Ologies with Alie Ward - Carnivorous Phytobiology (MEAT-EATING PLANTS) with Hali’a Eastburn

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

Flesh hungry plants. The world’s fastest hunters. Botany with brains?  Seymour, it’s time to feed because we’re doing meat-eating plants with conservation ecologist and carnivorous phytobiologist, Hali’a Eastburn. Can a Venus Fly Trap digest human flesh? Do frogs think of pitcher plants as home or hell? How fast is a bladderwort? Are scientists anesthetizing plants? Why exactly DID they name a fly trap after the goddess of love? Also: homicidal plant tattoos, nature’s grossest vending machines, and what plants are most goth with a pair of real #bogbitches. Follow Hali’a Eastburn on Twitter and InstagramDonations were made to North American Sarracenia Conservancy and KauluakalanaMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's that omelet that set off your smoke alarm alleyward. And get your calendar ready, May 4th, 2022, World Carnivorous Plant Day. Did you know that? I didn't until I dove head first into the watery wonders and the spiky jaws of this episode, plants that eat meat. What? What makes their carnivorous plant? You ask.

That's a good question. They capture, kill, and digest their prey and use the absorbed nutrients to grow. I know you're thinking carnivorous plant got it, Venus fly traps. And what else? So much. There are pitfall traps like pitcher plants. There are sticky flypaper traps. There's bladder traps, which sound painful.

They're like insect vacuums. There's lobster pot traps that have spikes you can't pass back through if you're a bug. Oh, this is a good one. So in the Northern Hemisphere, carnivorous plants tend to flower from May to July. So just get ready for a new obsession to bloom. But first, I'm obsessed with you. Thank you to everyone at patreon.com. Slash allergies for supporting the show since before it was even born.

You can join for as little as a dollar a month. And thank you to everyone who leaves a review. And I read them all like this still steaming one from Kitty Wav, who said, the only podcast I had while living on a cruise ship, five out of five stars for the podcast, not the cruise ship. That was like a two out of five. Thank you, Kitty Wav. We're glad to have you back.

Okay, carnivorous phytobiology, flesh eating plants. They exist. They're all over the place. And thisologist has been doing really great outreach out of her soggy field. And she did an undergrad in biology, cum laude, from University of Florida, and is now finishing a master's at Texas Christian University and graduates in May very, very soon with a thesis titled The Effects of Nutrients and Polyne Quality on the Reproduction of Carnivorous Plants.

And this ology, this episode, it covers so many ologies in one, phytology, conservation ecology, bog ology, plus the chemistry of digestion, the physics of trap mechanisms. There's symbiosis. There's tricky things. There's tattoos. There's pop cultural lore, historical gossip, death and snacks and survival and flowers. So tuck in your bibs. Get ready for a carnivorous phytobiologist, Helia Eastburn.

Oh, hello. Are you there? Hello. Can you hear me? This is some real fumblecore. Hi. Hello. We're here.

Hello. I mean, it's been months of Twitter back and forth. We're late. Yes. Let's get this on the books. Yes. Let's get this. And then, you know, COVID happens.

The holidays. The holidays. Omicron. A concussion on my part. Nothing like a little head trauma to all of your intended times. First thing I'm going to have you do. Can you say your first and last name and your pronouns? Yeah.

My name is Helia Eastburn. My pronouns are sheep. Sweet plants that eat animals. The tables are turned. Let's get right into it. Do you have to get in tight with the ENTO community to be like, hey, what's the scoop on bugs, man? Yeah.

So actually, one of the reasons why I got into carnivorous plants was because I was taking an etymology class during the end of that. And I've been growing carnivorous plants as a hobby and just kind of like, oh, these are cool. Like they look really fun and like they're easy to grow. And then when I took an etymology class, I was like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now I have to like reassess these plants and look at their relationships. There's so many different things going on.

They're eating bugs. They also need bugs to pollinate them. And then there's bugs interacting with them like just in the environment. And so my education and etymology actually helped enrich my understanding of these plants. It's like understanding gardening before you understand cooking, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Only the bugs are the garden and the cooking is the plants that devour the flesh.

Flip-flop. Everything's upside down. Let's get the big question out of the way. Okay. All right. I told you when you saw a little shop horse, what effect did it have in your life? Is that the most annoying question that biologists can get? It's a very common one.

I know. That's why I had to ask it. I honestly don't know what age I was when I saw it. I was born in 86. So like he was like a little before me. So I might have seen it when I was really young. And then I recently, I think the most recent time I watched it was maybe like five years ago and I was like, oh, this is like different than I thought this was going to happen.

It was like totally like flashed the past those. It's fun. It's a fun movie. Has anyone named any carnivorous plant species, Audrey or Aubrey or Aubrey too? I forget what it was called, but. I'm sure. Right now there's like a million cultivars of Venus fly traps. We don't breed them with all these different looks and things like that.

And so I'm sure there's an Audrey cultivar or something. OK, so this aside is meaty and I'm sorry, the rest are shorter. Did I spend two hours looking this up? Of course I did. Maybe three. I'm not in control. It's my brain. But first off, I found out plants that respond to touch are called sensitive.

That's the word for them. And I love that. And the Venus fly trap was first called the fly trap sensitive until some naturalists in the mid 1700s were like, yo, come on, two halves of a shell. Kind of dewy, rimmed in hairs, sensitive to a touch. So these horny botanists named the fly trap after Venus got us a love. They were like, and if you don't get it yet, common name for it back then, the tippity witchet, which was not derived from any indigenous language

as previously assumed, but rather it was just straight up slaying for a snatch. So let's continue to gossip. So the prominent Southern governor, Arthur Dobbs, who first described the fly trap and would send seeds around the country to fellow enthusiasts, including presidents, lapsed on his horticultural duties when he became a newlywed and two fellow botanists talked shit in a letter and are quoted as saying it is now in vain to write him for seeds or plants of the tippity witchet he has got one of his own to play with. Ew, the catch, he was 73 and his bride was 15.

And even though they are said to have had a loving marriage based on letters they sent each other, I don't like it. I don't like it at all. But Venus fly traps can live to the age of 20. So it is possible that he had plants older than his wife. What is my fucking point? That's a good question. OK, so I was looking for cultivars named after Audrey, too, or after little shopping

course, and I stumbled into the open maw of a website called flytrapcare.com and it listed all kinds of tweaks on the species. And there are cultivars named after sunset, after a shell, en français. After the B 52s, there's one named after the titular alien and alien. And they also have cultivars named Creeping Death, Polish Dracula, Bart Simpson, Kim John ill and but cheeks, but no Audrey, too. But they do have one named Justina Davis. And I was like, who is that probably a jazz singer I never heard of?

