Ologies with Alie Ward - Cycadology (RARE PLANT DRAMA) with Nathalie Nagalingum

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Gather 'round fellow nerds, you’re about to learn about the wildest not a fern not a bush not a cactus plant you never knew you never knew about: CYCADS. These endangered ancient plants have been around for 270 million years, give or take, and now they’re some of the most valuable vegetation in the world. Come along to learn about these uncomfortably sexy gymnosperms and the international crimes people do to steal them. Also: neurotoxins, Jurassic Park, and one of the best fixes for procrastination we’ve ever heard with the world’s favorite botanist and cycadologist, Dr. Nathalie Nagalingum.Dr. Nathalie Nagalingum’s websiteFollow Dr. Nathalie Nagalingum on Twitter and tell her you love herDr. Nagalingum’s profile at California Academy of SciencesSpeaking of which, Alie will be moderating a Women in Science Nightlife event there coming up March 3rd, and you can get tickets for that hereA donation was made to Ovarian Cancer AustraliaMore episode links and sourcesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped 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

Hey, hey, it's that yogurt parfait that honestly could use a little more granola. Allie Ward, 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. 270 million years ago, nerds. When it comes to Psycats, she is it. She is the person. And wait, hold up. What is a Psycat? Good question. So with a name like Psycat, it could be anything. It could be a person on top and a shark on the bottom. I feel like a Psycat could be a $16 cocktail at a speakeasy full of jerks. A Psycat 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 Psycat, it comes from the Greek, a typo for the word palm,

despite a Psycat, which is a plant not being a palm tree at all. So Psycats have been on the scene 200 million years before palm trees. Palm trees stumble in like, hey, what's up? What I miss? And Psycats are like, what did you miss? Oh, just the rise of the dinosaurs and like gymnosperms, aka plants that just bust out naked seeds without even having these new flowers or whatever you have palms. So Psycats, 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 a 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're 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 Psycat sleuth got a PhD at the University of Melbourne and continued her postdoc research 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 2017, 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 women in science panel. And I remember it well, many oligites in attendance. And thisologist was someone I just adored immediately. And I met her

March of 2020, March 5th. 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 in a 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 on to chat, which you're going to hear very soon. But first, a quick thank you to all patrons who support the show at patreon.com. 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 their foes about

oligies. Thanks to everyone who makes sure they're subscribed. That really keeps us up in the charts. Also reviews do I read each and every one of them. And to prove it, I will pick a fresh one. Thank you, LouBug19, who wrote, for lovers and haters of science alike, I hated science in high school. Like so much, they write, oligies make science of all types absolutely fascinating and I cannot get enough of it. So thank you, LouBug19. Everyone else who wrote a review, I read it and I love you. Thank you. Okay, you ready? Nope, you're not. That was a true question. Okay, here we go. Plant capers, investment strategies, Jurassic flim flam, nudity, sort of the Michael Phelps of plant sperm, neighborhood psycats, 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 scientist, scholar, enthusiast of charismatic gymnosperms, and one of the world's most respected, charming, funny, and endearing scientists, the universally beloved, psycatologist, Dr. Natalie Nagalingam. Oh, first off, I should ask, can you say your first and last name and the pronouns you use? My name is Natalie Nagalingam and my pronouns, Ashifah. I hate to ask this because everyone asks this, but what time is it there? It is 8.34. PM? 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 sleep in and then.

I'm sorry. We're both having our first coffee of the day, probably. Yeah, I had breakfast and yeah, made it. 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 pre-COVID. I remember you tapping us with your shoes to greet us. We didn't know anything. I feel like that was one of the last fun times in public I had was with you. That's true. I didn't know what a psycat was until I met you. Yeah, and it's so endangered. And for lack of a better term, we can call you a psychedelogist. Yeah. Is that a real word? Yeah, it is, actually. It is. Yes. That makes me so happy

because I do feel like we nudge toward words that are very new sometimes. Yeah, I guess it's real. But these plants are so old. Yeah, they're pretty ancient and if you look at all those dinosaur pictures, you're going to see something that looks like a psycad. Were psycads around during the time of the dinosaurs or were there 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 a psycad in your experience look like? That is a great description. Yeah, I never thought of that. I love it. I use a really boring description. I think it's from the botanical description saying 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? 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 I had planned, it just grows about, I don't know, one centimeter. I'm in centimeters here. It grows 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 probably about 10 years old. So they're little guys, kind of, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. But if you go into the field, you can find really big guys. I've been to field sites where there's three meters at all

