Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. Like
Speaker 1: many of you out there, I've been familiar with with
Speaker 1: tumbleweeds for a while, but almost almost exclusively as just
Speaker 1: this um sort of mundane symbol of the American West, right,
Speaker 1: you know, mainly it's this type of thing you see
Speaker 1: popping up in old westerns or perhaps more to the point,
Speaker 1: old cartoons inspired by old Westerns. Anytime you need the
Speaker 1: audience to understand, this place is is desolate, this place
Speaker 1: is in the American desert, or this place is a
Speaker 1: ghost town. What do you do? You have the old
Speaker 1: tumbleweed roll by, Yeah, tumbleweed means nothing's going on. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think it's even a common gift. Right. You can
Speaker 1: meme a tumble weed if you are to indicate the
Speaker 1: thread has died or or you know, nobody's got anything
Speaker 1: to say, Yeah, there's nobody in here. This is It
Speaker 1: comes to represent like not only desolation, but also uh
Speaker 1: emptiness and tedium. You know, it's just in boredom. It's
Speaker 1: like this, this place is empty, This place there's nothing
Speaker 1: going on. This is the domain of tumbleweeds, and therefore
Speaker 1: it's easy to think, well, tumbleweeds themselves are boring tumbleweeds. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's nothing going on with tumbleweeds. There's it's not the
Speaker 1: kind of thing you could do a two part series
Speaker 1: on for a podcast. Oh but you would be wrong, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: uh and uh and hopefully we will we will prove
Speaker 1: that in uh, in this pair of episodes that we're
Speaker 1: gonna be doing. Um. But but before, just a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago, I was very much of the mind
Speaker 1: the tumbleweeds. They they pop up in movies sometimes a
Speaker 1: lot of times they look fake. Um. Yeah, for we
Speaker 1: were actually looking at some clips prior to recording these. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, does this look like a real tumbleweed or
Speaker 1: a fake tumbleweed? Um? And I wasn't always in a
Speaker 1: good place to judge this well. I think one way
Speaker 1: in which movie tumbleweeds often fall short is in size,
Speaker 1: just the size shown, Because the tumbleweed in a movie
Speaker 1: it's always pretty much basketball sized. It's very round, or
Speaker 1: maybe you could say like turkey sized. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like a good Thanksgiving turkey. But it's made out of twigs. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: tumbleweeds can vary in size and reality, and we'll we'll
Speaker 1: explain more about that as we go on. But you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of real tumbleweeds I've seen, especially in some
Speaker 1: of the more dramatic tumbleweed footage where where humanity is
Speaker 1: really doing battle with with tumbleweeds. Uh, they get big.
Speaker 1: You know, they're more in the like beach ball to
Speaker 1: bean bag chair range. Oh absolutely, yeah, you know, thinking
Speaker 1: about the cinematic ones. Yeah, a lot of the times
Speaker 1: when you see a kind of essentially a fake looking
Speaker 1: tumbleweed and obvious plant, a plant that is is self
Speaker 1: a plant. Um, it will be that beach ball or
Speaker 1: turkey sized, uh tumbleweed just big enough to where it
Speaker 1: is amusing but not a threat. Uh, it'll just kind
Speaker 1: of be, you know, lazily rolling by in the background.
Speaker 1: And Uh, one film that that I was looking at,
Speaker 1: it was pretty interesting because you can see both examples
Speaker 1: of this, and that's the film The Petrified Forest starring
Speaker 1: Leslie Howard, Betty Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, which in and
Speaker 1: of itself is a tremendous film, but some of it
Speaker 1: is is obviously on more of a set or a
Speaker 1: sound stage, and other bits of it are filmed outdoors. Uh,
Speaker 1: perhaps in actual Arizona or at least somewhere in California
Speaker 1: that that you know, fit the bill. Yeah, and in
Speaker 1: the location shot, in fact, there's an early location shot
Speaker 1: where you see Leslie Howard's character walking down the street
Speaker 1: there and there's a fair sized tumble weed that that
Speaker 1: comes in at a at a pretty swift pace. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they filmed it in during an actual
Speaker 1: windstorm or they just have some you know, some big
Speaker 1: fans going. But uh, there's a moment there where I
Speaker 1: when I was rewatching and I'm like, oh, jeez, I
Speaker 1: hope this doesn't hit Leslie Howard. That would uh you
Speaker 1: know that that that wouldn't be very becoming of such
Speaker 1: a suave character. Well, isn't the beginning premise of the
Speaker 1: film that he has traveled out west in order to
Speaker 1: maybe commit suicide. So is it possible that he wanted
Speaker 1: suicide by tumbleweed? Well, I don't know how romantic would
Speaker 1: that day. Uh? Yeah, I think he says that he
Speaker 1: he's hoping to one day see the Pacific Ocean and
Speaker 1: perhaps drowned in it. But but I can't imagine saying
Speaker 1: I hoped one day too to uh run across the
Speaker 1: six feet tumbleweed and be demolished by it. I hope
Speaker 1: one day to to be absorbed by a sea of thorns. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, to to get back to the to the
Speaker 1: point here. Yeah, these tumbleweeds can get rather large. And
Speaker 1: I never really realized this before until this holiday season,
Speaker 1: this that we've just gone through because this year, or
Speaker 1: this previous year rather just after Christmas, my family we
Speaker 1: found ourselves, um driving south from Phoenix to Tucson, Arizona,
Speaker 1: and then west towards Las Cruces before cutting up to
Speaker 1: Albuquerque and then Santa Fe and um, and we were
Speaker 1: doing this because we originally are going to take a
Speaker 1: northern route through Flagstaff, but winter weather forced us to pivot.
