129. Terracotta Pots, Plant Poop, and Immortal Trees- Summer 2026 Q&A

What's up, Plant People?? It'  time again to answer your burnign plant questions that jump from backyard pruning to big-picture ecology, keeping the science clear and usable. We sort out plant naming, native planting nuance, and a few garden myths, then close with research that changes how we think about trees and carbon storage.

• late winter gooseberry pruning for fruiting wood age and open center structure 
• variety versus cultivar and why common language bends the rules 
• how to attract nighttime pollinators with pale fragrant night-blooming natives 
• when native plant cultivars can help and when true local genetics matter 
• why terracotta pots breathe, why drainage holes matter, and why gravel layers backfire 
• how plants handle waste through leaf drop and guttation 
• feeding carnivorous plants safely with fish food or dried insects 
• invasive species control through prevention, smart plant choices, and local ecosystem fixes 
• tree longevity, clonal forests, and what “immortal” can mean in biology 
• new findings on late-season carbon sequestration and what it implies for watering practices 

If you'd like to support the show, the best thing you can do is to tell a friend about it! Leave us a rating review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Podchase or anywhere else you can.

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Transcript

Welcome And Q And A Format

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is up, plant people? It's time once more for the Plant Apology Podcast, the show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vikram Beligia, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the green sciences. And as always, my friends, I am so excited to be with you today with a summer QA episode. Now I love doing these because I love answering your questions. So I've collected, oh, I don't know, let's see, what is this? Five, 10-ish, 10 or 11 questions from the social medias about a wide range of topics, and I'm going to answer them for you here today. So I keep a running, usually keep a running list of these. So over the year, as you're listening to this episode, if you think of more things that you would like me to answer on a future QA episode, drop them in the comments, send them to me, and I'll have them to the list. And maybe next time I'll feature your question on here. So not a whole lot else to say about this. Thanks for being with me and let's answer some questions. But first, let's listen to some music. I don't know how long this is gonna be. Hopefully not super duper long, but I want to try to answer these questions well, but as succinctly as possible, because that is how the science should be communicated efficiently and quickly. Here we go.

Pruning An Overgrown Gooseberry Bush

SPEAKER_00 1:41

So the first question comes from Laura Larner on threads. And this question is any tips on pruning a gooseberry bush that is at least six feet high, six feet wide, and ten feet long? It hardly had any fruit this year, just bought a new house in the UK. Okay, so I don't have any personal experience with gooseberry. It does not love here where I live. But the plants that I do have experience with that have very similar growth forms, production habits, and things like that are blackberries and raspberries. So the gooseberry, if you don't know, is ribus grossularia, at least that is the European gooseberry. There's also an American gooseberry. And in general, you want to prune a gooseberry in the late winter. But there's a little more nuance to this, okay? Probably there are a couple of reasons why it may not be fruiting. Some of it could be climate and weather. That does have a big impact on fruiting and production in a lot of our plants. But probably the wood that it is fruiting on or that you have on the plant is either too old or too young. So, for the most part, gooseberries and several other perennial woody shrubs that fruit, currants, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, several others, tend to fruit on sort of middle age wood, if that's weird to if that's the right way to say that, it may not be. But ultimately, what your main production is going to come off of is two-year-old and three-year-old stems. Now, they will fruit on and produce flowers on one-year-old wood. So not the current season's growth, but last year's growth is going to be your primary fruiting wood on your gooseberry. So if you come in and you prune it in the spring or in the summer, you're probably taking off that developing new wood, which will be your flowers and fruits for next year. So when we think about pruning something like a gooseberry, and again, several of our other woody fruiting shrubs as well, late winter is probably the right time to do it. So depending on where you are, late winter, the calendar says one thing, but your climate is going to say something different at the sliding scale. But January through March is usually a good time. The first thing you want to do is pay attention to the plant and see what canes are present, what stems are present, but you want a vase-shaped, an open vase-shaped pruning. So generally speaking, any branches that are growing inwards towards the middle of the plant can be pruned out. This improves sunlight into the middle of the plant, which helps ripen fruit and develop fruit and grow the plant, a healthier plant in general. It improves air movement, reduces humidity trapped within the canopy, so disease incidence and insect incidence goes down. So an open vase-shaped, typically pruning system is the right way to go. You open it up. But more than that, you want to make sure that you're keeping wood on the plant that's one to three years old. Again, you're going to get the best production on two to three-year-old stems. So any older wood that's been there five, six, seven years in some cases, take that out. Clean it out. Theoretically, you should be pruning on your gooseberry if you're really trying to maximize production every year, keeping the center open and removing that older growth. Because then if you keep mostly two and three-year-old branches, you're going to get flower production on spurs on those, which will give you most of your fruit, and you'll get a little bit on the first year or one-year-old stems. Now you can let those go ahead and fruit, it's not going to hurt the plant. You do have to be careful sometimes not to push any kind of fruiting plant too hard and instigate too much fruiting, because that can be a sign that the plant is, or can be a signal to the plant, I should say, that, oh no, we need to reproduce as much as we can, and then we start to decline. A little bit of thinning in some cases, if you've got too heavy of a fruit load, can be advantageous for the for me in a backyard garden. I may thin a little bit, but I'm probably going to let nature do most of that. Wind and rain and storms and animals and stuff will take some of your fruit off, which gives you higher quality, bigger fruit in the ones that are left. Now, gooseberry is a really interesting fruit. I've never had one, but reading about it, they're, I don't know, grape or cherry tomato shaped. They grow in these little paper lantern looking things, and they're very tart, apparently, when they're young, before they're mature. And at maturity, they have a grape-like flavor used widely in jellies, jams, and things like that. Great question. The short answer is prune in late winter, keep an open center, and maintain one to three-year-old wood on your plant. So great question, Laura. Our next question comes from Lynn Sullivan on threads.

