Hey, Hey, it's that yogurt parfe that honestly could use a little Moorkanola Alley word. I'm here with an episode that took not only two years to make COVID be damned, but has also been in the works since the Permian period two hundred and seventy million years ago. Nerds, when it comes to cycads, she is it, she is the person. And wait, hold up, what is a pycad?
Good question?
So with a name like cycad, it could be anything. It could be a person on top and a shark on the bottom. I feel like a cycad could be a sixteen dollars cocktail at a speakeasy full of jerks. A syicad could be a type of sore, maybe on your mouth if you're allergic to citrus, if I had to guess. But no backing up a cycad it comes from the Greek, a typo for the word palm, despite a psycad, which is a plant, not being a palm tree at all. So sycads have been on the scene
two hundred million years before palm trees. Palm trees stumble in like, hey, what's up? What I miss? And Sycads are like what did you miss, oh, just the rise of the dynast and like gymnosperms aka plants that just bust out naked seeds without even having these new flowers or whatever. You have palms. So cycads ancient plants so much older than palm trees, and they have like a stout, hairy trunk. It kind of looks like if your cat used pineapple as a scratching post. And they have a
bunch of stiff pinnate leaves. They have a spine down the center. And just like in ancient times, there are rigid females and males. They are also critically endangered. They're surrounded by so much drama. So much drama, you're not going to know what to do with yourself. Plants, yes, hang tight. So this sycad sleuth got a PhD at the University of Melbourne and continued her post doc researched
at Duke and UC Berkeley in Harvard. She went back to Australia to be a research scientist at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, and then in twenty seventeen made the journey back up to the Northern Hemisphere to join the California Academy of Arts and Science in San Francisco as an associate curator and the McAllister Chair of Botany.
And it was there that I met her when I moderated a woman in Science panel and I remember it well, manyeologites in attendance, and this ologist was someone I just adored immediately, and I met her March of twenty twenty, March fifth oh. No one was in masks, very few people had hand sanitizer, and hundreds of us packed into a room fearlessly. Instead of handshakes, we knocked sneakers into greeting, being like, this is going to save us. We're so young,
we're so naive. And since then I'd wanted to interview her for years, just waiting for this pandemic to be over. But you know what, too much waiting. Let's do it. So Natalie spoke to me this week from Australia where she's with family. We hopped onto chat which are going to hear very soon. But first I quick thank you to all patrons who support the show. At patreon dot com slash Ologies, you can join up for a dollar
a month or more and submit questions. Thank you to everyone who talks to their friends and maybe they're foes about ologies. Thanks to everyone who make sure they're so prescribed that really keeps us up in the charts. Also reviews to I read each and every one of them, and to prove it, I will pick a fresh one. Thank you Lubug nineteen, who wrote for lovers and haters of science alike. I hated science in high school like so much. They write ologies make science of all types
absolutely fascinating and I cannot get enough of it. So thank you lubug nineteen. Everyone else who wrote a review, I read it and I love you. Thank you. Okay you're ready. Nope, you're not. That was a true question. Okay,
here we go. Plant capers, investment strategies, Jurassic flimflam, nudity, sort of the Michael Phelps of plant sperm, neighborhood psychat, safaris, cultivating pet plants, thumbs that are not green, heists, thrillers, poachers, rangers, gardens, and one of the best fixes for procrastination I have ever heard with botanist, research scientists, scholar enthusiast of charismatic gymnosperms, and one of the world's most respected, charming, funny, and
endearing scientists, the universally beloved psychiologist doctor Natalie Nagalingham. Oh, first off, I should ask, can you say your first and last name in the pronouns you use?
My name is Natalie Nagalingham, and my pronouns.
Actually I hate to ask this because everyone asks, but what time is it there?
It is thirty four pm?
Am am?
Oh my gosh. Okay, did we get you up early?
Yes? You did. I had like two alarms set to make sure I wouldn't sleepy.
Yeah, I'm sorry. No having our first coffee of the day.
Probably, Yeah, I had breakfast and yeah.
Right, Well, I'm so glad that we're finally doing this because I had such a good time talking to you in San Francisco. That was just an amazing, amazing time, And I have been waiting. That was just a few days before COVID, wasn't it.
Yeah, it was pretty COVID. I remember you tapping us with your shoes just to greet us. Yeah, we didn't know anything.
I feel like that was like one of the last fun times in.
Public I had was with you.
That's true.
Yep, I didn't know what a psychad was until I met you. It's right, yeah, and it's so ed and for lack of a better term, we can call you a psychologist. Yeah.
Is that a real word?
Yeah, it is, actually it is. Yes.
Oh that makes me so happy, because I do feel like we we nudge toward words that are very new sometimes.
So, yeah, this is real.
But these plants are so old.
Yeah, they're pretty ancient. And you know, if you look at, you know, all those dinosaur pictures, you're going to see something that looks like a psycad.
Were cycads around during the time of the dinosaurs or were their ancestors around.
Well, that's kind of tricky because so the ones that we see today are kind of like a whole new crop of species, but they're great great grandparents. They were around during the time of the dinosaurs, and they also had kind of like distant relatives, cousins, kind of thing that looked like them that were around during the time of the dinosaurs.
To me, I think of a pineapple wearing a palm tree as a hat, and I feel like that is perhaps not the best description, But can you explain what does this psycad in your experience look like that.