Speaker 1: So here we are, Uh, we're going on Interstate ten
Speaker 1: between Tucson and Las Crucis. And what during my stretch
Speaker 1: of the driving, we begin to enter this uh, this
Speaker 1: this this uh you know, the you know where in
Speaker 1: the desert is you know, desolate. We get these advisories
Speaker 1: about possible you know, wind, possible uh dust storms and
Speaker 1: uh and then I begin to see the first tumbleweeds. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, I've been going out west for a
Speaker 1: while now, and I don't think i'd ever really seen
Speaker 1: a tumbleweed in action. Maybe i'd maybe i'd seen one
Speaker 1: small like turkey basketball size one. But this was the
Speaker 1: first time I started seeing some real bad boys, some
Speaker 1: real monsters rolling around. Uh. For first of all, at
Speaker 1: the you know, sort of the side of the road,
Speaker 1: were sometimes like stuck up against a fence. But then eventually, uh,
Speaker 1: they're they're crossing the road. They're being blown across the
Speaker 1: the highway, and it's quite alarming because again, some of
Speaker 1: these are are huge. There we were we were commenting
Speaker 1: at the time, perhaps overreacting, that they look like they're
Speaker 1: the you know, about half the size of a Voltswagen.
Speaker 1: Did you hit one? Oh yes, yeah, eventually let's started
Speaker 1: hitting them and that they explode. Yeah, they kind of
Speaker 1: or it's kind of like, um, it's like frosted, uh
Speaker 1: not frosted. What were they? Yeah, but not the many ones,
Speaker 1: the big ones. Oh yeah, Okay, it's like a shredded wheat,
Speaker 1: like shredded many wheat, of the shredded wheat hitting the
Speaker 1: front of your car. They just kind of, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: crumple and implode, and um, part of it gets stuck
Speaker 1: under the vehicle. But it's alarming because they're so big
Speaker 1: in volume at the size at the time. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I thought of it this way, but I
Speaker 1: was imagining it's like running into a ball of about
Speaker 1: five thousand tooth brushes and toothpicks all loosely taped together. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like that. And yeah, you're seeing them
Speaker 1: slam into other vehicles in the the opposing side of
Speaker 1: the highway. I'm watching them just slam into the fronts
Speaker 1: of tractor trailer rigs and and it's weird to watch
Speaker 1: them because on one hand, there there's something about the
Speaker 1: tumble weed moving around that is kind of comical. There's
Speaker 1: something absurd about it. And so I'm kind of freaking
Speaker 1: out about the driving of My wife is just like
Speaker 1: cracking up laughing at these things in the seat next
Speaker 1: to me, and um. And then the other thing is
Speaker 1: the way that they're you know, they're they're not perfect spheres. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're not perfectly round. They have this kind of oblong
Speaker 1: shape to them, so they kind of tumble and bounce
Speaker 1: and especially with the you know, the uncertainty of the
Speaker 1: wind and also the aerodynamics of the high speed traffic,
Speaker 1: the way that they behave kind of comes to to
Speaker 1: mimic that of an animal. You're trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what's it gonna do. Is it gonna cross, is it
Speaker 1: not gonna cross? Is it gonna halfway cross? And then
Speaker 1: change direction, and so all of this adds up to
Speaker 1: this this anxiety I was feeling about these tumbleweeds because
Speaker 1: I'm I'm trying to to to figure out what they're
Speaker 1: going to do and if I'm going to hit them,
Speaker 1: and then I have to make sure I'm not going
Speaker 1: to swerve and make the situation worse. Well, so with
Speaker 1: us talking like this, I immediately wonder if it's like
Speaker 1: if it's like us also talking about trying to drive
Speaker 1: in snow. I don't know if you've seen the stuff
Speaker 1: on the internet where anybody who lives up north makes
Speaker 1: fun of people from the South. You're like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's like an inch of snow on the ground and
Speaker 1: suddenly nobody can drive. Yeah. I imagine that there are
Speaker 1: some some desert dwellers out there who are who are
Speaker 1: having a laugh at um that at how we're talking
Speaker 1: about this here, and I mean they're probably used to it.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I just I don't think i'd ever been
Speaker 1: down there or and I wasn't in the right place
Speaker 1: at the right time to encounter like full blown, literally
Speaker 1: full blown tumbleweeds season. And I was I was actually wondering,
Speaker 1: why are there no signs advising tourists about this, Like
Speaker 1: they're warning us about what to do during the dust storm,
Speaker 1: But how about it, like don't swerve, just go ahead
Speaker 1: and hit the tumbleweed. Uh, you know, some sort of
Speaker 1: a poster to that effect. Anyway, I afterwards, I started
Speaker 1: looking around because I was curious, well, you know, does
Speaker 1: this ever get out of hand or is this just
Speaker 1: something where if you're if you live around at you're
Speaker 1: used to it. Well, Uh, I did some research online.
Speaker 1: I started running across news stories with headlines featuring things
Speaker 1: like tumbleweed Nightmares from as recently as last month, in
Speaker 1: which winds basically blocked certain New Mexico roads with tumbleweeds,
Speaker 1: or a NBC headline quote thirty foot tumbleweed pile up
Speaker 1: traps cars, semi trucks on Washington Highway, or another one
Speaker 1: this this was quite impressive tumbleweeds bury New Mexico town.