Variety Versus Cultivar Explained

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Off the top of my head, I'm curious how the word variety is used in the plant world. This is already a good question. For example, apples have many varieties: red, delicious, cosmic, honey crisp, etc. Red Delicious don't. Only one of those words is true. Anyway. But when we look at different types of zinnias, cut and come again, thumbelina, etc., are those varieties? Okay, this is a really interesting one because this gets into plant breeding, plant naming, and then some of the legal issues that surround how a plant variety or type is protected. Okay, so there's some jargon in here that we probably need to understand. And then there's another issue here of when we say vegetable, how that's not really a thing. And if it comes from a flower, it's a fruit. So a bell pepper is a fruit, right? It's the fruit of the plant botanically, but culinarily, we typically use that as a vegetable because it's savory in preparation, right? So there's a little bit of that happening here too. So first to start off with a variety, okay? A variety is a unique set of traits in a plant that is naturally occurring. Okay. So if I go out in a field and I find, use zinnias an advanced example. This is actually a great one to use. So I go out into a field, and there's multiple species of zinnias, right? Some are this tall, and they're eight, if you're watching on video, I'm doing a thing with my hands. If you're that's compelling audio, I know. Some of them are 18 inches tall, some of them are more like six inches tall and mounding, some of them have different leaves and those things. Those are different species, okay? They are genetically different enough. They are probably morphologically, biologically different enough that while they're still all in the Xenia genus, some of them may be grandiflora, some of them may be something else. Okay. So we've separated them into species. But then I find two that are exactly the same looking plant, right? They're the same size, the leaves are the same, but one of them has a red flower and one of them has a white flower. Okay. Those are two different varieties of the same species of zinia. So if it's naturally occurring through natural crossbreeding and natural mutation, if we go out in a field and we find it and we find multiple colors of the same plant, those are varieties of the same plant. What we're talking about in the industry, what you mentioned here from Thumbolina, come again, whatever, those are called cultivars, cultivated varieties. So what that means is we took Xinnias from the field and we said, okay, there's a red one and a white one. I would really like a pink one. So we, through different breeding efforts, whatever those might be, in zinnias, it's going to be primarily just conventional breeding, taking pollen from one plant, sticking it onto the other, planting out the seeds to see what comes up, and then doing some selections from there, we might do that and get our pink one and say, okay, this is rose, right? It's the rose zinia. So that is a trade name in some ways. It's going to be sold as rose, but it's a cultivated variety. Now, when we talk about apples, and let's extend that to other fruits, right? Different varieties of the same kind of fruit. So all your apples are the same species, basically. There's a little bit of nuance there, too, that we won't get into too much today. But those are actually cultivars as well. So red delicious, cosmic, honey crisp, those are all cultivars of Malice Domestica, the production apple. So we have come up with those varieties again through breeding efforts, hybridizations, taking different types of apples and crossing them together. So again, they are cultivated varieties. Now, why do we just call them varieties in the industry, right? Why are they not referred to as cultivars at the grocery store? Is because it's easier to just say variety. We can say there's multiple varieties of apples, and people understand that, right? People understand what that means, that there's some variety here. If I say there are multiple cultivars of apple, now again, eventually, yeah, we can adopt that. But even though it's more botanically industry-wide accurate, it is less useful as a communication tool. Y'all, the point of language, all of this stuff that we're doing, me talking to you, is to be understood. And so when we name things, when we use different words like this, there may be a more scientifically appropriate exact word.