Oh, no. Justina Davis was Dobbs, 15 year old bride. Got it. Get it. Didn't eat it. And I'm going to spare you the part where a research species named after famous people and discovered a pair of researchers who named trilobites after 1980s goth bands. Yes, I emailed them. OK, Little Shop of Horrors, getting back to it. It's a movie made the same year Halia was born. But it's based on a 1960 dark comedy by Roger Corman.

But the idea was maybe poached from a sci-fi story about a man eating flour, which was itself inspired by another short story about an orchid collector who becomes a victim of his own hobby. But the 1986 film was a cultivar of a cultivar of a cultivar of another idea. So there you go. Speaking of history, did you start as a hobby? And then did you decide, fuck, why not get a master's in this? Like, I love this.

There's got to be more people studying this. Like, what came first? Yeah, so I grew up gardening and around plants and all of that. And I moved down to San Diego and I served with babies. And one of them, they were actually born carnivorous plants. And they introduced me to the hobby. And so we started collecting these plants together and we helped actually found San Diego Carnivorous Plant Society that's still around today.

And so we kind of gathered this community together with all these other really cool folks down there. And we started having meetings and did a show and sale once a year for, I did it for like a year, four years. And then I graduated, got into working with insects for a while, and I worked with trees for a while. And this whole time after I graduated from my undergrad, I was thinking about getting a master's.

I just didn't know what I wanted to spend so much time studying. I was just kind of like dabbling around, looking for advisors. And then I stumble upon this posting and it's this advisor right now working with asking for someone to come work on carnivorous plants. And I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that like, I don't know, there was labs, but we're still working on this. I knew a few people that I've been working on carnivorous plants. They were like way across the country or like places that were really cold.

I don't want to live there. And I was like, I can do Texas. This is cool. So like kind of on a whim, I applied. The deadline was actually like the next day. So it was like, oh, shit, I'm just gonna put this in, applied right away. And within a few months, they were like, I interviewed with advisor, we clicked and then, you know, later that year, I was living here in Texas.

So it was kind of a crazy role when didn't intend really to study carnivorous plants. But again, like my curiosity for them has been a very long, long relationship. I guess it makes sense that I'm here now studying them. I feel like most, some people only have exposure to them as cultivars and as like hobbies and gardening. I don't even know where carnivorous plants exist because I'm in California. But what kind of habitats do they prefer? So carnivorous plants are incredibly diverse.

And I think that's something that people often miss because they automatically go to these five plants, but there's like tons of diversity within carnivorous plants. And they're found on every continent, except for Antarctica. Too cold, far too cold. We find them a lot of places where you're going to find them, though, is where there's a lot of water, where there's a lot of logs, where there's a lot of light and not a lot of nutrients. And that's the reason why they developed or they evolved carnivorous traits.

And so in California, we actually have a native species. It's a native species of future plant and it's up north, near the border of Oregon in these kind of like rocky, serpentine, like ravines, where water is just kind of rushing down to these rivers below. And there's constantly water just moving through the ground and watering these plants. There's not a lot of trees out there. And the soil itself doesn't have a ton of nutrients. It's got volcanic origins.

So there's not a lot of nutrients in there, there's carnivorous plants everywhere. So that's where you find them in California. The rest of the United States, there's bogs and swamps that have carnivorous plants all over the South and then up to Eastern Seaboard into Canada. Actually, you can find your plants. There's tropical plants that live in trees on tops of mountains. Like they're everywhere. There's the diverse.

I would think in bogs and stuff, there would be tons of nitrogen and things rotting. So what do plants need to thrive? They obviously need water, they need sunlight, they need carbon dioxide. But what is in Miracle Grow and what is in fertilizer? And what are the other things that plants need and why they are out there absolutely slaughtering bugs? Yeah. Yeah. So carnivorous plants are really different from other plants where they need nitrogen,

phosphorus, carbon to build all those structures. We produce all the things that plants do in bog environments. The soil is so waterlogged and anoxic, there's no oxygen. And so it actually slows down decomposition of all of the plant matter that's making up that bog. And so that those nutrients are there, but they're not readily available to the plants. And so it actually is a nutrient poor situation. And so these particular plants in these places have developed all of these different mechanisms to find other sources of nitrogen because they still need it.

They still need phosphorus, they still need nitrogen. They're getting carbon from photosynthesis. They still photosynthesize, but everything else, they have to get through instant capture. Dude, also somehow the scariest plants out there. I, for some reason, carnivorous plants are so mysterious. And so like, wait a second, a plant fucking kills bugs. What else can it do? Was that part of your alert to them is like, wait, it's a, this plant is endocidal?

It was that part of why you love them? Yeah, I think that was part of it. I was just interested in how they even got insects near them. Like, what are they doing to draw these insects in? Because you'll get, there's, at the store, you'll often see those, they're called like octopus plants or something, and they have the sticky tendrils. And I had a few of those for a while and you set them out in a sunny window. And the next day they're like, black with bugs.

And you're like, how, how did that happen? Like, what are we doing? Right. And so a lot of my curiosity around these plants is how are they doing what they're doing? And they have all of these really cool, like, lures that they use, some of them move, some of them don't, but he's like, easy attractants to bring in insects. And these mechanisms are different depending on if they want pollinators or

prey, because they still need to be pollinated, they need to produce. And so it's really fun to see the differences with me as two things. And like, how does the president partition their strategies? So they need some bugs to help carry their pollen. They need others to die so that they can break them down and take their nitrogen and phosphorus. Yes. Do they ever get a Bogo?

Do they ever do like a, a two for one on that? Oh, that is really rare because most carnivorous plants will set their flowers really, really far away from the traps. So it's either really, really high above their traps. Tropical pitcher plants have these long spikes that take the flowers, like a good few feet away from the actual pitchers themselves. Even penis fly traps is that their flowers are really high above their traps. So anything that's cruising through the bog is just going to hit the

flower and keep bouncing along. It's really not going to stick around and go lower to find anything. So that's one of their strategies. And also they offset the timing of when they put the flowers up and when they put them on their traps. Yeah. So a lot of pitcher plants, a lot of carnivorous plants have a down season to just take a break during the winter.

