Botanist Answers Plant Questions From Twitter

Hi, I'm Joey Santore, plant lover, botanist,

and working class mook.

Today I'm here to answer your plant questions via Twitter.

This is Plant Support.

[upbeat music]

Okay, this one's from CashSmartLLC.

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 have 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 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 areas of human disturbance.

A great example of that would be

something like tree of heaven, Ailanthus altissima.

Really thrives in our cities.

It can tolerate pollution.

It can tolerate drought.

It can tolerate growing outta concrete.

And it spreads by rhizomes.

So that's a great example.

The tree of heaven has benefited extensively

from its association with human society.

Okay, this one's from dylancholy.

How the [beep] does mulch work?

If I was a smart ass I would just say, you know,

you get a couple guys throwing logs in a wood chipper

and then out comes all the wood chips.

But the benefit of mulch, like why you throw it in a garden,

is because not only does it protect that barren 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 a typhoonannie.

How TF can you overwater a plant, like?

Just don't drink it, little dude.

Well, typhoonannie, 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 gonna sit in that soil for, you know,

upwards of a few days before it evaporates.

And in doing so it's only able to soak up so much

based on the metabolism that it's got.

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 melissa_aileen.

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 it's the Greek word for testicle.

The reason the Greeks named orchids after orchis,

the Greek word for testicle, is because in Europe

most of the terrestrial orchids

do indeed have a little tuber that kinda looks like a nut.

This one's coming from @jaxonrice.

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 Lophophora williamsii.

How peyote grows in cultivation is entirely dependent

on the warmth that's provided for it.

You get a little seeding heat mat,

you get the plant's metabolism going.

Remember, plant metabolism's entirely dependent

on temperature almost.

You have the right kind of warmth, you got the right soil,

you know, you can grow a seed to a golf ball size

little button in upwards of four or five years.

Now Jaxon, I have a feeling

as to why you're asking this question

and, you know, it probably has something to do

with ingesting this plant, and I don't blame you.

Maybe you wanna have a vision quest,

you know, you wanna have a little insight into yourself.

I would tell you there's probably easier ways to do it,

'cause these plants take a long time to grow,

and you get gotta eat at least four or five of them

to get any effects.

So would you really wanna do that to a plant

that took you five years to grow?

This is from alxgirar, Alex with no E,

if that makes any sense.

Anthro prof assigned 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 [beep] 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,

and every binomial name has genus and species.

Homo sapiens would be a great example of this.

A good botanical example is this guy right here.

This is Cleistocactus colademononis,

and it used to be in the genus Hildewintera

until DNA sequencing was done on it.

Botanists realized that it was actually,

it shared the same DNA sequences

as a genus that already existed called Cleistocactus.

So Cleistocactus colademononis.

Now you could 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 a UKEdVideo.

What's the strangest plant in the world?

That's a good question, and I have to give it to a plant

called Welwitschia 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 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 [beep] bizarre looking weirdo too.

It can live for 1,000 or 2,000 years.

It's more closely related to conifers like redwoods

than it is to flowering plants,

of course which evolved later.

And it has the same two leaves throughout its entire lives.

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 ikaari.

Mushrooms are an example as 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 shit will really weird you out.

Fungi are actually more closely related to us

than they are to plants.

You go far enough back in the 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 in 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 extract nutrients from them.

And this one's from BotanyRNG.

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 Chihuahuan Desert,

or a limestone, or in California a very odd

and somewhat toxic rock

that sometimes contains asbestos called serpentinite.

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 the 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 CathyCasilda.

I learned that Joshua trees are naturally spread

by giant slots eating the seeds,

and since there are no more giant slots,

the Joshua tree habitat hasn't changed.

Is that true? Did I really hear that?

That's kind of iffy.

There was a paper that came out talking about this,

about how Joshua tree seeds were found

in giant slot scat in a cave.

Obviously, Joshua trees are still around

and giant slots aren't, so something's going on here.

Some other animal's 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 cache the seeds,

kind of stash them.

'Cause 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 giants slot were probably doing

a lot of the dispersing.

But Yucca brevifolia, the Joshua tree's not too picky.

Rodents can do it too, or even in some cases humans.

This one from yumekojabami.

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 it's what differentiates flowering plants

from other plants like ferns and mosses and conifers.

Ovaries are part of the compound sexual part,

a.k.a. to gynoecium of a flower, called a pistil.

Pistil with two I's.

Now I know, kind of counterintuitive.

So you've got the ovary,

which is at the base of that pistil,

and then you've got the style,

which is the stalk that holds up the stigma,

and the stigma's where the pollen lands.

So from the top down, it goes stigma, style, ovary,

ovary being at the bottom.

And that'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 it to a fruit,

and that's exactly what a fruit is.

It's an ovary.

Now this is a nice question.

This is from a MelanieRestall1.

Can we please figure out how to harvest and process

the kudzu that is killing trees here in America?

Kudzu is a member of a pea family Fabaceae

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's 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 plant, the native species,

a fighting chance and just remove it by hand.

All right, this one's from nordipong.

Mangroves help stabilize the coastline

by reducing erosion caused by storms,

strong current, 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 the mangrove roots break up that kinetic energy

of those waves, thus protecting the shoreline

from further erosion.