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SPEAKER_00 10:57

And in a lot of cases, we should be using that appropriate scientifically exact word. But there are some venues like this one. Like,

(Cont.) Variety Versus Cultivar Explained

SPEAKER_00 11:05

I don't care if you keep calling bell peppers vegetables, your cucumbers vegetables, because they you understand what I mean. When we communicate effectively, I say, what no, because they come from the flower of the plant and they're actually a berry, which is true, both cucumbers and bell peppers are actually types of berries botanically, it creates confusion. And while that confusion from a pedagogical and educational standpoint can be very useful, it can lead to conversation and deeper understanding in everyday layman conversation. It's probably not. So again, varieties naturally occurring, things we go and we find out in nature and then grow out and carry forward. Cultivars are things that have been bred by us to have specific traits, bred and selected for to have specific traits. Really good question. Okay, a couple more here in this first block. This one comes from a yogurt farm XX on threads, who we've been mutuals for a very long time. How to attract nighttime

Night Pollinators And Urban Native Plants

SPEAKER_00 12:02

pollinators to your garden with natives, please, in urban areas. Mothing went poorly last night, lol. Yeah. So this one's tough. Okay. Nighttime pollinators are again going to be your moths, some beetles, flies, things like that, but moths are going to be our lace wings, some other, there's plenty of them, right? But moths are probably going to be our most important in some venues, nighttime pollinators. So, how do we do that with native plants? That's hard to say. You know, depends where you are and the palette of plants that live in your area. Now, not every area has super ecologically important nighttime plants. Now, I should hesitate saying that. We're going to get more daytime pollination. Let me explain what I mean. We're going to get more daytime pollination in some places than nighttime pollination just naturally due to the climate, due to species diversity. I'm assuming if you're out mothing, looking for moths, trying to catch moths and catalog moths, in your area, there's probably a fair number of them that are out doing the moth things. So, generally speaking, our nighttime blooming plants that will attract night pollinators are going to have large pale fragrant flowers. So, some primroses, things like moonflower and cactus flowers, and plenty of native plants and things too, some plenty of wildflowers and shrubs and things. But typically, when you think of what is ideal for a nighttime pollinator, be that a bat or a moth or a beetle or anything else that's moving around at night, they have to be able to see it. Yes, they can navigate by smell. Yes, they see in different wavelengths and bands than we do. So they can see infrared and in different ways, ultraviolet in some cases. And plants will, in some cases, or flowers will fluoresce in those bands or produce extra smells or produce their own heat in some cases to attract different pollinators. But if you're trying to grow plants in your garden to increase the availability of nighttime forage, look for your plants again, like evening primrose, some different other ones, depending on where you are. I'm just speaking from our experience my experience here to ours. There are several different species of these flowers that put on big, white, very fragrant flowers that will often open at night. That's what your nighttime pollinators are going to gravitate towards. So it's going to require probably taking a look at the species diversity in your area and trying to figure out, okay, what fits best, what works best, what's going to be my best option. Okay. But yeah, I have I I think I have all the mods. We have very many mods that hang out on my back porch. Even though I don't have a ton of flowers this year, but I can send some to you. That's probably counterproductive when we're talking about natives, right? Since I think we live about 2,500 miles apart. Okay. The next one from Threads comes from Tsukino Ico 86. Real but niche. Does planting cultivars of native plants erase the benefits of the native plant

