SciShow Tangents - Flowers

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

It’s been said that April showers bring May flowers, but here’s the thing, gang: we couldn’t wait a whole month to talk about the darn things! Stop and smell the roses with us as we sniff out some of the finest flower facts!Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Bubble gun pollinationhttps://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(20)30373-4https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/drone-delivered-soap-bubbles-could-help-pollinate-flowershttps://www.sciencenews.org/article/bubble-blowing-drones-may-one-day-aid-artificial-pollinationFungus mimicking flowersImage: https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/1BF8FBA2-1A97-4962-BDF7425878CF9454_source.jpghttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1087184520301572https://www.jstor.org/stable/2399434?refreqid=excelsior%3Ab21f9013c26e11394d09411860873d9f&seq=1https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-flower-is-really-a-fungus-in-disguise/https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/insect-color-vision.php[Ask the Science Couch]Carnivorous plants floweringPicture of pitcher plant: http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3639Picture of venus fly trap: https://theconversation.com/friend-or-food-why-venus-flytraps-dont-eat-their-pollinators-91620http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161010-how-insect-eating-plants-persuade-insects-to-pollinate-themhttps://www.nature.com/articles/srep21065[Butt One More Thing]Dead horse lilyPicture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicodiceros#/media/File:Dracunculus_muscivorus.jpghttps://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2003.00802.xhttps://theconversation.com/the-secret-of-the-worlds-smelliest-flower-44439

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Sari, how's science doing this week? I haven't actually read any reputable sources, but I think science got the big boat out from when it was stuck. Sure. I bet science was involved in the boat. Yeah. Well, science is involved in everything. That's the point. Was it like a big old shovel that got the boat out? I haven't investigated how they got the boat out yet, which I do feel a little bad about.

I learned a new word, though, which is refloat. Is it just when you make something float again after it's no longer floating? Apparently, it is specifically to do with big boats that when they stop floating, the process of refloating them where you have to try and do a bunch of things at the same time to get them not touching the ground anymore. That sounds very science-y. Like you have to dig in the right spot. You have to push in the right spot. Push, pull. And then you also have to do like they can tilt the ship with things that they have on the ship.

They have like tanks that they can move or pump stuff around so they can tilt from side to side. And they can lift up and down, empty it blow it back up so i think they did all those things that's quite smart i i have a cartoon image in my head where you just get a bunch of people on the boat and they all run to one end and that's how you shift the weights but that works on a little boat it's uh i think i don't know that works on a big boat. Sam Schultz is also here. Hello, Sam Schultz, our resident everyman. Hello. How is everything besides science?

Well, yeah, honestly, we were all thinking about the boat, too. That's been the main thing present in everyone's mind. I think the boat needed, it needed big monster truck wheels. They should make boats with the big monster truck wheels then it could have got out like a duck boat except it weighs you know as much as downtown missoula montana yeah and it's as tall as a whole mountain right pretty much yeah depends a small mountain really big really big tires then well unfortunately today here on sci-show tangents we're not talking about the boat

though the boat might come up anyway yeah um the boat will be like two weeks old by this point though well they're gonna look it's true i yeah everybody will have well and truly moved on to the next thing i do love the i loved the boat and i love every future thing that is a big deal that i can do nothing about that doesn't actually physically harm anyone. And the only people really losing money is, I guess, everybody. But it's like a little tax we had to pay for the memes. Yeah. It was our movie ticket to the real-life movie called The Big Boat That Got Stuck.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're trying to stay on topic, but sometimes we just spend a lot of time talking about a boat. So we'll look out for that. Our panelists are playing for glory. They're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play.

And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Usually we begin our episodes with a science poem, but I'm going to later on present you with three different science poems. So you're not getting one now. We're getting one during our game. So we'll move on directly.

You'll get your science poems later. We'll move on directly with Sari defining our topic, which is flowers. Sari, what is a flower? It's very different from a boat is what I've heard. They both float. So not that different. They both float. They're the reproductive bits of plants.

That's all flowers are there for. They look really pretty, but their biological function is reproduction. So they're like, hey, look at me, come closer, and then carry my seed away to some other plant to make the next generation. Sometimes they entice you with a smell to come look at them. They're like, I'm stinky. Check me out.