and I've had to get my husband to like climb on a rock and reach on his tippy toes to get a sample for me because there's no way that I can reach it. What does your fieldwork look like? Do you have to take a time machine at all to the past? My time machine is our car and what I do is we have all these collections and this is common for 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 where psychology 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 psycades there. Sometimes I can go back and there are psycades there. It is kind of hit or

miss. So part of Natalie's work involves tromping 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 yoo-hoo and be 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 psycads? Well, I started off my career as a paleobotanist. And if 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 psycades are these really, really ancient plants. And so I started studying psycads and ferns and conifers, things 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. Raz 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, 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 then if there was changes or 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, back up. Did you say Antarctica? Are there psycads on Antarctica? 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 psycads, you find little bitty, like moss-like relatives, you find them all. That's blowing my mind that underneath tons and tons of glaciers and snow are fossils of ferns and mosses and psycads. And dinosaurs? Yes, yeah. And the cool thing about the dinosaurs from that region, so you know,

Australia and Antarctica, 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 eyes 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 psycads? Were they edible? Yeah, yes. So there's, over the last few years, there's increasingly more evidence that dinosaurs ate psycads. So I've come, I'm always on the lookout for papers that show evidence for this. Maybe like 15 years ago, there was kind of like, oh, these are some leaves. It looks like they could be psycads in a dinosaur's gut, but we're not 100% sure.

And then more recently, we found seeds in dinosaur guts that are definitively psycads and some leaves as well that are from dinosaur's guts. Oh my God. The fact that someone could look at a fossil and be able to see certain seeds that a dinosaur ate as its, you know, final meal is bananas or rather, psycads. But what are their seeds look like? How do you even identify a psycad seed? So they're just kind of around a blob, really. They're not very exciting. And they do differ. They differ by species and genus and stuff like that. But they're just like a bit, 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, much, much smaller, maybe the size of your thumb. It just depends on the, the species and, and you know, the way variability. So reminder, psycads are gymnosperms or naked seeds, which is extremely sensual of them. And they're nude seeds. They're just waiting around for pollen where angiosperms, angion means container. So a contained seed have much more complicated reproduction. It involves flowers and some other romantic business, like encasing their seeds, perhaps in a delicious, juicy ovary, a.k.a. a fruit. But psycads, psycads are like, no, I'm a gymnosperm. 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've done studies. So one of, 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 those seeds go? So they found that it's like, they didn't grow very far. It was like little mammals, Australian, you know, marsupial, 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 thoughts that emus eat them in Western Australia. Other birds might eat them like cassowaries in the north of Australia. I'm not so sure in South Africa, I don't think there is evidence of, you know, the big, big megafauna, 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 interchanges. But I look this up for us. And those big five animals are kangaroos, wombats, koalas, crocodiles, and emus. Wait, no. Okay. Another website said kangaroos, wombats, koalas, crocodiles, and platypuses. Okay, another person lists kangaroos, wombats, koalas, platypuses, 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. I looked up slang. So basically, once you've got a cycad 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 cycads 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 fieldwork. Sometimes it's a bit hard and a bit mosquito-y. 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 that probably know it because of the dodo, and that's where the dodo was from. And the dodo became extinct there. Otherwise, people don't know about it. And so my parents moved from Mauritius to Australia, and we were encouraged to go to school, and we gave here to give you a better life.

And so I just went to school, I went to university, and 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 relief, because it was a long time. I think once you do it, it's just for me, and I think for many people, I just felt sick of it. It was like, I just want to get rid of this. I want to do something else, because it just consumes your life. 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 I have photos of my graduation day, and everyone was so pleased, and we're all smiling. So that was

really nice. So Dr. Negalingam has published papers with titles like Conservation Genetics of Wild Populations and Botanic Garden Collections of Australian Psychats, and Phylogeny of the Gymnosperm Species Psychus L, as inferred from plastic 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 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 we're not in breeding 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 maybe about 10 species that are pretty much extinct in the wild. And we've got samples from private collectors, from botanic gardens, and we've figured out the DNA profile of 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. And so we don't want to have a botanic garden full of 20 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 it's 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 realized something either with DNA or with through fossils that you realized you might be one of the only people to know that? There's a few instances where three subspecies were sort of lumped 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 cycad world yet. Most of the time, I'll just take a little segue. Most of the time, it's, you know,

psychedelogists 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 cycads, I expected them all to reveal that they all evolved, you know, 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 65 million years ago, my DNA patterns were showing pretty much all of these cycads evolved 12 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 cycads 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 ability to survive things like global warming and climate change. So yes, well, cycads 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 cycads stopped growing or stopped evolving or stopped doing the work this entire time, which means that in the Anthropocene, this time, they're vulnerable because of us. And cycads, I'm so sorry, that sucks and you deserve better. There's one species that is called Encephalitis woodyi. And that was found in South Africa as a clump of four stems. And because the