Do Native Cultivars Reduce Ecosystem Value

SPEAKER_00 15:03

for the ecosystem? Y'all, this is such a good question and goes back to the last two questions. So, first we have cultivars of native plants, which are bred and selected varieties. So, for example, and I've actually done some work in this in my master's. My major professor did a lot of wildlife flower research. And we would go out and do seed collecting. We'd pick up seeds from wildflowers from native spaces. We had permission to do this. We would bring them back, we would grow them out, we would put them out in our research farm, and then we would go and do testing on how many flowers are on there, how tall is the plant, what kind of pollinators are on there. And then we would make selections for the quote unquote best ones that had the biggest flowers, the most densest, dense canopy, the most petals per head, whatever it is that we were trying to select for, colors, etc. So, does this decrease the value for a native ecosystem? This is a loaded and complicated question. It can, right? Because if we think about what are native pollinators coming and visiting these different plants for, right? Why are they interested in them? They're there to get pollen, but mostly they're there to get nectar, right? Most of the time, pollen pollen is a secondary benefit. And some pollinators, honeybees, and other things, we use pollen as a protein source, but most of our pollinators are there after the nectar that plant provides. They eat sugar water. So nectar is sugar water. So they're there trying to get that. And then they pick a pollen, they move to the next plant. So depending on the changes we're making through cultivation, depending on how we're changing these plants to create new cultivars, it can reduce the importance and the benefits in a native ecosystem. Okay. I'm not going to say that it always does. And I would say that if you're going to plant a cultivated variety of a native plant instead of maybe something that's exogenous that could be invasive, that's still a better option. So a cultivator, a cultivar of, say, an echinacea, we have a lot of echinacea natively around here, is still going to be better than me going and getting something that's going to escape containment, right? That's going to become invasive in an ecosystem because still, even though it's different, our native pollinators can still recognize that plant as okay, it has the pollen load I want, it smells right, all of those things. So you're still going to get some benefits by even planting quote unquote improved natives versus, say, just going and getting something that doesn't exist in that ecosystem at all. But a native plant that has co-evolved in its specific growth form and all of those things with the natural environment, with the insects and the pollinators and the animals is better. It's going to be better. My caveat here is that a native plant that's existing out in a landscape somewhere. So if you're driving outside of your town and oh there's all these native plants, I'm going to take some and put them in my front yard and they just crater there. That's because you're not, you don't live in a native landscape. This is a tough concept, but I'm on a prairie. So out here, it's short grass prairie. So, you know, yeah, we have a lot of ag land and stuff. But natively, if we were to stand in the place that I'm podcasting from right now, 500 years ago, it would be grass two feet tall as far as you can see. Right. So not a lot of trees, moderately to low fertility soils, lots of grasses, lots of things. Okay. So we come in, we put in a city and we bring in different soils. We change the soil texture, we change the soil depth, we create structural shade and heat, and wind patterns are different, rain patterns are different. We have fundamentally changed our ecosystem. So when you take a native plant that's used to growing out in that field by itself on low fertility, low water, and you put it in your front yard, you are not planting really a native plant anymore. That's people are going to get mad at me for that. But you're putting it in an ecosystem in which it didn't normally exist. Now, is it still suited to the rainfall, the temperature, the pollinators, all yes, it is still native to your area, but it is not going to behave the same way in your yard as it did out in the field. It's just not. It is always going to be different. Now, different is not bad. It may not be substantially different. So there are times when if we're trying to be as native as possible in our plantings, as ecologically conscious as possible in our plantings, it may be best to reach for that cultivar that's actually going to survive and do well in your yard as compared to a true native which exists outside of our manufactured novel ecosystem. Right. So there is a lot of nuance here. And maybe I'll do a whole episode on this sometime if you want, if y'all want, let me know. Because it's really complicated. In fact, I'm teaching a class on this in the fall. I'm teaching a new native plants and urban landscapes class. And we're going to catalog native plants on campus and around our community, do some design work, those kinds of things. But this is a long and actually complicated conversation that I think it's important that we give the time and the nuance that it deserves. Okay, so our final question here before the break comes from my friend Madison Harton, WX from Instagram. Madison, by the way, is a meteorologist. She was the weather person and anchor here at one of our news stations that I've worked with and where I live. And she has moved on to a different market, but Madison is very cool, and you should be following all these people. But Madison posts some really great stuff, some really great science about weather and stuff like that. And I think you would enjoy following her, and she's fun too. So hi Madison. Why is terracotta the main thing we make pots out of? That's a good question. I did look into this a little bit, actually.

Why Terracotta Pots Are Common

SPEAKER_00 20:39

So the short version is that it's easy. Right? We've been able to make terracotta as human people for a very long time. So it is an old material that actually solves a lot of problems that is fairly easy and cheap to make. So for in terms of mass production and growing plants and things like that, it works pretty well. And it's also made out of the thing the plants grow in, right? I know it's clay and different stuff, but plants grow in soil. This is made out of things that come out of the soil. So there's some natural ingredients involved here that kind of work. But the biggest thing is air and water movement. So plants need drainage. Unless they're an aquatic plant, even your tropicals, they need drainage. If they sit in water all the time, eventually they're not going to be able to get enough oxygen. There's some things you can do to overcome that. But generally speaking, if they're sitting in water, if they are especially, especially sitting in saturated, wet, soupy soil, they're going to die. They're going to lose oxygen to the roots. They're not going to be able to grow anymore. And essentially they're just going to suffocate to death. And terracotta helps solve one of these problems. And besides the fact that it's cheap and easy to make, it breathes. Now you still need a drainage hole in the bottom of your terracotta pot. By the way, don't put gravel in the bottom of your pots. Just have a drainage hole, put soil in there, put your plant in. Okay. It's maybe a longer conversation, but you get things like a perched water table, you get mold and bacteria growth down in the bottom in that gravelly area, and it can cause more problems. Don't do that. It just puts soil in your pots. Thank you from coming to my TED Talk. But it's porous, right? So air is allowed to move through that terracotta. Whereas especially like an unglazed terracotta, right? Now if there's a glaze on it, that changes a little bit and it'll actually hold water better. But if you were to take terracotta pot without a drainage hole and fill it up with water and come back a while later, it will have moved that water through it because it's porous. So water can escape, air can escape, and you get better aeration into your soil. Get water movement and better drainage, and it just works really well. Indigenous peoples of the Southwest would use something called an Oya in Central America as well. And they essentially, like it was a clay uh terracotta pot that would be filled up with water and buried, or buried and then filled up with water, and it would slowly seep water into the soil, and those could be buried around a planting area and give you long-term sort of watering, slow release watering, so to speak. Because you would get osmotic pressure differences, there'd be more water inside the pot and then in the soil. And because it's porous and it works like a permeable membrane, if you've ever learned about osmosis, it would just osmocize, that's not a word, out into the soil, diffuse out into the soil. That's the right word. So your terracotta pots are actually great for that. You can also break them up and use them for different things. After they're done, they can be crushed, they can be reused in a lot of ways, incorporated into soil in some cases, used as filler material. So terracotta pots are great. But that's a really good question. Now, plastic pots have become very easy to mass produce, but they're even though there is energy involved in the making of terracotta, it's not strictly speaking a petroleum product. Plastic is. So from an environmental standpoint, using soil to make things that are going to grow plants probably is a better plan in the long term than plastic. Plastic, however, is light. It's easy to manufacture and mass produce. So my suggestion would be, yeah, if you can afford to and you have the space and you can deal with terracotta pots, use terracotta pots. If you buy plastic pots, that's fine. I have several in my office right now, but reuse them a bunch of times. Okay. Don't just use them once and throw them away. Plastics don't have to be single-use plastics. We can reuse and get more life out of them and prevent another one being from being manufactured because we don't have to go buy another one, right? These supply chains are complicated, but if we're using things, they don't have to make as many more new ones. And then stuff doesn't end up in a landfill. So terracotta good, plastic, fine, but use it a whole bunch. Let's take a break. I'll be back. Hey there. Welcome to the mid-roll. Good to see you here. Have you come up with any good questions yet? Again, if you have, send them to me. I want