Is a great it's a really good description. Yeah, I never thought of that. I love it. Are used a really boring description. I think it's from a botanical description saying it. You know, it looks like a palm. It's got a stout trunk and it's got a crown of leaves at the top. They had cones, and those cones look like pine cones, but yours is much more interesting.
So yes, very deep green, stiff leaves, a hairy, stumpy trunk. You've seen a million of them planted in dentist's office and maybe malls in business park landscaping, and thought, wow, what a very small palm. So people either take them for granted or are obsessed with them for like millions of years. Now, how long does it take for them to reproduce it? Why are they so endangered?
They grow really really slowly. So if you think of the seed, the seed takes a year for the root to germinate, and then it's a few months after that then you get the first leaf. Oh wow, so that in itself is really slow, and then each like psychad plant, it just grows about I don't know, one centimeter. I'm in cinemed here like half an inch or something. It grows really really slowly each year. And so if you see something that's probably up to your knee, that's about ten years old.
Oh so they're little guys kind of right, yeah, oh yeah.
If you go into the field, you can find really big guys like I've you know, I've been to field sites where there's three met at all, and I've had to, you know, get my husband to like climb on a rock and reach on the stiffy toes to get a sample for me because there's no way that I can reach it.
What does your field work look like? Do you have to take a time machine at all to the past?
Only my time machine is our car. And what I do is we have all these collections, and this is common for you know, all of biology, that we store collections of plants and animals that we found in the wild. And what I do is I look at those collections and find out we have psychades that being collected before. And I go back to those collections and note down where they're from, and I go back to those locations and try to find them. Sometimes I can go back
and there are no psycheads there. Sometimes I can go back and there are psychads there. It is kind of hit or miss.
So part of Natalie's work involves tramping through field sites looking for new species or discerning the presence of specimens that are thought to be extinct in the wild, or she returns to field sites other botanists have documented to drop by, like a little you anyway home, just checking in. So psychologists pass this baton generationally, kind of like science links in this unbroken chain. How long have you been studying psychads?
Well, so I started off my career as a paleobotanist, and so you break that word down, paleo meaning ancient and old, and botanist meaning someone who's a botanist who studies botany plants. So I studied ancient plants and that really fascinated me, being able to go back in time and psycads are these really really ancient plants? And so I started studying psycads and ferns and conifers theft like
pine trees. Then a little bit later into my career we got the ability to use DNA to answer these ancient questions, not just through fossils, and so I transitioned into that. And so now I use DNA to try and uncover all of those questions that I was trying to answer just using fossils alone.
Oh wow, so now you have this completely like backstage molecular way of looking at things, where as before did you just have to look really closely at whatever their leaves and their stems and their roots look like to try to identify them?
Yeah? Yeah, it was met like you sort of had to group them based on those characters that you said, and then were they similar to, say, ones in you know, are the ones in Antarctica? Were they similar to ones in Australia. So it's sort of just using features like that that we figured out what was happening, and that if there was changes, or if there were changes over time, then you could say this has evolved from that or there has been some kind of evolution happening.
Hold on, backup, did you say Anarctica? Are there psycads on Anarcta?
Is that?
Are you? Is that a joke?
No? In the Cretaceous there were lush forests in the Antarctic, and so I studied some I studied fossil ferns there. It's like the last place you would believe there are ferns. What happened was that the world was much much warmer. It was called a greenhouse Earth. So the world was warmer, and there were dinosaurs down there. There were lush forests. Those forests were actually really similar to the Australian forests and to the South American forests, and so you find
things like these huge conifer trees. You find ferns, you find cycads, you find little bitty moss like relatives, you find them.
All that's blowing my And that underneath tons and tons of glaciers and snow are fossils of ferns and masses and cycads.
Yeah.
And dinosaurs, yes, yeah.
And the cool thing about the dinosaurs from that region, so you know, Australia and Tarctica, South America, is that they had these really big eye sockets and because half of the year in Antarctica it was dark, and so they had these huge ties to allow them to see during that dark period.
Oh my god.
Okay, did dinosaurs on Antarctica or did dinosaurs in general? Did they eat cycads? Were they edible? Yeah?
Yes, So there's over the last few years, there's increasingly more evidence that dinosaurs ate cycads. So come, I'm always on the lookout for papers that show evidence for this. Maybe like fifteen years ago there was kind of like, ah, these are some leaves it looks like they could be psychads in a dinosaur's gut, that we're not one hundred percent sure. And then more recently we found seeds in dinosaur guts are definitively psycads, and some leaves as well that are from dinosaurs guts.
Oh my god.
That the fact that someone could look at a fossil and be able to see certain seeds that a dinosaur as it's you know, final meal is veanillas, yeah, or rather psychads. But what do their seeds look like? How do you even identify a pycad seed?
So they just kind of around blob. Really, they're not very exciting, and they do different they differ by us species and genus and stuff like that, but they're just so like they're kind of big, maybe like the palm of your hand. Oh really, yeah, they're pretty pretty big. And then some of them are probably you know, it's much much smaller, maybe the size of your thumb. It just depends on the spaces and you know, and there's always variability.