Speaker 1: And if you start looking up footage or images of
Speaker 1: some of this um it's it's not as much of
Speaker 1: an exaggeration as as you think, like you're looking at
Speaker 1: a two story like suburban homes and the tumble weeds,
Speaker 1: which again you're talking about tumbleweeds that can reach you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes like six ft in diameter. They're piling up, they're
Speaker 1: reaching the second floor of the house. Yeah, piled up
Speaker 1: like heavy snow drifts, except probably even more difficult to
Speaker 1: deal with than snow, right because snow, I mean you
Speaker 1: can at least shovel out of the way. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I could say easily, but to some degree easily.
Speaker 1: Tumbleweeds are notoriously difficult to handle and deal with. I
Speaker 1: think because of their size and their shape and the composition,
Speaker 1: like the thorny nous of them. It's difficult to just
Speaker 1: grab them because they're usually thorny and and in some
Speaker 1: way repel your flesh. And uh. It's also difficult to
Speaker 1: to sort of scoop them out of the way because
Speaker 1: they tend to break. Yeah, with snow, Like one of
Speaker 1: the great things about snow is that even if you
Speaker 1: don't shovel it. Um. Usually what's gonna happen is it's
Speaker 1: gonna melt. Right, the sun is gonna na come out,
Speaker 1: temperatures are gonna rise, That snow is gonna melt. The
Speaker 1: tumbleweed is not going to melt. The tumbleweeds a mass
Speaker 1: against the side of your house might not distribute on
Speaker 1: their own and they might catch on fire. They might
Speaker 1: catch on fire, yeah, because they're basically they're dried out,
Speaker 1: lifeless brittle um vegetation. So they're they're they're a fire
Speaker 1: has it. They're a legitimate fire hazard clumped up against
Speaker 1: the side of your house. So you've got to get
Speaker 1: rid of them. Or if they're not, again, if they're
Speaker 1: not against the side of your house, then they're perhaps
Speaker 1: blocking the road. Uh. They can also cause other issue,
Speaker 1: you know, they build up against fences. They can interfere
Speaker 1: with with drainage systems um because again, a lot of
Speaker 1: the environments we're talking about here are very dry most
Speaker 1: of the year, but then there will be a deluge
Speaker 1: and during that time you need to have sufficient drainage
Speaker 1: systems in place. You don't need those drainage systems and canals,
Speaker 1: etcetera clogged with old tumbleweeds. They can also interfere with
Speaker 1: irrigation systems. They can can cause a huge mess, and
Speaker 1: they do cause traffic accidents. Um i'm reading. I was
Speaker 1: reading about one in Jadito Wash that was apparently so
Speaker 1: impressive that the Arizona Daily Press did a ten year
Speaker 1: anniversary story about the incident, and I included a photo
Speaker 1: from the story in our notes here, Joe, it does
Speaker 1: look quite impressive. You ever like comb a shedding dog
Speaker 1: and end up with all these clumps of hair that
Speaker 1: you need to get rid of at the end. But
Speaker 1: then now imagine that, but it's twenty ft high. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like like Clifford the Big Red Dog or Marmaduke
Speaker 1: sized pile of of of shavings. Here now, like you
Speaker 1: were saying, yeah, it's difficult to clean all this stuff up.
Speaker 1: What do you have to do? You have to get
Speaker 1: a work crew out there. They've got to to gather
Speaker 1: these materials up. You've got to put them into vehicles, uh,
Speaker 1: and and take them somewhere, take them away. And they're
Speaker 1: mostly air, so you end up like really filling up
Speaker 1: a vehicle. But then you know the weight volume isn't there, so, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you start doing the math on you know,
Speaker 1: the the cost of labor, the cost of materials, the
Speaker 1: cost of transportation, and and the cost end up really
Speaker 1: skyrocketing for the various counties and towns and cities that
Speaker 1: have to engage in this kind of cleanup effort. One
Speaker 1: of the articles we were both reading for this episode
Speaker 1: is a PBS article about tumbleweeds by an author named
Speaker 1: Gabriella Ciros, but citing information from somebody named Ariel of Vario,
Speaker 1: a deputy agricultural commissioner at the county's Weed Abatement Division
Speaker 1: in Lancaster, California. U Ciros writes, quote, in the cities
Speaker 1: of Palmdale and Lancaster, tumbleweeds are such a big problem
Speaker 1: that Los Angeles County spends a hundred thousand to a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly mowing and chipping dried
Speaker 1: out Russian thistle that's the name of one specific dominant
Speaker 1: species of tumbleweed in vacant lots and abandoned agricultural fields
Speaker 1: before they can tumble away. So this is above a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars a year of a problem for one county,
Speaker 1: I mean big county, but uh, every year it's enough
Speaker 1: to make you wonder. Um, you know, there's got to
Speaker 1: be a better way, right, It's got to be some
Speaker 1: sort of technological improvement, uh, that that we could make
Speaker 1: that would uh, that would improve this situation. Uh and
Speaker 1: uh And indeed I found evidence of a of a
Speaker 1: really promising and and frightening looking project that I'm not
Speaker 1: sure ever really quite got off the ground. But I
Speaker 1: want to read verbatim from this n l A Times
Speaker 1: article by Eddie Pell's go for it all right, there
Speaker 1: we go Los Cruces, New Mexico. It looks like a
Speaker 1: contraption straight out of a Stephen King novel, huge metal spoke,
Speaker 1: squirreling away, shredding everything in its path. But the invention
