00:01Let's go down here and check out some of the stuff.
00:04You can see like this, this is a species of croton.
00:06It's in the Poinsettia family, Euphorbyaceae.
00:08Look at the net, the net-like patchwork of roots that holds this together.
00:13Oh, right here.
00:14So these plants stabilize the dunes, and they're also adapted to growing
00:18in what's a really harsh environment, just to grow in sand,
00:21especially when it's hot as hell here.
00:23This would be a beautiful landscape plant in front of a house, man.
00:26Look at this three-carpled ovary. Look at that.
00:29Tell me about the carpal.
00:31A carpal is a female unit of plant reproduction.
00:34Proton is a large genus with a lot of species in it,
00:37and a lot of diversity in Texas especially.
00:39It has three carpals, a trait that indicates it's in the family Euphorbyaceae.
00:44So an ovary can have many carpals.
00:46Now we're out here in late January, which isn't exactly the height of flowering season
00:50in most of the United States.
00:52Let's go look at this, because this is the only thing blooming down here.
00:55But this is South Texas, where even in winter, something's flowering.
00:59Wow!
01:00Oh, my God!
01:01So this is what's going off here.
01:03This is a species of Gallardia.
01:05It's got some really corny, honky name for it.
01:08It's called, like, Indian blanket or something that's stupid and mildly offensive.
01:12Doesn't make any sense.
01:13This is actually a compound flower.
01:14About a hundred tiny flowers in there.
01:16And there's one of them.
01:17What we're doing is we're looking at typical sunflower family morphology
01:22for any faces in the audience who don't think it's important.
01:26We'll tell you why this is important.
01:27A pretty wonderful thing that's going on here with the sunflower family
01:30is they evolved what looks like a single flower, like a sunflower.
01:33It's actually composed of, in the case of this Gallardia,
01:36there's about probably, I don't know, 80 separate individual flowers.
01:40We call them florets.
01:41So that's a single flower right there.
01:44That's a single floret.
01:45The benefit of this is that when an insect comes by to pollinate,
01:49it ends up pollinating 80 flowers at one time instead of just one.
01:52So anyway, that's Gallardia.
01:54But it's a really common native roadside wheat.
01:57This is so nice.
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