Or food. Sometimes they're just full of food for different organisms. Like, hey, come eat me and spread my seed. And some flowers can self-pollinate. So they just need something to go over to it to like jostle the pollen parts. Yeah, somebody please jostle me just in case it's not windy enough. Yeah. So the pollen is sperm equivalent. Then the egg equivalents are a little further down.

Like the carpals form the ovaries. Plant biology was never really my thing, but I did a little research to refresh. And then there are ovules internally on the ovary, kind of like there are ova in human or mammalian ovary. And then those give rise to egg cells. And then those are what turn into the fruit if they're pollinated. You know, it would seem to me that it'd be really easy to accidentally pollinate yourself, which is the thing that a plant wants to avoid doing. It doesn't want

to pollinate itself. It wants to get pollinated by a different plant from farther away. But it seems to me like 98% of the time, you're just going to get pollinated by yourself. But I guess they maybe have some strategies to avoid that. I think that some plants can be fertilized by themselves and i there's some biological process that allows the the pollen dna to fuse with the egg cell dna to like become the baby plant the zygote and that is not always the case with self-pollination like there is some biological mechanism in place in that it can't self-pollinate and needs another one of its species to make seeds. So I think that that is the strategy that was evolved to prevent that. It was like, oh, well, this isn't giving us very much genetic diversity.

So let's make that impossible. And then those are the ones that had more successful baby plants. Gotcha. There are some plants also that alternate or depending on like the abundance of pollinators or the environment where in less successful years they self-pollinate because it's like, well, just got to make things to try and stay alive. Yeah. And then if they're able to be pollinated by something else, then they can make more

robust seeds that actually combine genetic information. Are they actually making some kind of like physical change to self-pollinate themselves? Like, do they make that decision sort of at some point, or is it just an accident no matter how it happens? They can make a decision. I know, for example, that some trees can some years only be, only have male flower parts, and some years like be female and they can switch back and forth, and some years they can be both. And I don't know to what extent that is usual but i know that that can happen yeah plant reproduction very complicated there are like multiple cycles that plants can go through and i've forgotten them all it's really about knowing that something exists not knowing

what it is unless you have to do it for a living. This is like, this is actually how to be smart. You know that it exists. You don't need to know what it is because you can look up what it is. The hard part is knowing that it exists. So thank you, Sari, for letting everybody know that that thing exists. Now, where does the word flower come from?

So this is actually like surprisingly interesting. I thought I was going to be bored out of my mind looking up flour. But turns out flour, F-L-O-W-E-R, and flour, F-L-O-U-R, are the same word. And then we just decided one day that I was like, no, those refer to different things. But they both meant the finer portion of ground grain. So you had like the finest part of your meal was your flour. And it was also the finest part of the plant in a field is your flour. Okay, that's cool.

Yeah, and then somewhere around the 1300s, the 14th century, people were like, this is confusing that we're referring to grain and plants with the same thing. Like grain that we eat and plants that we look at. So let's distinguish the spellings. And then they did. We'll just switch the spellings up. It got too confusing. People were screwing up their recipes left and right. And so we just took the W out.

Wait, why were flowers called that they were like the finest thing you could look at is that what yeah like the finest thing in the field so you like have your have your ground up grain it's like oh the finest part is my flower the best part it's the cream of the crop and then the cream of the of the of the land crop is those pretty things that smell good okay that's That's weird. That's a stretch. It is weird. Should have thought of a different word. It's a bit of a stretch,

but like you look at a, look at a plant and like, you know, 90% of the time it's like, uh, that's just a plant like any other plant. Yeah. But then it has a flower and you're like,

holy moly, my dude, look at what you made. It's like purple and orange. When, what did this originate from? What, when was that word around?