Speaker 1: from New Mexico State University's Advanced Manufacturing Center is out
Speaker 1: only to mow down the bane of the West, the
Speaker 1: ever present tumble weed. So you shared video of this
Speaker 1: man alur with me, and it does look like a beast. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I found this this archived video that was put out
Speaker 1: I think by the by New Mexico State University UM
Speaker 1: or perhaps the State Highway Department. I forget which, but
Speaker 1: it was it was all about this, this promising new project,
Speaker 1: and it included footage of the prototype for this that
Speaker 1: The invention we're talking about is the tumbleweed crumbler. It
Speaker 1: was developed via a forty contract at the time to
Speaker 1: New Mexico State University from the State Highway Department develop
Speaker 1: a better way of collecting and shredding the tumbleweeds. And
Speaker 1: the prototype was essentially a pair of rotating, like inwardly
Speaker 1: rotating metal spokes hooked at the front of a snowplow truck. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like drum barrels imagine that are sort of
Speaker 1: rolling inward as if you know, to to roll things
Speaker 1: into the gap between them, which is pretty small, and
Speaker 1: that it's got spikes sticking out of the drums. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's a really excellent part of the video where
Speaker 1: a guy is standing right in front of it while
Speaker 1: it's running, kind of feeding tumbleweeds into it, and we
Speaker 1: were thinking, like, oh, is he going to reach in
Speaker 1: there to try to clear out a jam by hand? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like one of those like shake hands
Speaker 1: with dangerous safety videos. It just looks very unsafe and
Speaker 1: and I don't. I don't know. I the guitar twine
Speaker 1: comes in. Johnny thought he could save time because the
Speaker 1: I mean, it's terrifying, but it also looks really effective.
Speaker 1: They show it, uh like running into mounds of tumbleweeds.
Speaker 1: These uh, these wheels with the with the spikes on them,
Speaker 1: they grind up these these tumbleweeds and then the ground
Speaker 1: up remnants are like sucked up and shot into the
Speaker 1: back of the snowplow truck. So uh, you know, this
Speaker 1: seems like it seems like it would it would have
Speaker 1: been a great fix because first of all, you have
Speaker 1: the snowplow trucks anyway that are being used during parts
Speaker 1: of the year to to deal with keeping the roads clear,
Speaker 1: and then snowplow trucks without this kind of spike contraption
Speaker 1: are apparently sometime times used to clear the roads of
Speaker 1: tumbleweeds anyway, though of course they're just mostly pushing them
Speaker 1: out of the way and not really you know, not
Speaker 1: collecting them. So it seems like this would have been
Speaker 1: a cool way to to deal with the problem. But
Speaker 1: so are these machines day wegur Now, No, I don't
Speaker 1: think they are. That's the thing. You know you you
Speaker 1: see uh, you see an article like this, and you
Speaker 1: see if you see footage like this, And again this
Speaker 1: was ninety six and as far as I can tell
Speaker 1: this this ended up not really going too much more
Speaker 1: beyond the prototype phase in the video they're talking about
Speaker 1: they're going on to another phase of development. And I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe I couldn't find an answer as to
Speaker 1: why exactly they didn't go with this. Maybe it just
Speaker 1: came down to something as mundane as uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the money or politics, UH, cost effective or something. Maybe
Speaker 1: it just wasn't cost effective. UM, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: it was too dangerous. I have no no way of knowing,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't able to find out. But this seems
Speaker 1: to be a trend with a lot of issues related
Speaker 1: to the problem of tumbleweeds, particularly in the United States.
Speaker 1: I kept running across UH promising sounding scientific solutions UH
Speaker 1: from years past, solutions that in many cases may still
Speaker 1: be in development, but but but have not reached that
Speaker 1: point where someone is out there saying, yes, this is
Speaker 1: the thing we're actually doing tumbleweeds, watch out because we're coming.
Speaker 1: Though some of these solutions do get more sci fi
Speaker 1: than the mangler. Yes, yes, all right, Well, I guess
Speaker 1: it's worth explaining at this point what are tumbleweeds? Uh,
Speaker 1: And I think the most important point to say the
Speaker 1: beginning is that technically tumbleweed is not a single species
Speaker 1: of plant. Tumbleweed is a common morphological feature of a
Speaker 1: number of different species of plants spread out across different families.
Speaker 1: Though in the American context, there is one single species
Speaker 1: in the in the amaranth family that tumbleweed most often
Speaker 1: refers to, but it's by no means the only one,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk more about that species in particular later.
Speaker 1: But the broader category of features of a tumbleweed is this. So,
Speaker 1: a tumbleweed is the above ground structure of a plant
Speaker 1: which at maturity dries up and snaps away from the
Speaker 1: roots structure and then is blown around by the wind,
Speaker 1: scattering seeds as it goes. Yeah, it's sometimes referred to
Speaker 1: as a detachable diaspore. Yeah. And and a diaspore is
Speaker 1: basically any seed and other structure that helps the seed spread.
Speaker 1: So diaspore could include, like say, a little parachute like
Speaker 1: thing that catches the wind, or it could include like
Speaker 1: a fruit to that you know that an animal would eat.