Mid Roll Support And Where To Listen

SPEAKER_00 24:47

to put them on my cool PowerPoint. No, not PowerPoint, my Word document that has all the questions on it. So the next time I do one of these in a couple of months, I can answer your question, hopefully. And in a couple of months could be, hey, I don't have a guest for this week, or I don't have another topic for this week. It's time for a QA. That is not why I'm doing this when this was on the plan. Don't worry about it. Okay. Thanks for listening to Planthropology and being a part of it. I'm glad that y'all have stuck around through the hiatus. And it has been really cool to see y'all coming back and listening and being a part of it again. Planthropology is all over the internet. You can find these episodes on YouTube, on any podcast player at planthropologypodcast.com. You can follow me personally. Basically, everywhere is the plant prof, except for Twitter, that was rest in peace. And if you want video versions of this podcast, there are not very many yet. I'm still working on it. I've got a lot of video I need to go through. And I don't have it for some of the older episodes, but I'm going to put up as many as I can and start posting video versions on YouTube. So if you'd like to follow along there, it is on the Plant Prof YouTube channel for me. And then I have a playlist called Planthropology where the RS RSS feeds to. So you can already listen to this if this is episodes, once this episode's out there. But then you should be able to watch the video as well soon. If you'd like to support the show, the best thing you can do is to tell a friend about it. Word of mouth is still the best way. Leave us a rating review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Podchase or anywhere else you can. It was just my birthday, and if you've got to give me something, I wear a size five star review. And that would be real nice of you. Okay. Thanks. If you'd like to financially support the show, head over to planthropologypodcast.com and snag some merch or go to buymeacoffee.com slash planthropology. And for the price of a coffee, you can buy me a coffee and hosting fees, but mostly coffee. Okay. If you have ideas for the show, hit me up on social media. Send me an email at planthropologypod at gmail.com. And what else I got? What else do I have? I'm sure I have other things. Listen to the Deep Roots podcast, which is my other project that I'm doing for work, and it's really cool. And we got some great episodes out, just a few. But if you want to go subscribe to Deep Roots, I would love to have you listen to that as well. And then let's go answer more questions. Hooray. Okay, time for part two. Let's go. So, first question of the second half. First second half question. The next question comes from Josh Stacio. Josh, it is fun trying to read these

How Plants Handle Waste Products

SPEAKER_00 27:18

out loud, by the way. Josh's Tasio is how I'm choosing to read this. Okay. Sorry, Josh. How do plants poop? So they do. Not like you do, probably. Plants get rid of waste products in a couple of different ways, right? They're always creating new structures, and as part of that, waste is happening, right? Cells die, they are have to be removed in some way, they are pulling in carbon dioxide to make starches and sugars, and there are always waste products that have to be dealt with. And there's two main ways this happens. So plants will either in general, now there are some nuances here again, as always, because it's science, and the short answer is it depends between angiosperms and gymnosperms, broadleaf plants and conifers. But in most of our angiosperms are flowering plants. There are two main ways that plants get rid of these waste products. Now, make let's call it three, but two main ones. So one is that they're going to taste those, take those waste products and store them inside leaves or cells in the leaves. Leaf cells or plant cells in general have something called a large central vacuole, which is really just a big storage chamber, a big, almost like a big water balloon in the middle of the leaf. It's what gives plants their target pressure, right? Water fills those vacuoles. It pushes against the cell walls, which are rigid more than our wobbly, flexible cell membranes that we have as in our meat robot suits, and that pushes against other cells and that lets the leaves stand up, right? Plants, trees don't have bones, thank goodness. Not really. So they have to stand up somehow. They don't have muscles, so they can't dance. I'm sorry. So one way they do it is when they have waste products, they will store those waste products in the central vacuoles and leaves, and then eventually that leaf falls off and it rides the plant of the waste. That waste is broken down in the soil and is fertilizer for future generations of the plant or other plants. That's great. Plants also have these little pores at the edges of the leaves, or some most plants do, called hydathodes, and you get something called guttation. So guttation is when there's excess water or sometimes nutrients or toxins or different things in the leaf, the plant will force that out, assuming they have good water status, usually early in the morning through those hydathodes in the outside of the leaf blade. So sometimes if you get up and you go and you look at your lawn or you plant, and it looks like there's a heavy dew that is settled, little water drops sitting along the leaf margin, very likely that is water being excreted, water minerals, waste products, things being excreted from the leaf through those hydathodes, and it happens early in the morning because the plant typically has the best water status then, and it's able to force that stuff out. So sometimes you'll hang out under a tree and you'll feel stuff dripping on you, and then is the tree peeing on you? No, but sorta. So yay, don't worry about that too much. Okay. But yes, plants and all living things have to get rid of waste products, and they have different ways of doing that. Next question from comes from Adam Kat on Instagram. What happens if you give a carnivorous plant fish food? That's actually a thing you can do. The carnivorous plants are carnivorous, not because they don't