So reminder, cycads are gymnosperms or naked seeds, which is extremely sensual of them and their nude seeds they're just waiting around for pollen, where angiosperms angion means container, so I contained seeds have much more complicated reproduction. It involves flowers and some other romantic business like encasing their seeds, perhaps in a delicious, juicy ovary aka of fruit. But cycads. Cycads are like, no, I'm a gymnastperm, I'm here, I'm naked,
let's do this. And in female plants they can just be hanging out in a feathery looking leaf nest in the middle of their fronds. There's plenty of variability in the seeds, but from the gaze of my light googling, they kind of look like dried pinto beans or fava beans. How did they get dispersed if they were so dang big?
That's another question that like I think about a lot and people who have done studies. So one of my favorite studies by some people up in Queensland is they got a cone and they put little bits of metal on them, like a nut or a bolt or a nail and then they just sort of, you know, let it become ripen. And then they went around the bush with a metal detector and they tried to figure out how far away did these seeds go. So they found
that it's like they didn't go very far. It was like little mammals Australian you know, marsupi or they had sort of like picked apart the cone and just sort of taken them, you know, a couple of meters away, but not very far. There's also thought that e news eat them. In Western Australia, other birds might eat them like cassawerries. In the north of Australia, I'm not so sure.
And in South Africa, I don't think there is evidence of you know, the big megaphauna, you know, the Big five eating the cycad seeds.
Okay, quick aside, she dropped the Big five like a Los Angeles person casually talks about freeway interchange. But I look this up for US, and those big five animals are kangaroos, wombats, koalas, crocodiles, and EMUs. Well you know, okay, another website said kangaroos, wombats koalas crocodiles and platypuses. Shit okay, another person okay. Another person lists kangaroos, wombats, koalas, platypusses, echidnas.
I don't know Australia. I don't know what your big five is for a cane toad like me, I reckon it's a bit of a dog's breakfast. Good on me, duh. I looked up slang.
So basically, once you've got a psychad population, if you take it away, nothing's going to bring it back.
Oh wow, can you tell me a little bit about their range? Where do we find psychads now?
So I like to say that they are found in regions that I like, which is warm and tropical, and so it's like it's great for field works at ski are we. But it's kind of like the warm tropical bands like the top of Australia in the Pacific, in the Caribbean, in Asia, so Thailand, up into India, some in China, and then you go across to Africa and Southern Africa and Madagascar as well. So they're sort of in a band, sort of in the middle of the globe.
So if cycads were looking for an apartment, their search terms would be like warm vibes, average to above average humidity, equatorial adjacent maybe places like Central America or the northern parts of South America, Eastern Africa very popular region, and the coasts of Southeast Asia. But what about Natalie herself? Was it always locations, locations, locations? Did you grow up wanting to travel a lot? Did you grow up really
curious about native habitats? How did you end up getting to travel around and learn so much about these very endangered, beautiful plants.
I had no idea that I could have a job like this. I'm a first generation. My parents are from Mauritius, which is a tiny little island next to Madagascar. Not many people have even heard of it. It's actually people but probably know it because of the Dodo and that's where the dodo was from, and the dodo became extinct there. Wow. But otherwise people don't know about them. And so my parents moved from Mauritius to Australia and we were encouraged to go to school. And you know, we gave me
here to give you a bit of life. And so I just went to school, I went to university. I just sort of kept following what really interested me, and that was science. And then I didn't realize that I could be a doctor and pursue these plants all over the world.
What was it like when you got your doctorate?
It was just released because it was a long time. I think once you do it, it's just for me. I think for many people, I just felt sick of it. It was like, I just want to get rid of these I wanted to do something else because it just consumes your life. Yeah, and so I was just happy to get it done. And I think what was the nicest part was my family was so happy and so, you know, I have photos of my graduation day and they were everyone was so pleased and we're all smiling. So that was really nice.
So doctor Naglingham has published papers with titles like Conservation Genetics of Wild Populations and Botanic Garden, Collections of Australian psychads and Phylogeny of the gymnastperm species. Psychis l as inferred from plastid and nuclear loci based on large scale sampling, evolutionary relationships and taxonomical implications. But what plant knowledge is she just really digging into?
Now?
Is there anything that you are really excited about researching right now.
Yeah, So this project is basically like a zoo breeding program. Now we have all these zoos with you know, like lizards or frogs, and we have a population and we use their pedigrees to figure out which ones we're going to breed together to make sure that you know, we're not inbreeding, and we increase their populations for eventually bringing them out in the wild. So we're doing that for the psychads. So we are doing it for maybebout ten
species that are pretty much extinct in the wild. And we've got samples from private collectors from botanic gardens, and we figured out that the DNA profile of each of those each of those samples, and what we're doing is we're going to determine first are they clones of each other, because that's the thing that psychads do is they can produce clones. So we don't want we don't want to have a botannic guide and full of you know, twenty clones.
We then in the long term, once they grow big enough to breed, we want to breed them and produce more plants to increase that population and increase the health. And so we're going to use genetics to help guide our breeding program, so just like a captive breeding program in a zoo, and so I've got someone working on that and she's doing an amazing job.
Has there been a moment where you realize something, either with DNA or with through fossils, that you realize you might be one of the only people to know that.
