you know same thing you get coming out of a gas station bathroom floor drain why does it smell i don't know probably so you can crack one open and annoy people on the subway this one's coming from ncat mao i've never been able to keep a plant alive before even a succulent but the new apartment screams out for plants what are some low-maintenance idiot-proof beginner level pet-friendly plants don't feel bad a lot of this doesn't come second nature to most people especially since most of us don't grow up with any gardening experience or innate botanical knowledge i would start off with something easy start off with members of the plant family erasier that would be some of the airoids there's no schedule to watering a lot of people mess this up there's not every three days every four days every five days whether you water or not is entirely dependent on a multitude of factors that would be uh observable in the direct environment in this case your apartment what's the temperature what's the relative humidity i'm not saying you need to go out and buy a hygrometer but just maybe pick the plant up see if the soil is heavy if it's got moisture in it you know don't just throw water in there it's you don't want the thing to rot another thing people often do with uh indoor plants is we forget because our pupils can dilate we forget that the inside of a house is often extremely dark compared to being outside and so what may look very bright to us even if you got the nice painted white walls and the big windows and whatnot even you know still five feet from that window it's still very dark and that plant's light is all coming from one side so there's an entire side of the plant that's not getting any light at all all right well that's all i got time for today hopefully you learned something pay attention look around your environment ask some questions that's all i got have a good rest of your day bye

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,584,460

Keywords: botanist, botanist interview, botanist joey santore, botanist plants, botanist wired, botany, botany explained, crime pays but botany doesn't, horticulture, horticulture explained, joey santore, joey santore chicago, joey santore plants, mulch, mulch explained, plant, planting, plants, plants explained, poisonous plants, tech support botany, tech support joey santore, tech support wired, what does mulch do, wired, wired botanist, wired plants, wired tech, wired tech support

Id: Ryij01EbQkI

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/LudSable]

Been watching for about half a year, wish I had seen his channel way sooner. Nobody quite educates about the natural world like he does in a entertaining, engaging, often funny manner, and I tend to even appreciate his nihilistic rants about humanity. Started out with the Chile, Australia, New Caledonia playlists. The enthusiasm is contagious.

[u/robertdowneyjrjr]

Anyone know what molecule is on his shirt?

[u/Significant-Turn7798]

"Cannabis now occurs on every continent except Antarctica"
I'd be very surprised if there weren't at least a few hydroponic plants among all the permanent research stations down there. Those crews have to spend a lot of time indoors.

[u/ASepiaReproduction]

Really appreciating his own videos right now. I don't understand why they kept cutting every five seconds. Just let him ramble over closeups of flowers.