They kind of go into dormancy. They stop producing active traps. And before they produce their next crop of pitcher plants or little fly traps in the spring, they'll pop up their flowers. Timing is everything. And so they get all their pollination done. And by the time those flowers are pollinated, then their, their traps start coming up and start opening up.

Actives, which can actually are food for the rest of the season. And that's what they spend the rest of the season doing is just filling up on food. They're kind of like bears, I guess. Filling up on food, store a bunch of it for the next season to get them to the winter, use some of it for that, for that season to like get peasy and grow a bunch. And then they go back to sleep again and then fall winter. And for more on this, you can see the two-part personology episode on bears. Plus there's a carnivore ecology episode with Dr.

Rae Wyn Grant. But yes, let bog death plants be your inspiration. You deserve a snack and a break. So a huge problem with carnivorous plants, ecology and their conservation, and even like, I don't know, people knowing about them is the fact that their habitats have been significantly reduced to degraded. The amount of wetland habitat that we would have normally found these plants in has been reduced by like 85% worldwide.

85% of habitat is gone. And the reason that I, as a Californian, am shockingly ignorant about carnivorous plants is because the entire central valley of California used to be boggy as all get-out. In the pre-Gold Rush 1850s, there were four million acres of bogs and wetlands in California, which are now drained and are home to almond orchards and alfalfa fields. The Venus flytrap is endemic to a really small area of North and South Carolina, but only 3% of its natural habitat remains.

And biologists report that the local pine savannas have been swapped out for golf courses and parking lots, which, yes, is depressing. But people like Halia are on the job. So worldwide, we've gotten rid of all of these wetland environments where these plants have to live, like this is the only place they can live. And as that's happened, as we reduce them in size and quality, they kind of turn into these fragments, these islands, and we're not quite sure how they're spreading around their genetics, if they are at all, because we need good

genetic diversity while in terms of these populations healthy and thriving. My project is looking at these little islands. There's one particular island of plants here in East Texas, where the populations have been reduced significantly. And the nearest bog, Saracenia bog, to mine, is about 10 to 15 miles away. And these plants are only pollinated by bumblebees. They're the sole pollinators, as far as we know. I just want to tell you both, good luck.

We're all counting on you. And bumblebees only forage about one, maybe two miles in our whole day. And so it's likely that bumblebees that are pollinating our bog aren't bringing in any pollen from any of the bogs. And so essentially all the flowers within our bog are pollinating each other. And so by looking at the impacts of distance between pollen donor and pollen segment, we can maybe get an idea of how big these bogs need to stay, if we're going to conserve them, or if we're going to restore them or recreate them

in any sort of natural habitat, how big do these need to be? How much genetic diversity do we need for these bogs to be self-sustaining? They don't need to be maybe the huge, you know, sprawling bogs that we used to have hundreds of years ago. We just need to have pockets of them. You know, what are the qualities of these bogs? How close do they need to be to the next bog, if that's a necessary thing? So if there aren't any nearby bogs, chances are that the bumblebees visiting

the bog's flowers come from that bog, which means less genetic diversity. And she's also studying how the level of nutrients a plant has affects their offspring from a genetic level, because that can slip scientists some extra intel on what's happening in the local bog core scene. Are you ever tempted to, like, brand yourself as like, I'm a bog, bitch? Most of my day, like, in bog looking for carnivorous plants. That would be, that would feature carnivorous plants. I never thought about bogs, but I love that.

Maybe if I, if I spent more time in bogs, you know, I spent like all of the last spring and summer, but I don't live near any bogs. I'm from California, and that's my planning going back. So after I graduate, we don't really have bogs around California. So it's not really like I need a habitat. I'm more of a force now, she's a girl, but man, I love a good bog. I like a good bog schnog. And so it's not too soon.

There's someone out there. I know. So I'm going to see who's out there using the hashtag bog, bitch. And I am going to track them down and we're going to see what they're, I want to see what their personal brand of use like. Just a heads up, look up the hashtag bog, bitch on Instagram, and it will lead you to Haleopedia. Yes, she did it.

So enjoy pictures of her bog tromping past flutes of pitcher plants and doing microscopy on sticky little trickers. Speaking of variety, can you walk me through some of the types of carnivorous plants? Because I feel like we mostly hear about Venus fly traps. But what are like pitcher plants and fly paper? Like, what do they look like? Okay. So let's start with pitcher plants because those are the ones I'm working with.

So pitcher plants, they have these big license structures for one. I know a lot of people wonder if they have like roots and flowers and things. Yeah, they're definitely like ever plants, except their leaves have evolved to turn into like little tubes. And at the top of the tube is a lid. And the lid doesn't close. Everyone can still close as long as it wants to lay down. But around the lid and the lip of the tube, there's all of this nectar and there's

actually lines of nectar that stand up the tube to the mouth of the pitcher. And these serve as guides for insects that are going to come into the lip of the tube. It's kind of slippery and slick there. There's a bunch of dummy nectar and stuff like that. And they're going to slip inside and fall into the tube. Well, after this, I shall think nothing of falling down the stairs. So what is it the bottom of that slippery trap tube? Nothing but death in microbes.

It's delicious. At the bottom of the tube in Saracenia, most Saracenia, it's just a lot of fungus and bacteria and other insects actually stuck in there. And they actually help digest all of the food. They break it down and the plant absorbs what it means to its tissues of the pitcher. So those are Saracenia. Those ones that you're going to find here in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, they are beautiful, tall, gorgeous pitchers.

They can be up to like three or four feet tall and they come in all different colors. Red, white, yellow, pinks, purples, they're gorgeous. They're easy to grow to. They're similar to roses where you can just like read them together and they'll be really beautiful, you know, colorful plants. And they, and they grow fairly fast within a couple of years. You can have them fly and then the pictures themselves are so showy. So those are Saracenia.

There are some species of Saracenia up in Eastern Seaboard up into Canada. Saracenia paparia, they make a liquid at the bottom of their pitchers. They're kind of short, these are little tubby pitchers and they're filled with water and they often get flooded. And so they will eat a lot of stuff that like little larvae or little frogs that live in them that you can buy them sometimes. Yeah, and so they fill with water and enzymes that help them break down their food. And so those are a little different types of Saracenia, but those are

Northern North American. Whoa, is the frog in there for a while taking a dip? And then it's like, holy shit, my skin's falling off. Or is it like immediate toxicity? The frog is like, I'm so thirsty. And then it's like, I'm dinner. Yeah, I'm not sure I've seen some dead frogs in pitchers and I see frogs living in pitchers.