plants are either male or female, that clump was only four males. Hey, what's up dudes? So that of course, you know, being the Victorians, they just dug them all out and put them at various botanic 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. They've produced clones everywhere, but it's never going to reproduce. It's just this one plant. It's like that tortoise in the Galapagos, George, the loneliest turtle. 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 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, stretch your thumbs because you're about to take 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 crazy. People are astonished when they find that out. I can't believe it. Like, when I first interviewed you and I I'm still like the drama of a psychic. Like, what's happening out there? It's crazy. It's like, I remember a radio when I went to the tiny garden in Sydney, he was like, hold on, they got stolen and because I had some specimens stolen from me. And he was like,

but they're not diamonds. Why are they stealing them? Okay, let's get into it. Who are these plant thieves? People are so obsessed with psycads that they want every single species. And there are about 350 species. We're still finding more. And so they want every single species. So they will go to all lengths to poach them. Gotta catch them all. So some stories of people who have dynamited cliff faces to get the psycads out at the botanic garden in Cape Town. What they have done is they've gone in the middle of the night and they've purposely dug up specific species and taken those out. And it's not like the psycad garden is sort of on the edge of the garden. It's really deeply into the garden. And so they know these poachers 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. Well, I wouldn't even say gophers. They're just criminals. Yes, that's a better way of putting it. So what, how much are they worth when they're getting now? Oh, yeah. So some can be like 30,000, 40,000. What? 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, it 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. Oh my gosh. Psycads are Bitcoin? What's happening? What is the world? So, Psycadologists, 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 guarding rhinos and elephants, so that, you know, they walk around with them. 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, Kazaringa 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-Poching Foundation's squad of all vegan women who are rangers in Zimbabwe. And a 2021 paper I found titled Poaching of Encephalardos Transvenosus in the Limpapo 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 the respondents from the three nature reserves. Oh, in that last paper, Encephalardos Transvenosus, that's a cycad. So in South Africa, three of their 38 native species are what Africa Geographic Magazine called, quote, loved to death or extinct in the wild, three out of 38 already. So there's ranges who do that for cycads. 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, get out of here. Yeah, and I shot them. People went to jail. Oh my God. Why aren't there more thrillers about this? They should be. You know, like, where's Liam Neeson? Like, where's his cycad

movie? But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. That would be a good movie, actually. There would be a good movie. 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 and gets everyone's coffee just so that I can hang out and, 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 U.S., there isn't any native cycads. Okay. Especially maybe in Florida, there's a few. And they're really, really common. But people I know in, in South Africa, yeah, they have had to go to court and 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 2001 Department of Justice memo, elaborating in detail about five individuals who sent approximately half a million dollars worth of protected cycads to the U.S. from South Africa, Australia, and Zimbabwe. And then another criminal who bought them, that criminal's name was Donald Wiener, he bought $200,000 worth of stolen plants in the year 2000. That's so many dollars of plants. There was also this South African power cycad couple. They each ran their own flourishing businesses buying and selling and dealing cycads until greed and deceit and gambling and poaching ripped them apart. Anyway, it's thrilling.

It's gripping. Welcome to the world of sci-cad drama. But we're about to get to your questions with Dr. Nagalingam. But first, we'd like to donate to a charity of the oligarchs 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 thank Natalie for her work, consider donating to them on February 23rd 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.net.au. There'll be a link in the show notes. And while you're at

it, you can find Natalie on Twitter. Tell her how much you appreciate her. Her Twitter is at nnagalingam 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 to the root of your questions, my friends. 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. 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 collaroid 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 cyanobacteria that photosynthesize, and they recruit them. The cyanobacteria are like, okay, okay, I can fix nitrogen for you. What's in it for me? And the cycad roots are like sugar, carbs, all the sweet yums you want for that nitrogen. So the cyanobacteria are like, all right, I'm in. Now, if you were to cut a collaroid root, you would see that green cyanobacterial 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 Syam 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 130 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? The 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 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 increases, actually, it's a slight odor or technically it's a volatile. So it attracts all of the beetles and there's also thrips as well and weevils. And they basically it's an orgy. They feed and they mate 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 pollen cone decides, but it decides that, okay, 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 leave. And it's kind of like, it's like when you wear a cologne, you know, if you wear like a little bit of cologne, that's really nice. And then if you wear a lot of cologne, you know, when you're stuck next to that person who's got a lot of cologne, you're like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yes. So they get rid of it. And then 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 or interesting system that nothing else has had developed. That's pretty sophisticated. It is. It is. And there's somebody out of Utah and she's been working on this a lot as well. She does some really cool work, I mean, 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, you know, the eggs. And then they leave. Wow. That's so cunning. It's coning. It's coning.

