Show Notes
Episodes of the Crime Pays podcast are available Ad-Free on the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't Patreon at: www.patreon.com/crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt
In this episode of the podcast we rant about a myriad of topics and also discuss 4 main habitat types of Costa Rica :
Lowland dry forest, where you can get pissed on by spider monkeys and capuchins while photographing columnar cacti growing on karstic limestone dominated by Bursera simaruba. We also talk about the dry forest oak Quercus oleoides which tolerates a 6 month long dry season and doesn't even receive that much rain during the wet season since it tends to grow on thin-soiled limestone.
Montane Wet Forest dominated by oaks like Quercus insignis, which produces acorns the size of baseballs and grows with epiphytic orchids and bat pollinated Bromeliads.
Cloud Forest dominated by ectomycorrhizal trees such Quercus costricensis and Comarostaphylis arbutoides (Ericaceae), a kind of habitat which also contains tropical variations of plant genera that are generally more associated with temperate latitudes.
Páramo habitat, where it's summer every day and winter every night due to the thin air at high elevations above 10,000' (3300 m) and plants produce layerings of hairs not to protect against drought but to protect against frost and increased Ultraviolet intensity.
More from Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2 hours of rants - recorded from a filthy motel room in Miami, Florida during an intermittend layover - about the route from Santa Cruz dela Sierra, Bolivia West into the dry Inter-Andean Valleys and up to the Altiplano, and the many plants encountered along the way : Onoseris acerifolia, Deuterocohnia meziana, Neoraimondia herzogiana, Schinus mollis, Puya glomerata, Schinopsis lorentzii, Cereus hankeanus, Harrisia tetracantha, Blossfeldia liliputana, Puya humilis, Trichocereus tunariensis, Trichocereus bridgesii, Zanthoxylum coco, Koeberlinia holacantha, and more.
Originally recorded June of 2026 in Los Angeles California.
In this episode we talk with Chuck Delwiche about the early evolution of land plants, photosynthetic bacteria, what Earth may have looked like 4 billion years ago, what some of the first land plants look like, why bioluminescent dinoflagellates (Pyrocystis) "light up", and the species of algae responsible for the reflecting pool disaster that nearly have the president an aneurysm over the summer.
Laiken Jordahl is the national public lands advocate for the center for biological diversity. In this episode he tells us about the destruction of Big bend National Park for a pointless and unnecessary border wall and what efforts have been made to stop it.
Rants about Taos, Garden Design in the sba to j aisle, how to tell if a plant has massive tuberous roots, Peteria scoparia, a new species of Paronychia leucochthonicola, Texas Madrone in Denver, US intervention in Latin America, and more.