OK, I look this up and yes, some frog goes fall to their watery deaths. But others treat Saracenia plants just like a pied-a-tair. Or like a West Village apartment paid for by a lover. I mean, just listen to Jacob on the YouTube channel for Saracenia Northwest. Frogs and pitcher plants actually have a beneficial relationship. Frogs will use a plant's pitcher for shelter that will hang out along the inside of the pitcher trying to keep cool during summer. Their feet have natural adhesive or suction cups that help them maneuver in

and out of the pitchers. So really, they're not at all prey for pitcher plants. So it depends on the species. But if you see a dead one, something went wrong for the frog. But if you spot a live one, don't call 911. It knows what it's doing and loves it. And what are these love nests called? Scientifically speaking, phytotelmata, and that means plant pond.

And it's any body of liquid contained within a plant from pitcher plants to a watery hollow of a tree that serves as a nightclub for micro critters. Is the water getting there from rainfall? Or is it taking in water from the roots and then reallocating it to its pitcher? So they make their own fluids. You can add fluids in. And sometimes I can transport them plants that spills out and that crap themselves a little bit of distilled water.

But then they add their own stuff into it. That's that's part of what they do. Wow. Yeah. It's like their little suit, their little digestive suit. Yeah. So those are North American ones. Our Venus fly traps are found within a 90 square mile area in North Carolina. That's the only place in the whole world you can fly them.

And they're incredibly endangered for that reason, because people like to pull them out of the ground for some reason and kill them. When you just buy them at home, you go, wow, I love you so much. But so that's where our Venus fly traps that are from that are here. We also have a bunch of sticky trap species that called sundews. And those are so numerous. We have some species here. They're usually, you can usually find them with the other carnivorous plants.

So where you're going to look at, you're going to find serenade. You're probably going to find sundews. And you're probably going to find another family called bladder warts. They are fully aquatic carnivorous plants. And they have these underwater traps, which are super cool. How does that work? Yeah. So they're like these little pods and they have trigger hairs at the

front of their mouths and a little micro organism, a little vertebrate water will swim by, hit a hair. And it triggers the opening of the pod. And the pod creates like a little vacuum, sucks it in and closes. And recent research done, I think that Ceci Fresno showed that the velocity of the water getting sucked into these traps is like 5,000 Gs. It's ridiculously fast. And it's like the fastest moving predator, predator in clothes, I guess, on the

planet, because it's like, it's like a hundred times faster than the biggest fly trap you've been. So these are pretty effective little hunters. Yeah. Okay. So Pacquiz, what are the fastest hunters on the planet? Cheetahs? No.

Lions. No. Raptors? Nope. Bladder warts, swamp plants. Oh, we love an underdog. But you can call them with respect, Utrechillaria. And they look like swamp seaweed with little capsules along the bottom

of their tenderly viney branches. And I looked up the specific physics on this and dinner gets suctioned in at a rate of zero to 60 miles per hour in one millisecond. That is almost 2000 times faster than the world's fastest car, swamp goblins. And via a 2011 paper called ultra fast underwater suction traps, little delicious wetland crustaceans get sucked into the space of the bladder work death pockets with 100 times the G's that a fighter pilot experiences. Around 600 G's.

I myself have taken five G's in a military centrifuge for a science shoot, and I thought I was dying. I was like, should I had a will before this? So I'm sorry, crustaceans, because that is 100 times worse. And also you do die and you do not have a legal will. But I looked up the work of the team at CSU Fresno that Halia mentioned. And I came across the 2021 paper, complexity and diversity of motion, amplification and control strategies in motile carnivorous plant traps,

which explained that plants have stiff cell walls so they can't use proteins to contract themselves like animals do with muscles. And rather, most plant movement comes from changes of hydrostatic pressure, which is called Turgor. And that's activated through these really energetically costly water displacements from another part of a plant. So hydraulics to use elastic energy just when it's needed. And in reading this paper on a Saturday afternoon, I also noticed

that two of the authors on it were named Ulrika, Ulrika Mueller and Ulrika Bauer. Is that right? That's got to be wrong, or that must be weird for them. I'll email them and ask them if it's weird for them. And then later that day, I was delighted to find a note in my box from Dr. Mueller, who wrote, Hi, Ali Ward, happy to share. Nope, not a typo. There really are two Ulrikas.

And by fluke, we both do biomechanics of carnivorous plants. And aside from Ulrika Bauer, I know of only one other Ulrika personally in my entire 56 years of life. Ulrika is a really rare name. So it does warp people's minds that we are really two people and it creates a lot of confusion. But Dr. Mueller said that she always knew of Dr. Bauer's work and they finally met at a symposium and they've been

working together ever since. So when in doubt, hunt down a good story. When it comes to how you describe them, do scientists say that they are hunting, that they're predators? Like when does the nomenclature work for plants? Yeah, I mean, I don't, in an academic sense, I, I don't am for glorified plants because I don't know what they're thinking. You definitely know that they feel pain.

We've been necessarized plants and been able to remove parts of them without any pain signals or pain reactions. And so they do respond in that way. Oh my God. But like, I don't know what they're thinking as far as like, I'm going to get that little bug flying around or, you know, was that that little bee I need them around for the season? So I don't attribute too much human behavior to them, but I don't know.

Sometimes it feels like it. Does that freak you out ever to think, like if you anesthetize a plant, it won't react the same way. Does that ever mess with your whole, like thoughts about the universe? I think every, I think every time I like remember that I know that, like, I don't know, I have a lot of shit in my brain about plants. And so every once in a while, like I'll reread my notes and like, oh, and then like I kind of feel bad about like being salad or something.

Like, oh, wait, this person is stepping on this grass. I don't know. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. What do you know about how they are, let's say, hunting or predating? Are they ever using certain sense or signals to advertise? Like, come over here, come over here. Yes, yes, they are. That's primarily how they're rearing and sesting. So they produce what are called volatiles, which are just different aromas

from all of their tissues. It really differs across all the different species. And there's like over 800 species of carnivorous plants, so they're all kind of doing it a little different. But a lot of the aromas that they exude from like the pictures are sweet kind of earthy smells at the beginning of the season. The nectar's are really sweet because they're luring in insects. They're looking for food, right?