Okay. So when Natalie describes this as like a cologne dose gone wrong, she's not kidding. So this species of cycad makes a compound called B-mercine to seduce these tiny little insects called the rips. Now, how does it blast them away? How does it suddenly squirt a bunch more cologne? The cycad uses its stored carbohydrates and fats and it burns them all to raise its own temperature during the hottest 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 cycad sperm. So who needs flowers when you have strategy, people, and B-mercine? And I wondered what that was and what it smells like. What do they smell like?

So I Googled the work of Dr. Irene Terry, who Natalie just mentioned, and in a 2007 New Scientist article titled, Ancient Plant Has Hot, Stinky Sex, Dr. 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? Dr. Terry, come on. To her credit, Dr. 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 websites, which use terms like fruity, fresh, and clove-like. The GoodSense company website used the most adjectives, including spicy, earthy, and musky, refreshing, almost citrusy, but warm, balsamic, and ethereal sweet. I want to be doused in the love-making of cycad,

but trust to thrift people, too much of this compound can be irritating and toxic. So even if you're enjoying the planches, you're going to 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 cycads have motile sperm cells. So they 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 at the top of the pointy bit, you've got all those flagella, and then the flagelly sort of wind their way around, and it just helps to swim. Wow. So many advancements. They really have a lot of bells and whistles, you know? Yeah, and that's something to be cautious about, is that when you talk about something that's really ancient, is that it may not be ancient in all its ways. So like, you know, using the term like living fossil, which I have done, it's kind of a misnomer, because we're kind of just saying

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, a first time question asker, asked how someone who is not a psychedelogist, someone who is not an Adelie, can tell the difference between male and female psychedelic 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 like underneath each individual sort of unit, we call them scales, you'll find little like little balls underneath them, which is funny, considering wangs. 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 vallus in the center. It's my way. And then there's a few different kinds of female cones. So the one that's a Sego 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 tell apart, but the telltale one is the little balls on the scales. There's going to be people who are at a botanical garden

looking at cycads, and they'll probably have a security guard being like, what are they so close up in there? What are they? Why are they in the undercarriage? Get out of there, Chuck. 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 out 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 all wear

masks now. So we get like N95 masks, which you all know that, just to make sure, you know, we're not breathing in that pollen. Prehistoric, poaching, plotting, poison, nude seeds, cycads, 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 Kersi, first-time question asker, Matt Joliff, MB, and we actually had a few listeners write in to say, Kelly Shaber 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 Emma Garshigen wants to know about poison seeds, if that's true, of all cycads. Yes. So 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 ate 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 World War, when the food shortages 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 to us, but not to some animals. I mean, some cows, they get, I think the Australian farm is called a dropsy or something, they get a paralysis in their legs sometimes if they eat cycad leaves. And sort of all around the world, what I love is that people 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 leeches at all the toxins or through a series of soaks. And so this is the kind of funny one where they just like soak them in a series of soaks and they decide whether the toxins are leached

out by giving some water to the chickens. And if the chickens die, then the toxins have not been eliminated, so they keep going with the soaks. Okay, so I tried to find out if you can eat a poison chicken, but after learning that the sego palm is extremely poisonous to animals, including humans, and that pets think it's delicious, but within 12 hours of eating it, they can develop vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, seizures, liver failure, bruising, nosebleeds, and blood in the stool, and that the ASPA Animal Poison Control Center estimates a fatality rate of 50 to 75% when ingestion of the sego palm is involved. I'm like, I don't think anyone wants to eat those chickens. I think they're like, catch Tory and everyone's like, absolutely not. No, toss in the

river. You know, getting back a little bit to that, Texas City Nanonaturalist asked about the Oliver Sacks book, Island of the Colorblind. Yeah. Have you read that at all about? Yes. Yeah, tell me more about how you felt about that. Yes, so Oliver said, I mean, he's 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 cycads 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 cycads that caused it. 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 Balit Novak, who's also excited about this question and asked if researchers had yet confirmed the cause of this condition yet, which is referred to as ALS-PDC or lidocobodic disease. And essentially a recent 2021 paper seemed to reiterate the hypothesis that traditional methods for safe consumption of cycad seeds appear to have been lost over the course of time since colonizers banned consumption. And other articles have tracked the incidence 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 Joanne Flack is on the run, suspected of stealing a rare African plant

thought to be extinct and worth millions of dollars. And Sonia Kurtz was hired by the CIA to hunt down Joanne 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 2020 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 I've got to ask her 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 for headache. They do use it for