There's a few instances where three subspecies were sort of lumped sort of together, and then looking at them with the DNA, it was like, no, these are only these are two subspecies, and one of the subspecies is an entirely new species that's with DNA, And it's not being done quite a lot in the psychad worlds. Yet most
of the time I just take a little segue. Most of the time it's psychadologists going into areas that we haven't explored and finding new species with these really obvious characters. And the other thing that I found really surprising is when I was looking at the DNA of today's psychcads, I expected them all to reveal that they all evolved alongside the dinosaurs, and I would just sort of like hangers on, and they made it up until today. But then if you think the dinosaurs died out sixty five
million years ago. My DNA patterns were showing pretty much all of these cycads evolved twelve million years ago, So there's no way that these species today lived alongside the dinosaurs. And so really sort of reframes it because if we think of how endangered psychads are, then they haven't survived all of these millions of years of global changes, you know,
pressures from dinosaurs. They're actually adapted to modern conditions, and so they may not have the abilities to survive things like global warming and climate change.
So yes, well, psycads were here for much longer before many other modern plants like these newbie palms and flowers and fruits, maybe that pear in your lunch. It doesn't mean that psycads stopped growing or stopped evolving or stopped doing the work this entire time, which means that in the entroposcene this time they're vulnerable because of us and pycads. I'm so sorry that sucks, and you deserve better.
There's one species that it's called Encephaladis woody eye, and that was found in South Africa as a clump of four stems and because of the plants are either male or female. That clump was only four males, so of course, you know, being the Victorians, they just dug them all out, put them at verious potantic gardens. And so now they've never found a female and there's only one. There's only the males, and they're all around the world that produce
clones everywhere, but it's never going to reproduce. It's just this one pliant.
It's like that tortoise in the Galapamo George, the loneliest Turtlenes George. Yes, Oh my gosh. I wonder if one day they're going to find a female somewhere some you know old like ancient in some forest or some you know, overlooked bush. But it's not just sudden climate change that's affecting their population numbers. No no, no, no, no. Stretch your thumbs because you're about to text some really weird shit to your entire address book. Get the family chat ready
for this. And one of the reasons why they are extinct is partly collecting and trafficking.
Is that right, Yeah, it's it's crazy people. People are astonished when they that act.
I can't believe it.
Like when I first interviewed you and I'm still like the drama of a psychad, Like what's happening out there?
It's crazy. It's like I remember Ranger when I went to the Tanic Garden in Sydney. He was like, hold on, they got stolen and because I had some specimen stolen from me, and he was like, but they're not diamonds, Like why are they stealing them?
Okay, let's get into it. Who are these plant thieves?
People are so obsessed with psychads that they want every single species and they're about three hundred fifty species. We're still finding more, and so they want every single species, so they will go to all lengths to poach them.
Got to catch more.
So some stories of people who are dynamited cliff faces to get the psychads out. At the Botanic Garden in Cape Jawn. What they have done is they've gone in in the middle of the night and they've purposely dug up specific species and taken those out. And it's not like the psychied garden is sort of on the edge
of the garden. It's really deeply into the garden and so they know these poaches, know exactly what species they're targeting, and you just see that, you know, the empty holes where they've taken those particular species.
It's like the worst kind of gophers ever, human gophers.
They are well, I wouldn't even say gophers are they're just criminals.
Yes, that's a better way.
So what how much are they worth when they're getting that?
Oh yeah, so some can be like thirty thousand, forty thousand.
What crazy? I'm sorry, it's so loud.
I'm so sorry.
Are you kidding me? Worth more than a car?
It's oh yeah. And if it's super rare, like someone told me there was this huge species that is now extinct in the wild, and we saw it in a private collection in South Africa. It probably went up to your roof and wow, he said to me, it's probably worth a million dollars.
I am losing my shit. Are you losing your shit? I'm losing it. That's bananas.
And the other thing is people in South Africa what they do is they'll buy like a rare species for their kid. When their kid is young, raise that species, and then by the time that kid is old enough to go to college, they will sell it and they'll have the money to.
Oh my god, psychads are bitcoin? What's happening. What is the world So psychiologists do you all? Are you all on a WhatsApp thread talking about this kind of stuff? What happens when you meet up in person? What are your zooms like?
So what we're focusing on is trying to figure out ways to stop this kind of thing happening. So there's different ways. There's national parks and I know how you have rangers guiding rhinos and elephants so that you know they walk around with him.
So I was not aware of this, But in countries all over the world with critically endangered species like the black rhino or African elephants, armed rangers patrol for poachers. These units can range from pretty ruthless. For example, Kasaringa Park in India sees more poacher deaths than rhino killings.
That's all over the news. There's also really progressive movements like the International Anti Poaching Foundation's Squad of all vegan women who are rangers in Zimbabwe and a twenty twenty one paper I found titled Poaching of Encephalardos trans Venosis in the Limpopo Province, South Africa agreed that quote patrolling in law enforcement seems to be the agreed means by which poaching can be addressed, as indicated by all their respondents from the three nature reserves. Oh, in that last
paper encephalardos trans venosis. That's a psychad. So in South Act, three of their thirty eight native species are what Africa Geographic Magazine called quote loved to death or extinct in the wild. Three out of thirty eight already.
So there's rangers who do that for psychads. So that's one way to deal with them. And they've actually shot.
People, really people trying to steal them and they're like yet out of here?
Yeah, and I shot them. People go to jail.
My god, why aren't there more thrillers about this? You know, like where's Liam Neesim?
Like where's his psycad movie?
What I do have are a very particular set of skills.
Yes, it would be a good movie.
Actually it would be a good movie.
What Okay, I think you're the You're an EP on it obviously, Okay, I'll be. I'll be a PA on set who runs around gets everyone's coffee just so that I can hang out and hang out with you and learn all this stuff. Do you ever have to like testify or be like an expert about any of this kind of stuff.