For carbs, for amino acids and proteins are really high quality foods for insects. And so they have their nectarines that line the pictures. Those are putting off a smell. The pictures themselves are putting off a smell. And so those are bringing in the first insects of the season. You know, when all the bugs are out, they're the first to fall in. And then as they've built up on food, as they fill it up on food, they kind of stop exuding their own chemicals.

And they kind of like let the smell of visit hay from like everything's dying in them, bringing in other kinds of animals. They're like, if you're into eating decaying flesh, like this is for you. Come on over. So yes, they have a rim of delicious, sugary, sweet at the start of the season. And then toward the end, it becomes the odor of death. Kind of like a restaurant that has a great waffle brunch. But then at night turns into a goth fetish club.

What are some of the weirdest things that they eat? Can you run me through some menu items that we'd be? Yeah, I mean, no pun intended, but boggle to hear about. So their main prey are going to be like plants and pastries. OK. The sticky ones love to go off to those fruit flies. Those are great. Any kind of fly paper carnivorous plant is good for those little tiny fruit flies.

They'll also eat you like mobs and some of the grasshoppers will chew their way out. That's not really big food. Needles will find their way in there. They're very like opportunistic. So it's like kind of whatever calls in element of meat. In the tropics, the picture plants there grow up trees. They tell us the trees and they have these big pictures of they that hang off of them. Big old pots and those filled with fluid and a lot of things will come

checking out and I've heard stories of birds getting stuck in there. Little baby like mice and a little small mammals, lizards, like literally anything that can fit in a trap, it can can get digested by that. I eat the bones. Do they eat the bones? Not that I don't know if they have the enzymes to digest bone, but they do have enzymes to digest item, which is what insects are made out of. But nothing for bone as far as I as far as I know, maybe we'll find something.

All right, I looked into this for us and I came across a pop science article titled What's the biggest thing a carnivorous plant will eat? And should we humans be worried? Should humans be worried about carnivorous plants eating us in the middle of a global pandemic with ice shelves splintering into our boiling acidified oceans? And then I saw that the article was published in 2008 before yet another escalating war between superpowers and predating the rise and the fall of pink pussyhat culture and the return of baggy jeans.

Anyway, this 2008 article led me to the work of Dr. Alastair S. Robinson, who sounds dead, but he's a young guy studying picture plants who named one after Sir David Attenborough. And in a video, he talked about finding a rodent corpse inside a picture plant at the top of a remote mountain in the Philippines. Now, we were here approximately one month ago and the shrew was intact, recently killed. And now all that is left is bones and some of the fur, which gets to show how quickly digestion is taking place within the pictures of this

marvelous species. But it doesn't seem to be a common occurrence. And also, yes, David Attenborough got a picture plant named after him. And Obama has a bunch of species. Carmen Electra got a fly. Lady Gaga has a few, including a pretty cool aquatic might. Greta Thunberg is a popular species on her recipient. Beyonce has a horse fly with a golden butt named after her.

And Stephen Colbert begged on TV for someone to name some stuff after him. And scientists are like, sure, man. Also, I told you earlier, I would spare you this research. And what I did was I lied. But the cool thing about that is when the tropical picture plants are called the pennies, when prey falls in, whether it's an insect or whether it's a tree shrew finding its way and defecating inside the picture, when anything enters the picture, there's mRNA in the picture tissues that gets

right up regulated and it starts producing enzymes based on whatever is it, whatever it senses. So whether it's chitin or certain proteins or even ammonium, which is found in some insects, it'll start producing enzymes to like custom break it down so that it can change depending on like what it is. So there's a lot of flexibility in these plants and we really don't know a lot about that stuff, but that's kind of actually your area of study. Are there debates about the intelligence of plants if they are sensing

something and then reacting a certain way? When do you say like that is intelligence? That's a really good question. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's all kind of how you want to define intelligence. You're definitely aware of their environment. They're definitely aware of the other plants that are around them and their organisms that they're interacting with. So if you want to label that intelligence, let's, I don't know,

I guess you can do that. It's not really something that I under too often myself, but yeah. Someone's out there thinking about it. I mean, I'm sure in the future we're going to think, isn't it crazy that we used to debate and wonder if plants were intelligent and then we're like, wow, we were such fucking assholes to plants. They're like, of course we are. Like, have you seen us?

Also worth noting there is a field emerging called plant cognition and one of the leading researchers in this, Dr. Monica Galliano, defines it as the cognitive abilities of plants, including perception, learning processes, memory and consciousness, and the emerging framework holds considerable implications for the way that we perceive plants as it redefines the traditionally held boundary between animals and plants, like straight up salads or trauma. And I don't know what to do with that information. So how about we change the subject?

Great. What about pooping? Do they ever poop or fart? Yeah. Remember I first got this question, it was like a five year old, I was like, I was doing a school presentation and it was like kindergarten. And now he's kind of like a slow girl, super cool girl. She's like, so these are the bugs.

And I'm like, yeah, she's like, so do they poop? And I'm like, huh, huh. Oh, wait, that's like, I should really get back to you. I got a lot of thinking about that. That is, it's like one of my favorite questions because it's, I don't know, glorious. So they don't poop in the way that we can go poop. Usually what you're going to find, and again, this is the song, the type of

plants, they're capturing mechanisms and everything like that. They're put as digestive enzymes available. That'll change what, what comes out. But a lot of, like for picture plants, the picture plants I work with, all of the bugs stuff just stays in the whole picture and it just decomposes slowly. And so they break it down as much as they can. We derive whatever nutrients they can. And then like the husks of the bugs just kind of like sit in there and more

insects come and eat whatever they can. And it just kind of becomes like a communal compost, which is good, I guess. The rest of our community, other plants, like if you get the flytrap plants, any of the butter warts, which are kind of like little succulents looking rosette plants that are, that are sticky on top, when little flies stick to them, they'll just stay there, like their little hospital to stay and the plant is absorbed, like completeness, I guess. Like any of those nutrients in the water, that's just stays there.

And then those trees will like die. Yeah. So they kind of just like leave them hanging out. Post the time, this is a little, this is just a little dark, I guess. Yeah. I really thought about it that way. As goth is gardening. You know, like it's been so normalized for me.