It came from Latin florum of Spanish floor from the proto Indo-European root BHEL, which means to thrive or bloom. So that's the root for flower, blossoming, bloom, like all synonyms of flower. Then we decided to call ground up grain flower very weird choices we've made it is weird we've made some strange choices over the years and that means that it's time for some actual poetry you guys because we're playing a variant of rhyme time and it's only it's not similar to rhyme time at all and except in that it has rhymes so this is our mystery rhyme time game it's like rhyme time but it's not though it is a little bit and we'll get there uh in a moment but

there are many poems out there that draw on flowers and talk about flowers and use their beauty to make points about the world and about people but sadly there are not nearly enough poetic odes to flowers and their genes and molecules that make them good at their jobs. Not enough science, flower, poetry. So for this edition of Rhyme Time, you will be presented with three poems that are complete except for the last word, and you will have to figure out and tell me what the last word of the poem is. Poem number one. The flowers of that plant most peachy are full of reactive oxygen species. The product of things like photosynthesis can waver between toxicity and innocence. As in the case of a fungus, where like the imposter in Among Us,

what seems a solid chemical defense instead enables fungal virulence. But now it is time to switch our rhyme scheme and draw upon a cherished verse to identify this molecule that at times protects or instead makes matters worse. For roses may be red and water is dihydrogen oxide, but add one more oxygen and you'll get... Uh, how am I supposed to retain that many words? Hydrogen peroxide? Hydrogen peroxide! Oh, sorry, you were supposed to say it at the same time, but Sam obviously didn't know. Sorry, Sam.

I was like, this is a very chemistry question. It's more of a chemistry question than a rhyme question. If you add one oxygen to water, you get hydrogen peroxide. And now I will explain to you what the hell I was talking about. Does that sound good? That sounds great. A reactive oxygen species is a byproduct of several different metabolic pathways. They show up in various capacities as signaling molecules, but they can also cause damage because they are reactive. In plants, ROSs, like hydrogen peroxide, have been associated with helping plants resist infection. But in the case of the peach plant versus the brown rot fungal pathogen, the oxidative defense actually seems to hurt more than it helps.

When researchers applied the fungus's spores to the flower petals, they saw increased production of hydrogen peroxide, which then damaged the flower's own proteins and lipids. And that damage seemed to help the fungus infect the plant. And when the researchers added an antioxidant to the flower petals, they saw that the fungus was less able to infect the flower, but the exact role of hydrogen peroxide in helping the fungus infect the peach flower is still not clear.

Peaches did it wrong. The peaches did it wrong, yes. They were like, I'm going to hurt this fungus, and it's like, actually, I just hurt me. I think we can safely say that Sari got the point for that rhyme. There's three poems, but there are more chances for points at the end. So Sam, if you don't slay it here, don't lose hope. I think I've lost hope, but continue.

There once was a beautiful orchid that wanted to make a flower kid, so it produced macrolides to mimic a bride and began a relationship most sordid. There once was a long-horned beetle that longed for a love most gleeful, and as it assessed in its romantic quest, it smelled an odor deceitful. The flower has laid down its bait and the beetles all in mate it mimics the hormone that beetles call their own to get it to and again i will say all in mate is the rhyme you're looking for do you have it say it on three one two three pollinate hey nice all, so one point to each of you. And in this orchid, it uses sexual mimicry to attract the male longhorn beetle, producing a type of molecule called a macrolide that is often used by plants as an antimicrobial substance.

But here, it might mimic the pheromone produced by female longhorn beetles. The macrolide here is disalactone, and it's not quite clear if that's actually the pheromone produced by female longhorn beetles. The macrolide here is disalactone, and it's not quite clear if that's actually the pheromone, but scientists have found that male longhorn beetles were drawn to that chemical when they coated beads with it. So it's at least attracting them in some way, and probably it's attracting them because it gets them excited because when they get to the flower, the longhorn beetle reportedly strokes the petals and even will nibble on the petals, which is similar to their normal mating behavior. And then they will ejaculate. But most importantly for the flower, they carry away pollen.

The ejaculation is the little bonus for them. All right. And our final poem before we get to our more normal rhyme time. I do not know what time it is, for I am just a flower. I could not say the month or day, the minutes or the hour. But day and night are just two states that work in oscillation, and in me are a pair of genes that labs studied in isolation. And that is how I know to bloom, whether from the U.S. or Canadian.

And so my color fills your room, thanks to a rhythm most. One, two, three. Circadian. Hey! I forgot the word. Good job, Sam. Thank you. So scientists studying a plant called whalecress have known that two of the genes that are important to its circadian clock are ELF3 and GI. There's these two genes. And they create an internal molecular oscillation that responds to the cycles of light

and dark that the plant experiences in its environment. To figure out how those genes work together, scientists bred one of these plants lacking both of the genes and found that they were indeed not able to synchronize. Now, that last poem, the subject was circadian rhythms, which is super cool that we have these. And so we're going to go normal rhyme time. And you're going to tell me like a two word, or I think they're all two or three, maybe three word phrases that rhyme with circadian rhythm.