No, no, thankfully no, because in the US there isn't any native psychads, especially in Floriday's a few and they're really really common. But people I know in South Africa, yeah, they have had to go to court testify.
So if botanical burglary drama is what you're after, just google word pairings like cycad heist or plant poacher. The internet will haul up just a wheelbarrow full of returns from a two thousand and one Department of Justice memo elaborating in detail about five individuals who sent approximately half a million dollars worth of protected cycads to the US from South Africa, Australia, and Zimbabwe, and then another criminal
who bought them. The criminal's name was Donald Wiener. He bought two hundred thousand dollars worth of stolen plants in the year two thousand. That's so many dollars of plants. There's also this South African power psychad couple. They each ran their own flourishing businesses buying and selling and dealing psychads until greed and deceit and gambling and poaching rip them apart. Anyway, it's thrilling, it's gripping. Welcome to the world of psycha drama. But we're about to get to
your questions with doctor Naglingham. But first we like to donate to a charity of the ologist choosing, and this week we're honored to donate to Ovarian Cancer Australia in Natalie's name. She has a personal connection to them, and if this cause means something to you, or if you'd like to think Natalie for her work, consider donating to them on February twenty third, as gifts will be matched
that day. So many symptoms of ovarian cancer could be overlooked, like bloating and fullness after meals and abdominal pain and it gets overlooked a lot, and you can find out more and you can donate if you like at ovariancancer dot net dot au. There will be a link in the show notes and while you're at it, you can find Natalie on Twitter telling her how to appreciate her. Her Twitter is at Ennagalingum and will be linked in
the show notes. So thank you Natalie for telling us about that, and thanks to sponsors of the show for making that possible. All right, let's get the root of your questions. My fronds. Okay, listeners, they know you're on. They're excited. Aki wants to know I hear. These plants can host many things. What are some of the most unusual things that have been found in cycads?
Oh gosh, there's so many. There's so in their roots they have a bacteria, and that bacteria gets nitrogen from the air and converts it into a usable nitrogen for the cycads.
So these roots side note, are called coloroid roots, and I just fell down a musky tunnel about them. But the short version is that there are these knobby roots of cycads that hang out in this shallow layer of soil and they grab tiny sinobacteria the photosynthesize, and they recruit them. The sinobacteria they are like, okay, okay, I can fix nitrogen for you. What's in it for me? And the sycad roots are like sugar carbs, all the sweet yums you want for that nitrogen. So the sinobacteria
are like, all right, I'm in now. If you were to cut a coloroid root, you would see that green sinobacterial zone as a ring inside of it. So cycads ancient living soap operas in just a dirty modern world. We love them, but let's not love them to death? Now, who else loves them? Bugs? First time question askers Noah Siam and Jacob Bowman both asked about beetles. In Noah's words, is it true that cycads are pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees evolved? And yes, I looked it up.
Bees have only existed for one hundred and thirty million years. They're coming on the scene while cycads were in middle age and beetles are like, oh hey, what's up? Be cool? That's cool. Other pollinator questions came from listeners Harper Thomas Floridian, Gerald Thompson, and Anthony, who asked, if I'm not allowed to be their personal pollinators, then who is?
They're pollinators? They host their pollinators inside the cones. So pollination is one of my favorite stories because you have cycads and the plants look exactly the same. You have male and female plants, but they once they produce cones, then you can say, oh, okay, this is a male one. It produces pollen. This is a female one. It produces ovules, which eventually produces eggs. And then you need the beetles
to go to the male ones. And what they do is they get attracted by this odor that the male pollen cones emit, and the odor sort of increases. Actually it's a slight odor, or technically it's a volatile so it attracts all of the beetles. And there's also trips as well and weevils and they basically it's an orgy. They feed and they made and they lay their eggs on there, so they have an orgy on the male
pollen cone. And then once I don't know how the polan hone decides, but it decides that okay, you know, you guys have had enough. I need to kick you out. And so what it does is it increases the amount of the odor and it kicks them all out of the cone. I think you should live. And it's kind
of like it's like when you wear a cologne. You know, if you were like a little bit of cologne, that's really nice, and then if you were a lot of cologne, you know, when you're stuck next to that person who's got a lot of colone and you're like, oh my.
God, oh my god.
Yes, So they get rid of it, and that the cool thing about that is that it's possibly the only plant system that does that, because if you think of other like flowers, they will attract insects with their odors to pull them in, but they don't actively push them away with their increased cologne. So that's a really unique system. And considering that, you know, these are pretty ancient, they've still got this very modern, interesting system that nothing else has developed.
That's pretty sophisticated.
It is, it is, And there's somebody at a Utah and she's been working on this a lot as well. She does some really cool work Irene Terry. And so then after that, the insects get kicked out because of all the cologne, and then they go to the female cone that produces a tiny little bit of odor, but enough for the insects to come over and they you know, crawl all over and they pollinate the eggs and then they leave.
Wow, that's so cunning, it's coning. It's cunning.
Yeah.