Like, oh no, I guess little skeletons hanging out, it's weird. Yeah. Yeah, so sometimes they just kind of leave it there. Can I ask you some question or questions? Sure, yeah. Okay. But before your questions, let's scatter some money into the wind and blow it toward a cause of the oligarchs choosing and Halea selected two, actually, great

ones, the North American Saracenia Conservancy, NA Saracenia.org, which is dedicated to preserving the natural habitats and genetic diversity of the genus Saracenia, those are pitcher plants, through protection, conservation, propagation, and restoration efforts. And Kaulaakalana.org, which works with native Hawaiian scientists and community members to restore traditional fish ponds on Oahu. And projects like this show that indigenous traditional knowledge provides relevant and effective tools to combat issues related to climate change, food

scarcity, and habitat degradation. So those are two great causes and donations are made to them. Thanks to you for listening and thanks to sponsors of the show. Okay, let's digest your questions. A lot of you, including Slayer, Gustavo Discoteca, Bex Woodruff, Jesse Hurlbert, Diana Starracinic, Dean Jason Krause, Rachelle Williams, Annalisa Young, Quinn Newman, Michelle Mandula, Alia Meyers, Ben W., Schmidty Thompson, all asked if carnivorous plants eat people.

Role of grandma kin was like, if you boob it, will you lose a finger? And Sarah Stala wrote in, do I need to be afraid? Very afraid. Okay, Amanda Spinoza wants to know, could carnivorous plants theoretically digest very small amounts of human meat? Yeah, yeah, they eat small mammals so they could probably like digest something or something. Well, it's funny you should ask that because first time question

asker, Alia Mako says, if one were to dangle a pinky finger into a pitcher plant for a few days to a week, would it start to digest said finger? I don't know. I mean, if you could actually do that for a week, yeah, it would probably start working on some enzymes for that. Yeah, I could see that happening. Okay, I'm not sure how long it's going to take. It takes a while, though, so if you like maybe two weeks, you better

put like top your little fingertip in, but that'd be more effective. That'd be more effective. And I put my hand in the slicer and it got caught because I wasn't paying attention. Next time you have a kitchen accident, just do yourself a favor, drop into a pitcher plant, see what happens. Would you like more details on this? Okay, so Barry Rice, the conservation director for the International Carnivorous Plant Society and the author of Growing Carnivorous Plants,

notes that digesting a mammal takes a while and it could rot the plant, but Dr. Rice answered when opportunity knocked in the form of a bad case of athletes, but he got from his karate dojo and he writes on his website that he got treatment, but during his foot's flaky healing period, he wrote, quote, if skin were peeling off my feet like shingles from an old barn in a hurricane, ever enterprising, I figured, Hey, why waste all these skin hunks? Hunks! Oh, Dr. Barry Rice.

So naturally he fed some of his own foot jerky to some lobes of Venus fly trap alongside an earwig appetizer for some movement and pizzazz. And a week later, when the lobes yawned open, he discovered, yes, the plant ate his dried foot and I will put a link to the photo documentation from his website. I'll link that on my website. You don't have to click it. Okay. You don't have to click it.

You might want to, but you don't have to. Also, once I did one of those baby foot peels in the early pandemic, when I was like, no one's going to see me for a while and it is truly revolting. And my dog ate a foot flake of mine. And my first thought was like, she's made out of me now. Gross. I love it. And also Mark Eyre, you can tell your lovely wife now that it would take a

lot of dedication and coaxing and foot issues to even have a carnivorous plant attempt to digest a small bit of you. So fear not. Do not fear these swampy beauties. And just like our own simmering guts, some meat plants rely on a partnership with microbes to help digest their victims. But could you digest a digesting plant? Reb, Sean Kild, first time question asker, Laurie and Tom Astle, Alyssa Williams,

Pierce and Jody Pierce all had questions about pitcher plants. And what's going on with that liquid? Hunter Momberger, first time question asker, also asked, are there any practical applications for the slurry inside a pitcher plant? Can you do that? So there are some medicines that have been derived from content within pitchers and the pitchers themselves. They have a lot of, like, anti-jungle, anti-jungle properties.

I've heard that there's some indigenous traditions and tropical regions of using the fluid for, like, different maladies, stomach upset for eye infections. Yeah, there are some medicinal properties of these plants. Okay, I looked into this a little. And indigenous uses of pitcher plants include everything from using the leaf as a vessel and the roots to treat smallpox and lung illnesses. The leaves were used as a tea to treat fevers, kidney issues, and during childbirth. And there was a small 2012 study that seemed to suggest that saracenia extract

could inhibit viral replication and potentially be active against poxviruses, an Epstein bar. However, Sarah L, those claims about venous fly traps, curing cancer, jury's still out on that research. But Bengus, a.k.a. Sarah Payne, and first time question asker, Gerald Wallach, who wondered about medicinal breakthroughs, perhaps one day in the future, they'll do more research and carnivorous plants will be our new heroes.

But should you be considering them people? We wonder. Jess P, who's also a first time question asker, wanted to know about venous fly traps and said, why do we ascribe personalities to venous fly traps? Is it because they seem animal like because they have reflexes and chompers? But I wanted to ask about those, like, reflexes, what causes them to close? And Jess asked, also, did I kill my venous fly trap by sticking a chopstick on its little feelers to trigger the closing?

And as someone who's myself has killed a fly trap from just making it perform too much like a dance mom, like, what? How is it closing and how damaging is that? OK, don't worry. I've killed a bunch myself. So these are stuff. So in the mouth of the venous fly trap, you'll see that there's two little hairs on each side of the bait, right?

There's two little trigger hairs and usually where these plants are grown, they're just kind of like laying out with their mouths open and my son. And they're luring in bugs with their smells and stuff. And the point of these trigger hairs is that when a bug comes by, it'll hit a hair, but it needs to hit a second hair within 10 seconds, I believe. Oh, wow. It's yeah, there's like a national number. It's 10 to 20 seconds.