So we're starting out. This is the easiest one. They are not easy. A person who is from the country above ours, but he is obscured. Canadian hidden. What? It feels so good when people get it. Okay, Canadian hidden.

As you unwind this very long piece of fabric, you will notice that its color slowly changes from the beginning to the end. A long piece of fabric? will notice that its color slowly changes from the beginning to the end a long piece of fabric like a scarf or uh even skinnier than a scarf a thread um oh god you know gradient ribbon oh yes disgusting i hate you it's so far away from circadian rhythm for some reason gradient ribbon still works for me. Okay. The city is making some important choices regarding the building where sports are played. Stadium decision? That's not...

Does it rhyme? No, look, it's hard to rhyme with circadian rhythm. I worked hard and I'm having a fun time and finally the bone that contains your brain breaks apart like the catholic church cranium schism not even the right amount of syllables i don't think no not even close all right tuna's working out the points here s it looks like you've come in with six. I got creamed. Sam got creamed with three.

I'm bad at these. Yeah. But look, the important thing is that it's fun. And also, if you impress me with your fact off, you're going to win anyway. Oh, yeah. That's true. Which is what's happening after we take our quick break. Hello, welcome back, everybody.

It's time for The Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented the facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. It all comes down to what is most pleasing to me. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. And this isn't about me. This is about reality. Young sunflowers famously follow the sun throughout the day and then reset at night, but mature sunflowers always face east. In studying this, scientists at UC Davis discovered that this is based on the priorities of the life stage. Young sunflowers grow more with exposure to the sun, and mature sunflowers that faced east

warm up faster and attract more pollinators. Up to how many times more pollinators do eastern-facing sunflowers attract compared to mature sunflowers that have been rotated by devious scientists to face west? I'm going to guess three times more. Wow, that's like a very reasonable, that's where I was headed too. I'm going to guess five times more. Five times more is the exact right answer. It's always five times more. Yeah, five was last week's answer, too.

I'm on a streak. Well, then you get to decide who goes first, Sari. Sam can go first this time. Oh. All right. Fruit-producing plants, as we said before, generally require pollination to make fruit. And to a large extent through pollinator species and wind, this kind of thing usually takes care of itself pretty well, like in the wild. But when it comes to commercial fruit farming, there's a big external factor to consider.

Capitalism. Bees and wind don't know about profit margin and overhead and stuff like that. So they don't always pollinate every tree as efficiently as they possibly can. Plus, with the impacts of climate change, natural pollination might not always be super reliable. So a whole field has popped up around artificial pollination and especially drone-aided pollination. And while drones have their benefits when it comes to reducing labor costs and upping efficiency, they do lack one thing that bees and wind generally do have, a very gentle touch. For example, in 2017, material scientist Ijiro Miyako came up with an idea to use tiny drones fitted with horsehair brushes to collect and redistribute pollen.

pollen. So he made a prototype and he tried it out on some lilies. And unfortunately, he found that the drone had to get way too close to the lily and he chopped up the flowers whenever he would try to dip it in. So he started to think about gentler ways of distributing pollen artificially. And one day he was playing with his son and he was shooting bubbles at his face with a bubble blowing gun. And it occurred to him that if the bubbles were gentle enough to be shot at his own child's head and bounce off, then they were also gentle enough to land on a flower without hurting it. So Miyako and a team loaded up some bubble guns with pollen-filled bubble solution, went to a pear orchard, and started shooting bubbles into the trees. Oh my god.