Fish Food For Carnivorous Plants

SPEAKER_00 30:31

photosynthesize, they do, most of them. Because they're green, right? So they have chlorophyll, they have chloroplasts, and they're creating their own sugars, but they have poor root systems. They typically, not always, but very often grow in swampy places, places with lots of organic matter, leaf litter, things like that, and very little soil. So they don't have root systems many times up to the task of pulling nutrients into the plant. So they get their nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, the other things that make up all of us and all of the things from eating other things. Now, typically they're going to eat bugs. They don't eat meat, right? And that's interesting to think of is a bug meat. That's a very human conversation that we have. But aside from some nepenthes and some other things that will happily eat a mouse if it falls in the pitcher, most of them are eating bugs, sometimes like a small frog if they're real slow, like a Venus flytrap, but they're eating insects, arthropods in general. So they're deriv deriving minerals from the chitinous exoskeleton of those arthropods, as well as from the gooey bits inside and getting the nutrients they need. Okay. So if you think of a carnivorous fish, like a tetra or beta fish, right, that you're going to keep in a pot inside, these are carnivorous fish. So what they're typically eating a lot of times is arthropods, bits of chitin, bugs, shrimp in the water sometimes, krill, whatever they can get that's small and can fit in their tiny little mouths, that's basically what they're eating. Sometimes decomposing animal material and stuff like that. So fish foods that are designed for some of your fish that you would keep in aquarium fish are often made of chitin, as well as other enzymes and nutrients that your carnivorous plants can also take up. Now, carnivorous plants do go dormant. Your Venus fly trap will have a dormant season. So you don't necessarily have to feed it in the winter. Just if you catch a horsefly or a housefly, stick it in there. You can get blood worms, like freeze-dried blood worms that you would feed a beta as well. And you can do it a little bit. You don't want to go overboard on it. Sometimes there's salts and some different things in fish foods that can cause longer-term damage to your carnivorous plants. But in a pinch, if there's not insects available, you could go biofeeder crickets. You could go again by mealworms or blood worms or things like that and feed them. But a little bit of fish food every now and then is not terrible. It actually can help your carnivorous plants in a pinch. The next question comes from Alex Solimian on threads. What percentage of my waking hours should I devote to removing invasive plants? Up to now it's been only 15 minutes cumulatively. You

Invasives Control Without Doing Harm

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don't sound like the part kind of person that spends a lot of time out weeding and stuff, and that's fine. If you see an invasive plant as you're out walking around, yeah, maybe get rid of it, okay? Remove them from your local environment. If you have invasive plants in your yard, probably start there. And I think a great way for all of us to contribute to the restoration of native ecology is to not make it worse. So this is a funny question, and I was going to give a funny answer, but there's actually a serious answer to this too, is that there's many ways to have an ecological impact. We think of a lot of times, if you want to make a big ecosystem change, you have to do that. You've got to devote your waking time to going out and roguing out invasive species and collecting invasive lionfish and zebra mussels, and those videos are very satisfying, by the way, to watch. But we can also help and we can also make a big contribution to not by not making the problem worse, right? If you're going to go, say, plant things in your garden, do a little research first. Go to your garden center, see what's there, know what you're after, know what plant native plants are well suited to your environment or well-adapted, non-problematic plants. So things that are maybe not truly native, but are that fit well in the climate that are unlikely to get out of containment, that are unlikely to become invasive, because there's plenty of those out there. Just because it's not native doesn't mean it's a bad plant. It just means that there are higher risks associated with putting it in a new ecosystem. And there's always a potential that something that's not invasive now could be tomorrow due to climate change, due to a lot of other things, natural mutations and breeze. So we want to be careful with that. But the biggest thing we can do to help with invasive plants is just not to make it worse. Just don't introduce new invasive species. And there, because there are people doing the work of going and getting rid of them. And if the only thing you do to contribute to that is just not make it worse, you are doing a huge job that many people don't think about. So yeah, don't maybe if you're gonna, if you need ladybugs for your garden, probably don't order them. Those are poached somewhere in Southern California or internationally and then introduced into different environments. So maybe just try to adjust your landscape in such a way as to make ladybugs more likely to come live with you and to colonize your yard naturally, adding water, adding leaf litter areas where they can hide, things like that, reducing your pesticide use. Those are better environmental interventions, ecological interventions, than saying, I don't want to spray a pesticide, so I'm going to order ladybugs that may be incredibly invasive and outcompete native species and introduce them. Work at the environment level first. But yeah, if you want to go and spend a couple of hours pulling native plants out of somewhere, especially your backyard, I won't tell you not to. I think it's a good idea. The next question comes from Liminal Fish Studios from Threads. Favorite mutation. I have always thought that Cyclops was very cool. Sorry. Plant mutation.