It has to hit the other hair and then it will start closing. That's how it avoids closing on accident and wasting energy, because every time it closes, there's an electrical impulse that actually snaps the leaves together. And so it does require energy for it to move in quite a bit. And each leaf can open and close, I believe, three to five times before it's going to die. And it can actually do that and it does that normally. So like, try and follow the fear, do not run, but like, it can eat like

three to five meals essentially also. It can eat that many times and then that leaf is done for this job and it's going to put it in the trash and it'll keep going. So that's kind of part of a normal life cycle? Yeah. So the reason why you don't want to trigger them without feeding them is because they're not like getting any energy back from closing. They're taking all their energy to keep going.

It's not horrible if you trigger them, you know, once it's like that, but like give them a treat or something the third time, you know, you like flies, they like grasshoppers, it's like that. But yeah, so each leaf will eventually die. It's supposed to, they are just leaves. That's this is the leaf aspect of the plant itself. And leaves, you know, have a shorter lifespan and they can only once in the season.

That's pretty normal for most plants. So to patrons, Flaw's Neve, Alice Rubin, Jamie Kishimoto, CJ Luck, Nikki, aka Dr. Headbutt, who asked, is it unethical to poke a Venus flytrap to make it close? Just pay it for the performance. And if a leaf dies, that's OK. Now, what if you have or are interested in adopting a carnivorous plant like patrons Dana Hett, Adi Capello, Ashley Oakley, Hannah Lefler,

Ellen Caner, Danielle Edgar, Nina Eve-Z, Bex Woodruff, Jen Skrull, Alvarez, Alicia Henning and Anacostat Aria. They asked, do they make good pets? And Jessica Randolph notes, I've seen them at stores and I'm tempted, but I don't want to encourage a bad industry. What about keeping them as pets? Should they be left in the wild or what do you think about that? Well, we should definitely not be coaching wild plants ever.

And so make sure that where you're getting plants from is an ethical source because coaching is kind of a problem in front of this plant hobby. Because they grow wild on like the roadside and Florida and people don't have a lot of they don't like value their existence. And so they're like regularly just kind of like disturbed in mode and stuff like that. So people assume that they don't have a lot of, you know, importance in it. This is too much like that.

So again, you definitely want to find your plants from an established reader. There's nurseries across the country that sell really good quality plants. So I recommend visiting one of them. There's a bunch of online shops you can buy kind of as plants. So yeah, own carnivorous plants, give them a nice sunny window to live in. Give them good rainwater distilled water. Put your hands on it to see them, you know, nutrients, to the chance that they keep looking for bugs. Oh, yeah.

So it's interesting. Yeah, if you give them too many nutrients, they'll stop being carnivorous. A lot of them are just like not produced traps. They'll still produce leaves that it can produce synthesized. They won't produce any tracks because they don't need to. So do we have a lot of nutrients in tap water? Do we have enough minerals? Yeah. So if you look at your local water sources,

you have to go to your local water board. You can have a website and you can look at where your water is coming from and what the TDS is, which is total dissolved solids. And you want your TDS for carnivorous plants to be below 100. Ideally, that's where you want it. So pretty pure water. Catch your rainwater if you can. You can also buy distilled water or reverse osmosis water

if you want to have like a horror system or water purifier at home. There's lots of cheap ways to do it. So yeah, you want to maintain this and you can create an efficient environment for them. So if you can keep doing cool little ruggiers. So keep them a little hungry and look for a reputable dealer. California carnivores and predatory plants are both Halea approved. And you can check botany forums for more local suggestions.

And it's not all Venus fly traps and showy pitcher plants. What about a sticky little guy that can grab its prey and put it in a sleeper hold on your window sill? The drama. Don't sleep on sundews, beginners. You can try a sundew. Sundews are really great. You've got a nice sunny window. We'll catch all the little fruit flies that you might get in the house.

These fly traps, too, are pretty easy plants to keep. But again, you just need like the right amount of light. It's just finding the right spot in the house. You've got a nice sunny spot. But I'd start out with a sundew with the hang of it first. Yeah, actually, Oki had a better question than I did in terms of carnivorous plants in the media. I wanted to know if you have thoughts on Mario Kart specifically.

Oh, is there carnivorous plant in it? Yeah, there's like little ones that come up in the pipes like in Mario. So they are actually based on a combination of a certain flesh eating plants and fish. Little Venus fly trap ones with little mouths. Yeah, those are cute. Those are probably one of my favorite little monsters that come out. Are there any others that are in the media that you roll your eyes at?

Or you're like, hey, good job. No, I think I just kind of get tired of seeing like the Venus fly trap thing because there's so much diversity. Like there's so many really cool plants out there that we could be representing in the media. And I'm like, come on, guys, like let's be creative or something. And so that would be nice to see this more diversity. You know what?

Shout out to Pokemon for modeling the character Victory Bell, a fanged pitcher plant after Nepenthes by Kel Sarada, the common name of the fanged pitcher plant. We need more of this in media. So thank you. You need producers to come and find you and say we need our carnivorous plant expert as soft as she goes with these weird plants. It's called Bogbitch and I love it.

Definitely. I we're going to we might have to sell a show like this. Yeah, I imagine like when it comes to if you had to do like a graph of the distribution of carnivorous plant tattoos, you would find a lot of Venus fly traps and not as many sundews or pitcher plants, right? Probably. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Although I don't know.

I feel like a lot of people that I see get carnivorous plant tattoos are like deep into the hobby. And so you might see like a lot of variety in their arms. You know, something like really loose or something like that. Like, oh, is that like a or doula or something? Or is that just a pile? I'm like, you're such that you can't find the source. You're like, OK, interesting.

Hori doula, I think. Side note is a plant that grows on the Cape of South Africa and it makes a sticky resin that traps bugs. But wait, I can't digest the bugs, but it has a business deal with the assassin bug, which can walk all over the resin unharmed and eat the bugs and then shits on the plant's face, which it loves, not to anthropomorphize too much.

Also, we had some technical difficulties again and got momentarily disconnected, during which time I did image search tattoos. And I did Google carnivorous plant tattoo. Turns out you were so on point and you're right. There's a ton of like picture plants. There's a ton of sun do's. Like there is good biodiversity when it comes to carnivorous plant tattoo.

So good call. There's even one with a shrew next to it. And that that shrew is like, God, I got to take a dump. And there it goes. Like it's like a New Yorker looking for Starbucks. And I appreciate that. I also want to ask you about nature's toilets because nanonaturalist Derek Wallach, Derek Allen, Megan Trippie.