Speaker 1: It's the thing around the seed that helps the seed
Speaker 1: get where it's going. Yeah, but in this case it's
Speaker 1: pretty much the entire above ground part of the plant. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so there are variations between different species, but in
Speaker 1: most cases you can picture, for a tumbleweed, a bush
Speaker 1: like plant that becomes very brittle and dry and has
Speaker 1: a big tangle of different stem segments, and eventually it
Speaker 1: breaks off at the roots at roughly the place where
Speaker 1: the stem meets the ground, and then it rolls around
Speaker 1: on the planes, driven driven on the wind, like a
Speaker 1: giant inflatable ball. Now you might think, okay, most plants
Speaker 1: don't break off at the place where they meet the
Speaker 1: ground and then get their bodies blown around, dead and
Speaker 1: dry by the wind. So why do tumbleweeds do that? Well, Actually,
Speaker 1: the answer is similar to the answer to the question
Speaker 1: why are fruits delicious? Uh. The answer is it's for
Speaker 1: seed dispersal, meaning the transportation of seeds and thus the
Speaker 1: next generation of plants away from the parent and UH.
Speaker 1: A lot of plant species actually spend a great effort
Speaker 1: at seed dispersal, and there are a host of different
Speaker 1: strategies available. So, for example, there is animal dispersal. So
Speaker 1: you can think of the seeds of edible fruits. The
Speaker 1: fruit is tasty and dense and calories, so animals want
Speaker 1: to eat it. The animal will be attracted to the fruit,
Speaker 1: they'll nom nom, they'll swallow it, and then they will
Speaker 1: travel elsewhere on their their wings or their legs, and
Speaker 1: then they will defecate and deposit the seeds in a
Speaker 1: new home. But that's not the only method of animal dispersal.
Speaker 1: They are also the burrs that cling to the fur
Speaker 1: of mammals, that that brush up against the parent plant. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know if if you've got pets
Speaker 1: that are burr magnets like my dog is. But you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes Charlie will will get into some bushes and then
Speaker 1: when he when he comes out, it's a problem he
Speaker 1: has probably like you know, a thousand of these things
Speaker 1: stuck to him, and and there are a bunch more
Speaker 1: that there. For example, there is a whole class of
Speaker 1: of diaspores that are spread specifically by ants that you
Speaker 1: know that they have specific relationships with ants that will
Speaker 1: maybe bury them underground in a way that's preferable to
Speaker 1: to the land. But there's also wind dispersal. So you
Speaker 1: can think of the seeds of dandelions. They contain a
Speaker 1: natural parachute, like a structure that catches the breeze and
Speaker 1: allows the seed to be picked up by the wind
Speaker 1: and blown to new lands. There's water dispersal. Coconuts are
Speaker 1: a great example here they float on the water and
Speaker 1: allow currents to carry them to New German nation sites.
Speaker 1: There's gravity dispersal, that's what it sounds like. There's explosive dispersal.
Speaker 1: That one's fun. Yeah, yeah, bursting pods and so forth.
Speaker 1: So there are a number of different methods uh, and
Speaker 1: there are some primary reasons that a plant would want
Speaker 1: to disperse its seeds to get the seeds away from
Speaker 1: the parent plant. One idea is that doing this reduces
Speaker 1: competition between the seed and the parent plant and with
Speaker 1: other nearby adult plants. So, just like animals, plants need
Speaker 1: access to resources. And one example here would be sunlight plants.
Speaker 1: It's sunlight in order to power photosynthesis. But if they
Speaker 1: fall straight down off of the parent this could limit
Speaker 1: them right because they could be trying to grow in
Speaker 1: the shadow of the adult plant. And you can imagine
Speaker 1: other competitions for nutrients in the soil for water and
Speaker 1: so forth. So one reason seeds might be dispersed is
Speaker 1: that the is that it allows the parent plant and
Speaker 1: the offspring to grow separately without competing with one another
Speaker 1: for access to the same resources. You know that that
Speaker 1: does make me think of the old thing the apple
Speaker 1: doesn't fall far from the tree. But that's saying really
Speaker 1: kind of misses the point, because it's not the The
Speaker 1: apple is not supposed to just fall off the tree
Speaker 1: and remain there, and then the seeds are going to
Speaker 1: end up in the soil right there beside the parent tree.
Speaker 1: Like the idea is that this is animal dispersal, that
Speaker 1: those seeds are in this lovely, delicious apple that's going
Speaker 1: to be consumed or carried off by some other creature.
Speaker 1: That's a very good point. If the apple stays too
Speaker 1: close to the tree, that could be really bad for
Speaker 1: the young apple or the young apple tree, I guess um.