Okay, so when Natalie describes this as like a cologne dose gone wrong, she's not kidding. So this species of psychad makes a compound called b mercine to seduce these tiny little insects called thrips. Now, how does it blast him away? How does it suddenly squirt a bunch more colonne? The cycad uses its stored carmine, hydrates, and fats and it burns them all to raise its own temperature during the hates part of the day, which lets off more
of this beta mercine. So the now pollen doused thrips are like, we're out, and then they go find a less stinky female plant, dusting it with the cycadsperm. So who needs flowers when you have strategy people and be mercine? And I wondered what that was and what it smells like? What do they smell like? So I googled the work of doctor Irene Terry, who Natalie just mentioned, and in a two thousand and seven New Scientist article titled Ancient plant has hot, stinky sex, doctor Terry stated that the
whiff quote takes your breath away. It's a harsh, overwhelming odor like nothing you ever smelled before. But what does that mean? What doctor Terry? Come on to her credit, doctor Terry is not one of those perfume guys on TikTok.
But it turns out that m mercine is used in perfumes, so I asked some cologne and fragrance web sites, which use terms like fruity, fresh, and clove like the Good Sense Company website used the most adjectives including spicy, earthy, and musky, refreshing, almost citrusy but warm, balsamic, and ethereal sweet. Mm hmm. I want to be doused in the love
making of psycad, but trust to threat people. Too much of this compound can be irritating and toxic, So even if you're enjoying the planches, you're gonna want to bounce to On that note, one listener wrote in Carla Maria Pyrus and asked, what cycads have motile sperm cells? Tell me more? Is that true?
Yes, So the sperm in psychads have motile sperm cells.
So there's there are swimming around.
Yeah, they do swim around. Yeah, They're like a little blob. And there's like a helix of little tails like flagella that go all the way to the top, you know, like a spinning top.
Wow.
And then as I said, at the top of the point, bet you've got all those flagella and then the flagelly sort of wind their way around and it just helps a swim.
Wow, so many advancements. They really have a lot of bells and whistles, you know.
Yeah, I think, And that's sort of something to be cautious about, is that, you know, when you talk about something that's really ancient, is that it may not be ancient in all its ways. So, you know, using the term like living fossil, which I have done, it's kind of a misin moment because we're kind of just saying it's it's old. It hasn't changed, but it's still had millions of years to change, and it's got some cool features. Well.
Zoe Armstead first time QUESTIONSCO asked how someone who is not a psychologist, someone who is not a natolie can tell the difference between male and female psychad plants. Zoe says, they kind of look like they have giant wangs.
Yeah, any thoughts on that.
Yeah, So the pollen cones, they if you look at underneath each individual sort of unit we call them gales, you'll find little like little balls underneath them, which is funny considering they're tiny, like tiny little balls, and that's where the pollen comes out. So it's only when you can see the cones.
So look for round spherical objects on the underside and a conical pollen phallus in the center. It's my way.
And then there's a few different kinds of female cones. So the one that's sago palm, it just looks like it's almost like an open bud flower, but it's not a flower. And you can see the seeds as they mature on the edges of the leaves, and then otherwise they just look like big pineapples like you said. So they're a bit more tricky to the tailerpart. But the tailtaler one is the little balls on the on the scales.
There's going to be people who are in a botanical garden looking at psycads and they'll probably have a security guard being like, what are they so close up in there?
What do they wire in the undercarriage? Get out of that check.
But a word of warning, the pollen can be has neurotoxins in it, and so just be careful not to breathe them in. I mean, I don't know, you probably have to, you know, really snuff them in, but just just be careful and wash your hands.
Have you ever had to worry about that when you've been out in the.
Field, not add in the field, but definitely Like I've tried experiments where we get pollen and we do artificial pollination, and so we get the pollen, and you know, we wear masks, like we're all wearing masks now, so we get like n ninety five masks, which you all know about, just to make sure you know we're not breathing in that pollen.
Prehistoric poaching, plotting, poison, nude seeds, psycads. You are the forbidden reality show that we did not know that we loved. Now who else asked about toxicity? So many of you, including Kersey for some question asker Matt Joel f MB and we actually had a few listeners right in to say, Kelly Shiver wants to know what is with this thing where animals eat toxic cycads and they're fine, but humans
eat the animals and are affected by the toxins. And a magartgen wants to know about poison seeds if that's true of all psycads?
Yes, so are they are poisonous and the toxins, the
toxins are pretty bad. And so one story that I can think of is in Guam where and it's actually not conclusive, but they thought that people who were eating the seeds of one of the Guam cycads they during the war, either they didn't prepare the seeds properly and just eat them, you know, without preparation and they got sick, or they were eating fruit bats that were able to you know, to withstand it, and they got sick from that and they ended up with a neurological disease like
an als Parkinson's like disease, which coincidentally, you know, after the Second Wall, when the food shortage is ended, that incidence of those diseases ended. But it's still kind of there's still a big scientific debate about this, like why is this happening kind of thing. I don't really know why they're toxic, like to us, not to some animals.
I mean some you know, some cows they get I think the Australian farms called them dropsy or something, so they get the paralysis in their legs sometimes if they eat psychad leaves and sort of all around the world. What I love is that peoples all around the world, like in Australia, in Guatemala and Mexico and South Africa. People have figured out how to detoxify the seeds, and
so they figured out you can use ash. You can put them in a basket and run that basket through a creek and it leaches out all the toxins or through a series of soaks. And so this is a kind of funny one where they just like soak them in a series of soaks and they decide whether the the toxins are leached out by giving some water to the chickens. I think the chickens die. Oh, then the toxins have not been illuminated, so they keep going with the six.