In nanonaturalist words, I need to know more about the carnivorous plants that animals use as toilets. Apparently shrew potties. What's going on? Yes, there's a plant called the country's lowie eye. It's found in, I don't know. I think it's Borneo or Sumatra, one of those in Indonesia. Oh, it's from Borneo.

OK, so these plants are these big old tubby pictures. And this one in particular, it's lid is held open. And on the lid, it accumulates like this really thick layer of sugar. Like it's white, like you could scrape it off and eat it yourself. It looks like little hatched snow. It's like so thick and three shrews that are needed to that area. No, to come to these plants and they sit with their little beehives hanging over the picture that's filled with fluid.

And they have this awful little snack, this high quality, high energy food. And they defecate into the picture. And that is like the primary food source for that picture. For a long time, people didn't know that they if they were like even deriving any nutrients from it, because they're like, well, maybe it's just an accident. But no, it's like a significant amount of energy comes to it. And I think that's awesome.

And there's another there's another species that's long and tubular. But this one houses bats. And because it's nice and long, the bats can come in. They hang from the bottom of the lid into the picture and they roost their overnight and they're pooping into the picture. So while they're taking a snooze, the picture is getting food. And then they pass out and it's pretty cool. So yeah, unbelievable.

We had a couple patrons, Sammy Baker and Metatron and Mowli both asked about that about bats in particular. But it seems like the the absolute grossest vending machine ever. You've been to a vending machine. It's like, listen, you take a dump, some sunships are going to come out. You're like, sounds good to me. I guess. So gross.

So gee, I love it's just like, we have a transactional relationship. Very straightforward. I harvest your turds. You get a snack. What about any myths that you would like to step up on a platform? Use this as a soapbox, get your megaphone out. Anything to bust? OK, there is always a question that I feel like in general,

there's like no concern about the flowers of these plants, which I have like a special love for the flowers. According to those plants, because they're beautiful, like gorgeous. And there's a lot of ideas that if you cut off flowers, that it's going to benefit the plant or if you leave the flowers, it's going to kill the plant because it doesn't have enough energy now or whatever. And I just want to say right now that you should leave your flowers on the plants. The plant has already requisitioned resources for those flowers and it's done.

As soon as that flower pops up, it's done. So just leave it, enjoy it, you know, and keep feeding your plant because then it'll just pop up more flowers and keep enjoying it as part of it. Yeah, enjoy those flowers. What about the hardest thing about carnivorous plants? About your job? About dead insects? What's difficult about getting your master's and, you know,

perhaps your PhD next and the hardest part about getting a master's in general is that you're wearing a lot of hats and that's hard to do. You're working, you're doing your research, you're taking classes, that juggling the workload can be a lot. And then you also don't have a lot of time in the field. You go put your experiment out, you collect everything and then like be back in the lab inside crunching numbers. So like that can be like the less fun part of it.

When like, because most of us got into this work because we like to be outside with plants and then you get stuck inside doing like the important part of science, which is love and do the yeah. So that's probably the hardest part. That makes sense. What about your what about your favorite part or something you didn't expect to love so much? I have really appreciated the community that I have found here at TCU.

Within the carnivorous plant community, I've so many cool friends. And so I think just like growing plants, getting out of nature, meet some really cool people and we're all from different blocks of life. I've met a lot of people who are like engineers, but they grow these plants inside and that researchers and explorers and all these like really cool people. And so I think that's a great part of it. That's what I love about science is that the collaboration aspect of it. You know, like nerd out with people all the time about like your favorite

nerd shit and yeah, that's probably the best part. Do you have a lot of people who text you and ask, I killed my Venus version. What do I do now? Yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely that friend. Yeah. And then also places where people can follow you or anything you want to plug. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at the homea pedia on both of those platforms, nothing to plug.

Please pay attention to your local wetlands and plant native plants in New York. Amazing. We need lots more native habitat back after all of the development we've done over the last 500 years. So please do your part. You can have a little pot of, you know, whatever wildflower you love. That will make such a difference. Thank you so much for doing this.

It was fun talking to you. Keep up the great work and let me know how your bog branding is going. All right. So ask smart plant people human questions and plant natives, if you can. I'm in LA and the last few months we've been rewilding this grassy hillside in the backyard. It's been covered with invasive weeds for years, but we've totally redone it with native plants, and it's just so cool to see sages and coyote brush

growing and blue dick. It's a plant and poppies are finally sprouting. And so big thanks to my friend, David Newsom, of Wild Yard Projects for his work in this area, and I will link Wild Yards Project on my website, too. More links will be up at leward.com slash allergies slash carnivorous phyto biology, which will be linked in the show notes as well, alongside the two causes that we donated to. Thank you so much, Aaron Talbert, who admins theologies podcast Facebook group.

Thank you to Shannon and Bonnie of the You Are That podcast for helping out as well. Thank you, Susan Hale, for handling merch and quizzes and so much else. Thank you, Noelle Dilworth, who wrinkles schedules and so much else. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Kayla Patton bleeps them. Those are available for free at leward.com slash allergies dash extras. If there was a sponsor that you need a link or a code for that's on my website as well. Thank you, Kelly Dwyer, for making my website. She can make yours, too.

Every few weeks we put out a classic allergies episode that has been whittled down and defilthed. It's safe for kids. They are called Smologies. Thank you to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas for those. Those are linked to my website as well. And to Stephen R. Morris for the assist and huge thanks to the gooey, slurry of my heart lead editor, Jarrett Slaper of Mind Your Media for putting all the pieces together each week.

Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret and this week's secret is a little raw. I might have COVID. Neither that or I'm fighting it off. Here's the deal. I went to a birthday party on Thursday. Didn't know it was going to be so indoors at a restaurant.

And I was like, oh, no, BA too. What do I do? And our dear friend whose birthday it was, was running a couple hours late because he had to work late. So we're just kind of hanging out for him for a while. Anyway, I found out my friend, we were sitting next to, has COVID today. So I am feeling like I'm fighting something off. Rapid tests said negative, but I'm going to be doing a PCR tomorrow, but I did

have to cancel the trip up to help my dad go to the hospital because of it. Not happy about that. Be careful, you know, just be careful. And you can still wear a mask. It doesn't matter if anyone makes fun of you for it. Keep it on your face. Okay, bye-bye. Hey, you're supposed to give me some pee-pee.

Where's that pee-pee? We're talking about pee-pee here. I need that pee-pee. Oh, no, Mr. Tournament.