Speaker 1: But then there are other reasons. So that's just one
Speaker 1: possible motivation in the evolutionary sense. Other evolutionary motivations for
Speaker 1: seed dispersal would be saying, limiting bad things that can
Speaker 1: happen to young plants when they tend to be densely
Speaker 1: congregated around the parent plant. Uh. So these bad things
Speaker 1: could include contagion, could include the you know, the spreading
Speaker 1: of pathogens that would spread among densely congregated plants, or
Speaker 1: the harvesting of predators. So if say seeds are potentially
Speaker 1: edible and they all fall in one place right around
Speaker 1: the parent, this often results in say an animal that
Speaker 1: would eat those seeds or would eat those young plants
Speaker 1: the seedlings, uh, coming gobbling them all up at one
Speaker 1: time in one big buffet. But if they spread out
Speaker 1: all over the place, the risks of things like pathogens
Speaker 1: and predators are reduced, And then other motivations could be
Speaker 1: things like colonization of new areas without competition. So you
Speaker 1: might want a way to spread your your offspring plants
Speaker 1: to areas that don't really have any other plants in
Speaker 1: them right now, you know, just kind of some bare
Speaker 1: ground if it can be located. And in the cases
Speaker 1: of tumbleweeds in particular, that often is located because tumbleweeds
Speaker 1: can grow in areas that many other plants can't tolerate
Speaker 1: or haven't been able to take root in yet. And
Speaker 1: that's going to be key moving forward. So keep that
Speaker 1: in mind, right, Uh and uh. But another thing might
Speaker 1: be that seeds would be dispersed so that they could
Speaker 1: target a specific germination spot where the plant is likely
Speaker 1: to thrive. And you can interpret that in a couple
Speaker 1: of ways. For example, some animal dispersal would mean that
Speaker 1: the seed ends up either buried in the ground or
Speaker 1: maybe surrounded by dung which can protect it and provide
Speaker 1: other benefits. Or in other cases, Uh, this might be
Speaker 1: methods of dispersal aimed at getting the seed to a
Speaker 1: certain kind of landscape or environment. Yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: one thing to keep in mind. It kind of goes
Speaker 1: back to the whole day about an idea about the
Speaker 1: apple falling far from the tree. It's not about where
Speaker 1: the apple initially falls, it's about where the seeds end up.
Speaker 1: And with the tumble weed, it's actually quite similar. It's
Speaker 1: not about it's not about really where the tumble weed
Speaker 1: ultimately goes. It's about the seeds it drops along the way.
Speaker 1: That's right. So if you apply what we've been talking
Speaker 1: about to the tumbleweed in particular, how does it disperse
Speaker 1: its seeds? Generally? What what the detachable diaspore of a
Speaker 1: tumbleweed plant does is dry up with a bunch of
Speaker 1: seeds in it, and then it will be blown about
Speaker 1: by the wind, dropping seeds as it goes, because it
Speaker 1: will be kind of dry and brittle, so it bounces
Speaker 1: over the landscape, uh, sort of degrading and breaking apart
Speaker 1: as it as it blows around, and it will drop
Speaker 1: seeds intermittently, so all over the place you get. You
Speaker 1: get vast seed dispersal with this method now, and thousands
Speaker 1: of seeds. Yeah, yeah, totally. And also if there are
Speaker 1: any seeds left in the tumbleweed when it reaches its
Speaker 1: final destination, whatever that is, I mean, I guess there
Speaker 1: probably usually are some seeds still left in it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it can, it can try to germinate from wherever it
Speaker 1: comes to rest, especially if it finds a water source,
Speaker 1: if it happens to land in a place with moisture. Yes,
Speaker 1: But one of the interesting things to keep in mind
Speaker 1: is that, again, this is a plant that does extremely
Speaker 1: well and barren environments. Uh so like an abandoned agricultural site.
Speaker 1: Oh that's that's that's pristine for the tumbleweed, you know,
Speaker 1: a vacant lot. Yes, it wants to get in there.
Speaker 1: But one of the things about say, tumbleweeds accumulating in
Speaker 1: a well irrigated yard is that I've I've read that
Speaker 1: those those tumbleweed seeds, if they land there and they're
Speaker 1: not going to really be able to compete with the
Speaker 1: grass that's growing there. So yeah, this is ultimately a
Speaker 1: plant that is at its best, uh in the worst
Speaker 1: of environments, at least from uh, you know, from from
Speaker 1: from a typical human perspective, in the worst of environments,
Speaker 1: or environments that have for some reason been cleared of
Speaker 1: their natural vegetation, which often happens in the case of
Speaker 1: human development. Yeah, and I think it's worth this is
Speaker 1: something that I saw pointed out in a couple of
Speaker 1: different sources. It's easy to get to get in this
Speaker 1: mind because again, tumbleweeds, and we'll discuss more about this.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're a pest. They're there, and they're there.
Speaker 1: It's it's a problem that people having to deal with.
Speaker 1: But you can't just look at the tumbleweed like a disease.
Speaker 1: You also have to look at the tumbleweed as a
Speaker 1: symptom of land degregation, land degradation. Yeah, yeah, so uh,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the life cycle just a little bit here. So, um,
Speaker 1: so what happens once that seed lands in just the
Speaker 1: right spot. Well, they don't need much water at all
Speaker 1: to start growing, and they have this kind of like
Speaker 1: screw like shape. They're they're kind of interesting to see
Speaker 1: the close ups of the seed. And then when they
Speaker 1: start growing, they start out looking like just blades of grass.