Plant Mutations We Use And Keep

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Okay. I don't know that I have a favorite. There's some really cool ones, but I think let's talk about what plant mutations do for us or maybe some us for the environment. There is a stigma that a plant mutation is going to be a bad thing, right? That's going to make it a problem in the environment. But a lot of seedless oranges that we have came from a mutation. And there was a parthenocarpic branch on a plant that didn't have seeds, and those can be propagated out and carried forward. Different varieties arise sometimes. I talked in the first half how a lot of our fruit varieties come from cultivation. They're actually cultivars, but sometimes it's not always true. Because sometimes you can actually get some of these new varieties that appear in nature just through mutations, point mutations, whatever else. And we get some cool flower colors. There are mutations in roses that give them stripes and in tulips. Some of these mutations we can instigate by introducing a virus into the plant system that will cause streaking and things like that. Some of them just happen naturally. So I don't really know if I have a favorite. I'm trying to think. I'll do a follow-up if I think of one. But generally speaking, plant mutations are something that we can take advantage of as people to get new varieties of things, to come up with new things, to find plants that are more suited for a given in uh given environment than maybe some others are. And sometimes that just happens randomly, right? That is just a genetic mutation, an evolutionary push in a direction. Evolution's not driving anything in a certain direction. It is often what is most able to survive in a given ecosystem and in a given set of circumstances and live long enough to reproduce. But sometimes these mutations that just happen, it turns out cells are not great at copying themselves. So sometimes they make mistakes. And so as something is replicating, sometimes you get weird genetic differences that can actually be advantageous for the organism or deleterious in some cases. But generally speaking, yeah, I think mutations can be pretty groovy. Next question comes from Mr. Dennis Z on Instagram. Are trees practically immortal if given the right conditions, do they just keep existing? Ooh, this is a real good one. Yeah. Okay.

Are Trees Effectively Immortal

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So the short answer, if I was gonna give you a one-word answer, is yes, they are. But of course it's not that simple, right? And it never really works out that way. Now there are some very old trees out there. There are bristle cone pines, which if you've listened to the show for a long time and if you've looked at the logo for the show, you may know is my favorite tree. And the oldest ones we know about are about 5,000 years old, we think. As far as we know. There's no upper limit that we know of, right? We don't know what old age will kill a bristle cone pine. The same is true of like olive trees. There are olive trees, ginkgo biloba, that are thousands of years old. Okay. A lot of research research has indicated that cell replication, growth at the growing points, the mere stems of our trees, doesn't even really slow down much with age. In some cases, it can actually speed up. Now, a plant has in general some sort of biological speed limits or limitations, constraints. So if they get past a certain height, they're probably not going to get any taller. That is largely biological, but it's also environmental, right? It is the ability for the plant to pull water up to those top leaves, or in the case of some plants like the giant redwood, to have evolved to be able to scrub water out of clouds through the leaves. And that's really fascinating. We'll talk about that on another episode. But in the right conditions, if the soil were perfect, if there was enough fertility, the sunlight didn't change, the climate stayed constant, if nothing ever changed for that plant, there were no stresses on it, biologically, sure. It could keep growing basically indefinitely, but we don't live in that world, right? We don't live in a world that's in a vacuum. Now plants live again a very long time. And it depends also what we think of as a tree, right? So pando, the largest stand of aspen and the largest what's considered single organism on the planet, except in Australia, there's some seagrass that is out there that is probably older and larger. They're all genetically the same. All these trees came from a parent plant. They are clones of one another. There is some genetic drift if you were to sequence a tree on one end and on the other, certainly in the stand of seagrass. There's a little bit of drift. But functionally, are they the same tree, just reproducing and cloning themselves and still connected through the roots and it's still one organism? Yeah. So as long as it can keep doing that, is it immortal? So yeah, trees can be immortal in the right circumstances. We just don't really have those right circumstances. And we really never did on this planet. There's always something. Evolution is an arm race, right? So there's always a pest, a something else that's trying to eat the thing, trying to get at the thing that is going to make that life hard. And the climate does change. We're changing it faster right now. But throughout our geological, biological history of this planet, yeah, there there are trees that maybe could have still been alive from late Cretaceous, except that all these different things happened and mass extinctions and meteorites and asteroids and volcanoes and all kinds of stuff that happens on this planet that keeps things from living forever, that keeps plants from living, retreats from living forever. But yeah, did they have the biology to do it? Sure, sure they do. And finally, from Overcowl art on Instagram, how is the new Subaru? It's fantastic. I love it so much. I bought a car this year. I drove my old 2012 Toyota Tundra. I bought it new in 2012, used it as a work truck for my landscape business. I drove it for 14 years, put 160,000 miles on it, and then I sold it to my nephew because it still runs great. It's a great work truck, and he is carrying on the legacy, and he's doing some lawn mowing and lawn care, and he's using the truck for work, which makes me very happy. That was the majestic silver caribou, and he and I were in wonderful friends for 14 years. But now I have bought a Subaru outback that I have named Tiramas Subaru. I'll link the video in the description. So, yes, new Subaru is great. So thanks for all your questions. They were fascinating, and it's always fun for me to have a good reason to go do some research on things and get to read papers and stuff like that. That's so much fun for me. So keep the questions coming. My last segment, which I'm going to start doing every time, I forgot last time, but the conversation with the guys that let's botanize was all good news. So it's okay. But here is a bit of good news for you, or some interesting news from plant science. I just read an article today in Science Daily,