This one is from MsZoonosis.

Why do leaves change color in the fall?

That's a question 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 the 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 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, a.k.a. the anthocyanin pigments,

you know, you'd see in, say, a sugar maple leaf.

From @aaron_m_lambert.

Can you crossbreed fruits?

Like, can someone work on a plumango or pineapricot for me?

Just checking.

You can crossbreed fruits if they're closely enough related.

Depends on how far back in time 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 cross a plum with an apricot

or plum with a cherry.

But again, it's gotta be in the same genus,

generally speaking.

Okay, this one's nice.

This is from gokosweets.

They 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 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 'cause it came from a plant

and it came from the earth,

that's not the best rationale to get here.

Remember that scene in Breaking Bad

where Walter White extracts ricin from a castor bean?

Great example of why we wanna stay away

from using that rationale.

But indeed, some plants,

because of the compounds they produce

often ward off fungi or insects,

if those compounds are bioavailable enough in the plant

and able it to be utilized if they're ingested or extracted,

then humans can use them too and benefit from them.

And 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 wanna go down this wormhole,

open up a fucken organic chemistry textbook,

you know, rather than watching

some hippy snake oil salesman on YouTube.

All right, moving right along.

Next one we got is from @jourdak.

Twitter plants sleuths, what is this cute little dude?

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

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 gotta 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 and 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 reallifexo.

Does anyone know of any plants

that can grow without sunlight?

I don't have 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 they're plants that parasitized fungi.

You got a lot of members of this group

in the blueberry family Ericaceae.

Also, plants that parasitize other plants.

Oftentimes they don't need any sunlight

and they've entire 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 or pink.

But again, there will be no green in them whatsoever.

If you're looking for a plant that can grow

in a apartment that's not that well lit,

there is an answer for you though.

The best family of plants that's most tolerant

of human living conditions, i.e. sometimes dry air,

lack of water, and lack of light,

is members of the family Araceae, also known as the aroids.

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 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 handchappelldick.

Do plants need real sunlight or this 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 you 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 sodium lights.

Or even better yet, if you're trying to avoid

a high energy bill, LEDs.

All right, this one is from SilverSageWitch.

How can you tell if a plant is poisonous?

Most poisonous plants tend to have 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 Apocynaceae, tend to contain heart toxins

called cardiac leukocytes.

So if you find a plant

and you know just from looking at the flower

that it's in the Apocynaceae, the milkweed family,

you know you probably don't wanna be putting it

in your mouth anytime soon because you might die.

You know, many plants that are poisonous,

like a great example is many members

of the nightshade family will produce fruits

that aren't poisonous.

But to make it even more confusing, some of those species,

even in 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 Solanum,

and it will also produce fruits like deadly nightshade,

also in the genus Solanum, 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 CornellCALS.

Why does the corpse flowers 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, a.k.a corpses.

From Wonder Bot, 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 @baeason.

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, et cetera.

So, you know, you get genetic recombination, i.e. sex,

a 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 seeds that germinate

within those resulting plants you get random mutations,

and those mutations can either thrive or fail.

Most of the 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 Mrkalman.

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.

It allows you to out-compete other species of plants

that might you growing 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 giants 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-compete your neighbors

and also out-compete them not just for sunlight,

but also for moisture that's available in the ground.

All right, next question, and this one's from ruthmkb.

Question: is this some type of lichen?

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 basidiomycete fungus,

a.k.a. just a mushroom.

Now interesting enough, what a lichen is,

a lichen's also a fungus,

but a lichen 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 to,

a basidiomycete yeast.

Lichens, of course, take a long time to grow though.

And what a lichen is, it's a great example of mutualism.

So all the organisms in this arrangement

are extending the 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 it was close.

Maybe there's a lichen,

I'm sure there's probably a lichen on that stump too.

I just, that's not what I see a picture of.

From two9_swank.

I don't know what that...

Kind of a weird name. To each their own.

How do I become a botanist?

Now, some people think you gotta 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 botanist

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 iNaturalist.

And 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 at actively about the things you see and observe.

Learn plant identification, learn some plant taxonomy,

and learn that flowers are the ways

in which we group plants together

in genus, family, order, et cetera.

This one's from demigod_kid.

Can you interbreed or crossbreed 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

in the genus Sarracenia with another species

of pitcher plant in the genus Sarracenia,

and you get some wild shit that pops up.

You know, all different colors of pigmentation

in those pitcher leaves,

different kinds of flowers, et cetera.

Okay, this one's from MtiSimba.

What's the rarest plant?

There was a plant I saw in the deserts

of Baja California Sur called Encelia densifolia.

I think there's only 100 plants in existence.

Now, is it a neoendemic,

i.e. it evolved recently and just has a restricted range?

Or is it what's called a paleoendemic?

It's a relic.

It basically evolved a long time ago

and 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 taylorposting.

Is there something dangerous about durian?

Why does it smell bad?

Now the smell in durian is due to sulfur compounds.

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 EmKatMal.

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 shit 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 at the plant family Araceae,

that would be some of the aroids.

There's no scheduled 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 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's heavy,

if it's got moisture in it.

You know, don't just throw water in there.

You don't want the thing to rot.

Another thing people often do with 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 [beep] 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.