Speaker 1: They have kind of like a pinkish, uh, like a
Speaker 1: white and pinkish um section towards the bottom. They almost
Speaker 1: look like it almost looks like some sort of weird
Speaker 1: onion grass or something. Oh yeah, yeah, Now I want
Speaker 1: to be clear at this point, we're talking about one
Speaker 1: species of tumbleweed in particular, the one that that Americans
Speaker 1: usually mean when they say tumbleweeds. So now we've narrowed
Speaker 1: it from the broader class of tumbleweed structures to the
Speaker 1: plant people are usually calling tumbleweed, which is known as
Speaker 1: Calli tregas or sell Sola tregas, or more commonly prickly
Speaker 1: Russian thistle. But yeah, that's the one we're talking about now.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and and I'll get into a fascinating little
Speaker 1: history lesson about that one in a bit. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: if you're a singing cowboy. This is the variety you're
Speaker 1: probably singing about. Yeah, unless you hear like a really
Speaker 1: uh like you're singing botanist cowboy. And then perhaps you
Speaker 1: have a more robust um uh you know, lyrical treatment
Speaker 1: of the whole situation. But yes, your your description is good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So like usually white and pink lower stem areas branching
Speaker 1: out into green grass like structures above and in in
Speaker 1: this young form, you know, this plant doesn't look quite
Speaker 1: so quite so threatening. You know, it's not thorny yet,
Speaker 1: it's not dry and brittle yet. And uh and according
Speaker 1: to the way it looks, in fact that this this
Speaker 1: young form can be eaten by some animals. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it it should be noted that the initial leaves here
Speaker 1: are long, but then these spring leaves eventually fall off
Speaker 1: and or they're replaced by shorter leaves. Each flower contains
Speaker 1: a fruit that develops into a single seed. But then
Speaker 1: in the late fall. Uh And and again we're just
Speaker 1: talking more or less about one variety. You see some
Speaker 1: some differences depending on the variety of tumbleweed that you're
Speaker 1: you're looking at the different species. But during the late fall,
Speaker 1: they begin to dry out and die and the wind
Speaker 1: eventually breaks the dead tumbleweed free of its roots, and
Speaker 1: as as described in that that PBS source wee we
Speaker 1: referenced earlier, it's a clean break. Um, it's it's the
Speaker 1: sort of thing you could compare to like a lizard
Speaker 1: shedding its tail due to a microscopic lay ear of
Speaker 1: cells at the base of the plant called the abscission layer.
Speaker 1: Uh so this allows it to just snap off. So
Speaker 1: the part of the stem that was made to snap clean,
Speaker 1: it's like the part of the lizard's tail that can
Speaker 1: that can shake off for autautomy. Yeah, yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: it's you would be forgiven if you just, you know,
Speaker 1: casually thought, well, you know, it's it's a dry place
Speaker 1: and these bushes they just get so dry and dead
Speaker 1: and then they gets so windy here it just snaps
Speaker 1: the bushes off and they roll around. Um, but no,
Speaker 1: it's it is that. But it is also a species
Speaker 1: that has evolved to take advantage of this environment and
Speaker 1: to snap off it just the right place and it
Speaker 1: just the right time. Now, I saw some wildly different
Speaker 1: numbers about how many seeds and individual tumbleweed plant can
Speaker 1: drop as it rolls around. I assume. Obviously this varies
Speaker 1: by species, but even just with reference to Calli tragus
Speaker 1: or the Russian thistle. I saw people mentioning that, you know,
Speaker 1: one can drop a few thousand seeds, like maybe two,
Speaker 1: and then I saw estimates of like hundreds of thousands,
Speaker 1: so I really don't know which one is more at
Speaker 1: the correct end there. Yeah, I saw tens of thousands. Um.
Speaker 1: I guess the tacome here is that we need to
Speaker 1: think of it again, not as like a single seed,
Speaker 1: but a depositor of many, many seeds. It's not about
Speaker 1: where the where it goes. It's about the seeds it
Speaker 1: drops along the way, as it tumbles, as it bounds
Speaker 1: across the landscape, as it weaves in and out of
Speaker 1: traffic and collides with semi trucks. Um, it's just gonna
Speaker 1: spread out the seeds across the way, and all the
Speaker 1: ones that land in just the right spot are going
Speaker 1: to have a shot at growing into plant, into adult
Speaker 1: plants themselves. It's one of those evolutionary marvels, which is
Speaker 1: in fact neither of these things, but kind of strikes
Speaker 1: you somehow as stupid and genius at the same time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's that again kind of cuts to
Speaker 1: the reason that tumbleweeds can be both frightening and impressive
Speaker 1: in person, but also innately comical. There's just something kind
Speaker 1: of ridunculous about this large bush bumbling and bouncing across
Speaker 1: the landscape. So I was curious about the you know,
Speaker 1: the physics of the of this thing. I was like,
Speaker 1: and my and my wife even brought this up, just like,
Speaker 1: surely somebody's looked at the physics of this. So I
Speaker 1: was looking around and I found a wonderful book by
Speaker 1: Ralph D. Lawns, a planetary scientist and engineer at the
Speaker 1: John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. It's titled Spinning Flight Dynamics
Speaker 1: of Frisbees, Boomerangs, Samaras and Skipping Stones, And uh, there's
Speaker 1: a there's there's only a brief part of the book
Speaker 1: that really gets into tumbleweeds um and ultimately he ends
Speaker 1: up talking more about tumbleweed rover designs, which I'll I'll
Speaker 1: touch on briefly in a minute, but uh, first I
Speaker 1: want to read this quote from the book by Lawrence. Quote.
Speaker 1: It is worth noting that the center of mass of
Speaker 1: a tumbleweed is generally off set from the geometric center.
Speaker 1: To what extent this is an inevitable consequence of the
Speaker 1: dendritic architecture of a plant, in that the branches must
Speaker 1: converge towards an apex which is linked to the roots
Speaker 1: system is unclear. It may be that there are dispersal
Speaker 1: performance advantages in such a departure from spherical symmetry. Tumbling,
Speaker 1: bouncing rather than rolling, may enhance the shedding of seeds
Speaker 1: from the plant. That totally makes sense to me. So
Speaker 1: if it were a more perfectly round dry shrub that
Speaker 1: were to roll away, it might roll better, but it
Speaker 1: also might shake. Uh, it might shake seeds loose in
Speaker 1: a less even way. But by having a kind of
Speaker 1: oblong or uneven structure, it's always kind of bouncing while
Speaker 1: it rolls, and with every impact as it bounces, it
Speaker 1: can have a greater chance of shaking some of those
Speaker 1: seeds loose. Yeah. Absolutely, And he also points out that
Speaker 1: that the tumbleweed is naturally porous. So and we look
Speaker 1: at the airflow. The air is flowing not only on
Speaker 1: and around it and against it, but also through it
Speaker 1: um and he discusses He discusses most of this in
Speaker 1: connection again to the tumbleweed rover designs. These are various
Speaker 1: UH engineering approaches to creating some sort of a you know,
Speaker 1: a rover or probe that will work on the UH.