So traditionally, pear farmers in Japan will pollinate their orchards with a feather brush. And it can take a really long time and they have to collect all the pollen before they go out and do it. So what Miyako and his team found was that the bubbles would land harmlessly on the flower's pistol. I think that's the part where it goes. Then the bubbles popped and the pollen got wherever it was supposed to go and fruit would grow. With the bubble guns, they estimated that it took 0.06 milligrams of pollen to pollinate each flower. And it took 1800 milligrams for each flower to be pollinated using the brush and the traditional method. And 95% of the blossoms were pollinated this way. 95%

of the blossoms would grow into fruit, which is the same as the brush method. And bees and wind are lazy and they would only pollinate 58% of the fruit. So the bubbles worked very well. Now that they knew that the bubbles could do the job and wouldn't hurt the plants, it was time to reintroduce drones into the equation. So Miyaku and his team got a bubble blowing toy and it looks like in the video, they just taped it onto the drone basically, like a big drone. And they started practice flying it over rows of fake flowers and spreading bubbles. And they tweaked the height and the speed of the drone flybys until they could hit 90% of the flowers. Like at the end of their flyby, 90% of them would have a bubble on them.

But they also used way more pollen bubble solution per flower that way than they did with the bubble guns because they were just shooting bubbles everywhere. So their next step is that they're going to program drones that can see the flowers, go to the flowers, sprinkle bubbles on them instead of just scattering them everywhere and hope for the best. But putting aside the drone stuff, I think the really important takeaway from all this research is that the bubble guns worked really well. And it's very cute to imagine farmers going out into orchards with their bubble guns and shooting all of the flowers with bubbles. They go from this really sort of meditative process of horsehair brushing, doing the sex for the flower,

to being like, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Yeah. I feel like all agriculture should be done with bubble guns. Bubble based agriculture we're moving to. Yeah.

Like crop dusters should just have big bubble guns on the back of them. You could really get community efforts too. It's like come on kids. Yeah. Bubble the plants.

Trick kids into doing all your work for you. Yeah. And then they shoot each other and then they start sneezing like crazy. I like it. It's cute and weird.

Sarah, what do you have? I hope that mine is cute and weird too, but those aren't the adjectives I would use to describe it at first. That was just me trying to segue. Look, here's the situation. It's not cute. It's not weird.

So like we've talked about, flowers aren't just pretty for human eyes. The petals are like flashy neon signs trying to attract pollinators. And the nectars or other volatile organic compounds, which are just chemicals that go into the air really easily, lure them in like scents from a bakery. That way, flowers get pollinated and seeds can spread. For example, the genus Cyrus lives in Guyana, a country on the northernmost coast of South America. These plants are also known as the yellow-eyed grasses, and their flowering strategy is to have long vertical stalks with a single bulb on top and one feathery

yellow flower sprouting on the top. But all living species, not just plants, are trying to sow their wild oats and grow lots of offspring. And one of them is a fungus named Fusarium xylophyllum, which is a pseudoflower that infects yellow-eyed grasses, we've seen two species so far, to kill their reproductive organs, hijack some biology that we don't quite know about yet, and grow out the top like a flower, and it tricks pollinators into spreading fungal spores instead. And as far as scientists can tell, because this research was published in November 2020, so it's fairly recent, this is a whole other level of floral mimicry with a full fungus pseudoflower, not just a coating on leaves. So it infects the plant, takes away its ability to

make flowers, and then produces a yellow flower-like fungus. If you just glanced at it in a field, I would not know which ones are flowers and which ones are fungi, but it was just close up, you can tell. But it not only fools our eyes, it fools insects as well. From studying the fungus and the flower with light, scientists found that the fungus reflects ultraviolet light and specifically emitted fluorescence in light ranges that insects with trichromatic vision, like bees, can see. So it's like the correct colors for pollinators. And also, they did a lab culture of the pseudoflowers. They couldn't collect samples because of COVID.

And they isolated a compound called 2-ethylhexanol, which is a smelly compound, another one of those volatile organic compounds that attracts pollinators emitted by the xyrus flowers. So they have to do more research about the blend of aromas, but at least one compound is in common between the fungus and the flower. So yeah, as pollinators hop from flower to flower, they could be spreading a fungal infection because of this very well adapted disguise. Those were both very good. And so I think that I'm going to award them equal points. Oh, great. Because they were too good. Sam, you had a chance there, but Sari kind of came through with a little bit of a mind-blowing fungus. And that means I

don't have to think too hard and Sari just wins. Okay, that's fine. A mind-blowing fungus is a pretty special thing. And that means our final scores are something to something and Sari is the winner. Now it is time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This one is from at Echo Coda who asks, do carnivorous plants flower? And gosh, you know, I don't know the answer to that.