actually something voodoo as well. So if you put someone in your bed, like it kind of protects you. But that's all I know. I gotta say, if you put a $40,000 plant under your pillow, seems like pretty good luck to me. I think it's just a little bit of bark. Just a little bark. Okay. Yeah. Kitty Bailey also, first I'm crossing ask her 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 Jurassic Park, they're in there. I'm not really sure about 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 cycad friends and they crossed, that means that the two neighboring tribes are at war. And it's only until that is resolved that the friends get uncrossed and then they have a huge big party. And so it's also a taboo. So if somebody places a cycad friend somewhere, it means that this, you know, 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 friend where they 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 cycad friend to honor his power as a chief and warned me before googling.

He's topless though. So I'm just wondering 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 blasted. Now, what if it's not enough to take home all of this knowledge? What if you want to take home a cycad? So listeners, Andy, Kristi Kazakov, Jen Squirrel, Alvarez, Joe Mueller, and Caitlin Powell asked about their cultivation. And in Rebecca Winesettle's words, can I grow one 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 cycads 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 cycads everywhere, like I remember seeing them whole foods once, someone told me they saw them on IKEA. I've seen them at Disneyland, you know, it's the common species are not hard to find. And so you can easily find cycads. It's just those rare species where you're spending thousands that you know, maybe kind of dodgy. And so, you know, I love that people grow cycads. And I love that people who have just been to my talks,

they come up to me and say, Oh, I found a cycad on my wall. And they'll show me the picture of the cycad. And so they become cycad 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 cycad, you told me when we met in San Francisco that you're like, I'm actually terrible at playing. 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 cactus I've ever had. Any tips on how to cultivate cycads? What do they like sun? Do they like miracle grow? I feel like this is a really main question, Ellie.

No, it's one of the reasons I fell in love with you. I love that this is a botanist who's like, I'm not very good with plants, but you're good with plants on a level that's like saving them 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. I feel like I can't share with you. Excellent. Yeah. 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 hard. I think a lot of academics would 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

rubbish. And 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 and does it all at once? What's your strategy? Are there any tips? The way I do it is that I will set aside time in the morning usually, and I'll 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 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 I 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 a draft that you allow to be rubbish. And it's never that crappy, is it? When you go back, you're like, Hey, this is pretty good. Yeah. I mean, the ideas are there. And 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 without like, kind of relay writing where you're like, All right, I fixed the last one. Do the next one. Fix it. You know, that's great. I'm going to try that. What about your favorite thing about psych ads or your work? I love talking about psychos, because they're so fascinating. But 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 the dreams of writing a book about psych ads and all their crazy stories about the people and their biology and reproduction, but never got around to it. Meanwhile, we have this. Yes. Anything that you would recommend people look into if they're now suddenly a side cat spotter? There are these 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 Megalingham and watch those. Including getting to ask you a bunch of questions at

the dawn of COVID. Yes, that's right. This has just been such a joy. You've been on my list for so long, and I'm glad we didn't put it off anymore. It just went for it, 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. Dr. Natalie Megalingham, we straight up love you so much and you're a treasure in this world. Thank you on behalf of every PsyCAD 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.

Megalingham, we will also link some other videos that she's been in through the California Academy of Sciences. Also, mark your calendar for March 3rd. I'm going to be moderating another panel with them. And it's part online, part in person, but March 3rd, 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 and Megalingham on Twitter. Tell her how cool she is. More links, including one to donate to Ovarian Cancer Australia on February 23rd, matching day, are all up at alleyward.com, slash oligies, slash Psycadology. Link to that in the show notes. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ally Ward with 1L on both. Thank you,

Erin Talbert for managing the Oligies 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, Noelle Dilworth, who helps schedule and run behind the scenes. Emily White makes our professional transcripts. Caleb Patton bleeps them. Those are up for free for anyone who needs them at alleyward.com, slash oligies, slash extras. All our episodes are also arranged by topic too, on my site at alleyward.com, slash oligies, 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 alleyward.com, slash Smologies. Thank you, Zeke Rodriguez. Thomas of Mind Jam Media for heading those up. And Stephen Ray Morris, who helps too. As we record this at 9.48 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. Jared, the mayor of Babetown Sleeper, the best. Nick Thornburn made the music and he is in a very good band called Islands. And if you stick around to the end of the episode to tell you a 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 very much, especially you, Dr. Naglingham and Jared. Happy Valentine's Day. Okay, bye-bye. You have plants in this building that are poisonous. You picked them because they look good. But these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in and they'll defend themselves violently if necessary.