Trees Store Carbon After Growth Stops

SPEAKER_00 42:38

and I'll link the article in the show notes that came out from the Columbia Climate School and some new research that shows that trees keep absorbing carbon long after they stop growing, which is fascinating. So carbon is sequestered into a plant during photosynthesis. And as photosynthesis keeps happening, as the leaves convert carbon dioxide and all the different things into sugars, they store those carbon molecules as wood as different things. And usually by late summer, growth slows down, right? A lot of times, if you're looking at, say, oaks, a main growing period is going to be, they call it April, May, depending on where you are till September, August, September, right? So several months of active growth, putting on new length and girth in the plant. But then at some point, they slow down and they stop growing. And they do, they're not putting on new leaves, they're not elongating stems, they're storing stuff to get ready for winter, to overwinter, to not hibernate but go dormant for a while, right? And the thought a lot of times is that they do all of their carbon sequestration during active growth because that makes sense, right? Where you're gonna use those compounds produced directly to grow new leaves and stems and stuff. But it turns out that maybe as much as 40%, 35 to 40% of carbon sequestration and accumulation happens after they stop actively growing in the season. And that makes some sense too from a physiological standpoint, that if they're trying to store resources for the next year, they're going to use the leaves that are still on the plant, even though they may be starting to get ready to drop them in a couple of months. They're going to use those to store compounds in the roots and in the stems and build new wood that is, yes, part of the structural support of the plant, but it's also there to store resources in case there is a bad climate thing, if the leaves fall off, something happens. They have the resources necessary. So what does this tell us practically? A couple of things, right? We could zoom out and go back to our conversation about old trees and how important old trees and old forests are because they're still sequestering carbon, even at their old age. They're still having a lot of ecosystem services and doing the thing where they grow and develop. But for us as plant managers, a lot of times late in the summer, the heat has died down. We'll reduce the amount of water and care that we give to plants sometimes because we've gotten through the hot season. But trees, it turns out, again, one, they need water. They take the hydrogen from water molecules to make sugars and combine it with carbon. So if we stop watering, if we reduce the water status and the active resources for a plant, at the end of the active growing season, we may be reducing their ability to photosynthesize and sequester carbon. Now, you this is going to vary based on your locale. In some places, like where I am in the south, we actually probably need to keep our soil at least wet some through the winter. Plants will do bark photosynthesis even in the winter. So they do need available water. And it's very dry where I am. So in the winter, our soils can get very dry. So I water in the winter, right? I will go out and especially before a big cold snap, and I'll saturate my yard, the root zone of my trees to try to insulate and protect those roots, but also give them water to keep carrying out bark photosynthesis and things like that. Up north, in places where it freezes more solid and it stays consistently frozen, you probably don't want to water during the winter, right? It depends on where you are. But yeah, plants keep absorbing carbon after they stop growing for months in some cases. And that is very cool. And it's very good news because the more we understand how plants work, the better we can care for them and the better care we can take of our planet. So thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to Planthropology again. It amazes me that y'all have stuck with me for so many years, and I'm just

Final Takeaways And Goodbye

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so happy to have you with me. I hope you learned something today, and I hope you have thought of some great questions to throw at me. Planthropology is written, recorded, produced, all the things by me, Vicar and Beliga. Our intro and outro music is by the award-winning composer Nick Scout, and our mid-roll music is by my buddy Rui and his lo-fi dad jazz beats. So check them out. They're linked in the episode description. And y'all keep being good. Okay, be kind to one another. We really need it. If you haven't done it to date, probably start doing that. You know I love you guys. And keep being good, keep being safe, and be very cool plant people until next time.