They seem like flowery plants to me, the kind that have flowers. Does every plant flower? No. Oh, okay. Yeah, like pine trees don't flower. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They make pine cones.

Right. There's angiosperms and gemnosperms. Okay. It's like the two big plant categories. And one of those flowers and one of those doesn't? And I'm pretty sure that angiosperm is the flowery kind. Well, you don't have to know, like you said earlier.

You just know the word and then you can look it up. Yeah, angiosperm is the flowery kind. But yeah, they are flowering plants. I also never thought about carnivorous plant reproduction. I just looked at them and were like, oh, cool. And then that was the extent of my thought about carnivorous plants. But they do flower. And that is first struck me as very weird because like they want to attract insects to eat. And that seems very tricky to balance with attracting insects that you want to pollinate you and then fly to other plants. It's like,

wouldn't you just eat them all? Turns out people have already done this research. Smarter people than me have asked this question. It's actually a very, like, pretty straightforward answer. To solve this, what they call pollinator-prey conflict, there seems to be three main strategies. One is the plant's flowers and traps can open at different times, specifically of, like like the growing season so not just like night and day opening flower opening trap but that's like how pitcher plants operate

where their their traps are closed when their flowers are open so bugs only go to the flower and and spread the pollen the second method is a difference in smell. So the flowers and traps can use different attractants. So like one insect is attracted to the traps because it's like, I love a red nectar. And then it looks at and then a different one is like, oh, a white flower. I'm going to go pollinate that. The third thing that could be combined with the first two is like physical separation so the it just tries to grow the flower really far away from its trap which i think looks the funniest that's super good i love this picture if you look at picture i linked a couple but like there's one of a venus fly trap

and it's like the trap the venus fly traps are down by the ground and the flower is just like sticking a 10 foot pole above it not that high but like relative to the small stubby traps. The flower is just like way up there. It's like, please do not notice me. The trap at the bottom. Just land on my flower and then please flit away. It's like, I love you insects. Don't worry.

I'm a totally different plant. I'm not that one that ate your mom. Yes. different plant i'm not that one that ate your mom um yeah and and even more along those lines it's like different bugs see the different layers of the plant so like a study on venus fly traps found that the prey near the ground were mostly spiders and ants which are bugs that you know like walk around on the ground but the pollinators were mostly bees and ants, which are bugs that, you know, like walk around on the ground. But the pollinators were mostly bees and beetles that were flying along

and then saw a flower to stop on and didn't even notice the death pits beneath them. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out the topics

for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at I May Be Human, at The Merrier More, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like our show and you want to help us out, I would love it if you did that. So much so.

I want to keep making SciShow Tangents. You could do that by going to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents where you could become a patron. You can get access to our newsletter. You can also get access to bonus episodes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. I love reading them.

And also, I think that it helps with other people finding out whether they want to listen to the show and give it a shot. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us.

I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tudabedish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

But one more thing. Heliocodicirus muscovorus is a lily found in the Mediterranean that is also known as the dead horse lily because it's hairy, has a tail-like structure. I'll talk more about that in a second. Coming out of the middle, that makes it resemble, as one paper states, quote, the anal area of a dead animal. Adding to the realism is an awful, sulfury smell, which is meant to resemble the smell of a dead animal, but, I suppose, to attract insect pollinators. I think, okay, and here's a picture of it.

I think it doesn't look so much like a tail. It looks like a poopy hanging out of its butt. And if I'm a bug, I'm going to want a poopy instead of a tail. And it does also look like a horse's butthole, for sure. It definitely looks like a horse's butthole. A beautiful speckled coat on a poopy instead of a tail. And it does also look like a horse's butthole, for sure. It definitely looks like a horse's butthole. A beautiful speckled coat on a horse,

just his butthole, though. And just like the deepest, darkest hole. Yes. It looks like it goes forever. And if I'm a bug, I'm rubbing my damn hands together. Can't wait to get into that. Yeah. I thought you were putting on hand sanitizer.

Well, yeah. That's what the bug was doing. Just getting a couple pumps. Look, it's a pandemic. I do want to fly into a horse's ass, but I am going to sanitize my hands first.