Okay, so I tried to find out if you can eat a poisoned chicken. But after learning that the sago palm is extremely poisonous to animals, including humans, and that pets think it's delicious, but within twelve hours of eating it, they can develop vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, seizures, liver failure, bruising, nose bleeds, and blood in the stool, and that the ASPA Animal Poison Control Center estimates a fatality rate of fifty to seventy five percent when ingestion of the sago
palm is involved. I'm like, I don't think anyone wants to eat those chickens. I think they're like catchtory and everyone's like absolutely not, No, toss it the river, you know. Getting back a little bit to that toxicity. Nano naturalist asked about the Oliver Sax book Island of the color Blind. Have you read that at all about Yes? Yeah, tell me more about how you felt about that.
Yes, so all of us sad. I mean, his writing is beautiful, and so he believes that it was the bat theory, I think, and that's about Guam and that whole process of people not getting enough food and then wanting and then using the psychads as a source of food. And then so he and another doctor went and investigated that, and so that was his conclusion that it was the
psychads that caused it. Wow, But other doctors have come up with other reasons, and you know, there's been other incidences in Japan as well, So it's still it's not clear. Nobody really knows.
Just a shout out to listener Bolitovak, who was also excited about this question and asked if researchers had yet confirmed the cause of this condition yet, which was referred to as als dash PDC or Latico Bodig disease, and essentially, a recent twenty two twenty one paper seemed to reiterate the hypothesis that traditional methods for safe consumption of sycad seeds appear to have been lost over the course of time since colonizers banned consumption, and other articles have tracked
the incident's rates, and the cycad seed hypothesis essentially seems to be going strong. Also, I started reading yet another Bananas article about a cycad caper which led with Joan Flack is on the run, suspected of stealing a rare African plant thought to be extinct and worth millions of dollars, and Sonya Kurtz was hired by the CIA to hunt down Joan to find the link between the missing plant
and a terrorist group hiding out in South Africa. Before I realized that this article was a book review for the twenty twenty novel Last Survivor by Tony Park And I don't know if this book is a good book, but it is about cycads and it exists in case that kind of action thriller is just what the doctor ordered. Oh which brings me to Rachel Walwood. Wanted to know first have question. Asker says, this seems like a type of plant that would be excellent for research into practical
application as medicine. Yes, no, maybe, yes, So in.
South Africa they do use the bark to hit it. Oh, they do use it for actually some for voodoo as well. So if you put someone under your bed, it kind of protects you. But that's all I know. I know.
I gotta say, if you put a forty thousand dollars plant under your pillow, seems like pretty good luck.
I think it's just a little bit of bark, just a little bark, Okay, yeah, Kitty Bailey Also for some christ Oskar wants to know if they have any appearances in mythology or any interesting stories about them.
And if not, if there's any in movies or TV that you, as a psychologist have seen and said that's not right or oh they got it right.
Oh, so definitely Diress Path they're in there. I'm not really sure that. Like the mythology is pretty varied. One of the stories I love is in Vanuatu is that it's a symbol of war versus peace and it's also a symbol of the chief. And so if you have two pych head fronds and they're crossed, that means that the two neighboring tribes are at war, and it's only until that is resolved that the fronds get uncrossed, and then they have a huge, big party aho. And so
it's also a taboo. So if somebody places a pychhad front somewhere, it means that this, I say, this person's shop is under taboo, and so people won't go in that shop. It's also a chiefly symbol. And if a chief places a cycad front where, let's say on the beach, he's indicating that this is my beach. Nobody can come here.
Natalie also related a story about Prince Charles being gifted a ceremonial psychad frond to honor his power as a chief, and warned me before googling.
He's topless, though, So I was just warned about that, Okay.
So I looked around for this, and I did find some pictures of Prince Charles fully clothed in like a rumpled suit on the beach during this exchange, but the search of him topless did return some beach frolicking recon on that trip. All I can say is that I hope that his Royal aides had some sunscreen in like a fire extinguisher canister. Just blast it. Now. What if it's not enough to take home all of this knowledge?
What if you want to take home a psychad? So listeners Andy Kristy Kazakhov, Jen Squirrel, Alvarez, Joe Mueller, and Caitlin Powell asked about their cultivation and in Rebecca Winzel's words, can I grow on in a pot in my Midwestern apartment? And on that note, patrons Chelsea and Emily Davis wrote in not a question, but heck yeah, dinosaur plants. How do you feel about people who grow psychads and cultivate
them just to keep them around? Do you feel like it's like maybe only where they should already be growing? Or how do you feel about people propagating them?
Oh? I love them. I mean if you can get psychads everywhere, like I remember seeing the Whole Foods once someone told me they saw them at Akiya. I've seen them at Disneyland. You know, it's the common species are not hard to find, and so you can easily find psychads. It's just those rare species where you're spending thousands that you know may be kind of dodgy. And so, you know,
I love that people grow psychads. And I love that people who have just been to my talks they come up to me and say, oh, I found a psychcad on my walk, and I'll showing me the picture of the psychad, and so they become psychad spotters, And for me that's really exciting because you know, now they know about them.
Yeah, and I understand you don't have the greenest thumb, but our psycho. You told me when we met in services car that You're like, I'm actually terrible.
Yeah, I can't grow anything, which.
Makes me feel so much better because I am not good with plants that I kill like every charactus. I've ever had any tips on how to cultivate a psychiat Do they like son? Do they like miracle grow?
I feel like, I feel like this is a really mean question, Allie. You know, I.
Don't you know, it's one of the reasons I fell in love with you. That was like, I love that this is a botanist. He's like, I'm not very good with plants, but you're good with plants. On a level that's like saving them and on like a molecular and taxonomic and like going around the world. Doesn't mean that you have to be good at growing one in a pot on your desk.
With you.
But what about the hardest part of your job other than growing plants?
I think it's just like, you know, there's writing papers, and it's just that pressure of writing papers. That's that's hard, I think, and I think a lot of academies will say that. And it has to be really good, so it's that sort of constant churning out of papers as well, but you don't want to write rubbish, So it's just it's hard.
Are you someone who writes a lot of drafts or are you someone who just wrings your hands, procrastinates it, does it all at once? What's your strategy? There? Any tips on.
The way I do it? Is that I will set it aside time in the like in the morning usually, and I will just sit at my computer and force myself to write one or two paragraphs, and in my mind I'm like, oh, this is really crap, but I'm just going to write it, and then you know, I do whatever I can, and then the next day I get back to it, and then I fix that one and I write another one, and I sort of keep going that way. I just can't. I can't do the
whole thing in one. But it's just like little by little.
That is really really good advice to revise what you've done and then do draft that you.
Allowed to be rubbish.
And it's never that crappy, is it when you go back and you're like, hey, this is pretty good.
Yeah. I mean, if the ideas are there and you know, just so you just sort of restructure it and fit it in with the next paragraph. So yeah, and you know the hard part of starting.
Oh, tell me about it, man, that's great advice. You may have just changed people's lives with that like kind of relay writing where you're like, all right, fix the last one, do the next one, fix it.
You know.
That's great. I'm gonna try that. What about your favorite thing about psychads or your work?
Oh? I love talking about psychods because they're so fascinating. They've just I mean, I've told you a little bit about them, but there's so many more things that I could talk about. They're just fascinating. One little group of plants have so many stories. I had some dreams of writing a book about psychads and all their crazy stories about the people and their biology and reproduction, but never got around to it.
Meanwhile, we have anything that you would recommend people look into if they're now suddenly a psycat spotter.
There are there's lots of pictures online, but the Academy has produced a bunch of videos where I'm talking about all these different issues. So if people want to hear more of my voice, you can go to the Academy's video pages and look up Natalie Megglingham and watch those.
Including getting to ask you a bunch of questions at the Dawn of COVID.
That's all right, Yes, this has just been such a joy.
You've been on my list for so long, and I'm glad it just I'm glad we didn't put it off anymore, just went for because I wanted to ask you about this literally since the day I met you two years ago. Oh, thank you, thanks for the excellent, excellent work you do.
Thank you for having me.
So ask iconic people botanic questions. And let this be a lesson. When you have a friend you want to chat with, do it sooner rather than later. Doctor Neaglingam. We straight up love you so much and you're a treasure in this world. Thank you on behalf of every psychad on the planet for your work. And Natalie's website is linked in the show notes if you want to find out more about her and her work, as is
her Twitter at n Nagalingham. We will also link some other videos that she's been in through the California Academy of Sciences. Also mark your calendar for March third. I'm going to be moderating another panel with them and it's part online, part in person. But March third, tune in California Academy of Sciences. I'm really really excited to actually be back in person, even if it's in a limited group. But again, follow Natalie n Nagalingham on Twitter, tell her
how cool she is. More links including want to donate to Ovarian Cancer Australia On February twenty third. Matching Day are all up at aliwar dot com slash ologies slash Psychology linked in the show notes. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both. Thank you Aaron Talbert for managing the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you Shannon and Bonnie of the comedy podcast You are that for helping out too. Thank you,
Susan Hale, who handles everything from payroll to merch. Thank you Noel Dilworth who helps schedule and run behind the scenes. Emily White makes our professional transcripts. Caleb Patten bleeps them. Those are up for free for anyone who needs them at Alleyward dot com slash Ologies Dash extras. All our episodes are also arranged by topic two on my site at alliwar dot com slash ologies dash by dash topic so you can find all sorts of episodes maybe you've overlooked.
Kelly Dwyer updates the website. She can make yours too her links in the show notes. Every two weeks a new Smologies episode comes out and those are shorter condensed. They are defilthed digests for all ages, totally parent and classroom friendly, and those are in your feed or at aliward dot com slash smologies. Thank you Zeegredriguez Thomas of mind Jem Media for heading those up and Stephen Ray Morris who helps too. As we record this at nine
forty eight pm on Valentine's Day. Thank you to lead editor Jared Sleeper of Mind Jam for making sure this gets out the door every week. Jarrett, the mayor of Babetown Sleeper the best. Nick Thorburn made the music and he is in a very good band called Islands. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you secret. This week's secret is I swear adhd is coming out this week. I swear y'all. I added two more guests for it. I'm sorry. I can't
help it. It's such a big episode, so there's now four guests for it in a two parter. It's going to be so good. I will be making some of it on a plane this week. Take care of yourself. I love you all for your much, especially you doctor Naglingham and Jarrett.
Happy Valentine's Day. Okay, bye bye.
You have plants in this building that are poisonous.
You pick them because they look good
But these are aggressive living things that have no idea what sentry they're in, and they'll defend themselves violently if necessary.