Speaker 1: Generally we're talking about the surface of another planet or
Speaker 1: another planetary body of some sort, or a moon or
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, Mars is often a target here because
Speaker 1: again we have to remember there is wind on Mars
Speaker 1: and UH and if we could take advantage of that, UH,
Speaker 1: that would be a way to to move a rover
Speaker 1: across the landscape. UM. So you have various takes on
Speaker 1: this that are you know, and some are inflatable, some
Speaker 1: are non inflatable, UM, you know, roughly spherical designs to
Speaker 1: allow a rover to roll more or less like a tumbleweed. UM.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like the you know, while this is
Speaker 1: a promising area of study, the tumbleweed rover nut remains
Speaker 1: to you know, remains to be fully cracked. But a
Speaker 1: lot of the science around it UM. I thought was
Speaker 1: interesting because it kind of helps illustrate what really works
Speaker 1: about the tumbleweed the plant as a as an as
Speaker 1: an evolved solution and as an as as an evolved
Speaker 1: approach to the landscape and what wouldn't work, uh for
Speaker 1: a probe or a vehicle. So some of the designs
Speaker 1: do tend towards non smooth surfaces like the real tumble weed.
Speaker 1: And there have even been some experiments with oblong shapes,
Speaker 1: but these produced bouncing due to acquired kinetic energy, something
Speaker 1: Laurens rights is quote not recommended for an attractive vehicle design.
Speaker 1: And I think that's quite telling again because with it,
Speaker 1: with these tumbleweed rover designs, we are trying to solve
Speaker 1: a human vehicle problem, how to move a thing from
Speaker 1: one place to another and potentially to other locations, and
Speaker 1: to control the movement as well. The tumbleweed plant, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, is not trying to arrive at a destination.
Speaker 1: It's again all about the journey and that it and
Speaker 1: it's going to drop its various seeds along the way
Speaker 1: and bouncing far from being a danger to sensitive cargo
Speaker 1: and and uh you know, sensors and whatnot. Uh, this
Speaker 1: can help free the seeds that need to be dropped
Speaker 1: and um, you know, and again naturally, tumbleweed plants are
Speaker 1: not perfect spheres. They're they're they're vaguely spherical and are
Speaker 1: I guess more bush shaped than anything um as opposed
Speaker 1: to like, you know, ball shaped, they're more shaped like
Speaker 1: a turkey than they are shaped like a beach ball.
Speaker 1: If if a turkey were likely to be like one
Speaker 1: to two meters in width, yea, and was like, you know,
Speaker 1: light enough to be pushed around in the wind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're really it's it's really remarkable. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's time to talk abouit about the history
Speaker 1: of the tumbleweed. And one of the strangest facts about
Speaker 1: the tumbleweed, this icon of the American West, is that
Speaker 1: it is not actually native to North America. It's a
Speaker 1: fairly late arrival. In fact, one of the most common
Speaker 1: plants categorized as a tumbleweed in the United States today
Speaker 1: is the one we focused on a good bit already
Speaker 1: uh known sometimes as callie tregas or previously known as
Speaker 1: Salsula tregas. The common name again is prickly Russian thistle.
Speaker 1: The name gives it away a bit where it actually
Speaker 1: comes from. This is a species originating in the steps
Speaker 1: of eastern Europe and Western Asia, probably around the area
Speaker 1: of Ukraine. And I found a very interesting description of
Speaker 1: tumbleweeds in an eighteen fifty two botanical reference book by
Speaker 1: an English surgeon and botanist named Arthur Henfrey. It's called
Speaker 1: The Vegetation of Europe Its Conditions and Causes, published by
Speaker 1: Javan Vorst in eighteen fifty two. And uh, he gets
Speaker 1: to talking about tumbleweeds in the section of the book
Speaker 1: where he's cataloging the plant life of the Russian step
Speaker 1: So again you have to imagine that at the time
Speaker 1: this was written in the eighteen fifties, there was probably
Speaker 1: no trace of this type of tumbleweed in the United States.
Speaker 1: But here's what Hinfrey says. In these regions, the wormwoods
Speaker 1: and thistles grow to a size unknown In the west
Speaker 1: of Europe. It is said that the thistle bush found
Speaker 1: where these abound is tall enough to hide a Cossack horseman.
Speaker 1: The natives call all these rank weeds useless for past
Speaker 1: yere burian, and with the dry dung of the flocks,
Speaker 1: this constitutes all the fuel they possess. Oh, and I
Speaker 1: should note, by the way, that while he keeps saying thistle,
Speaker 1: because that is the common name and what they were
Speaker 1: classifying at is back then, I think technically, in the
Speaker 1: in the modern botanical sense, the tumbleweeds referring to are
Speaker 1: not true thistles. They're not thistles, but that's what they're
Speaker 1: called here, So Henfrey goes on. One curious plant of
Speaker 1: the thistle tribe has attracted the notice of most travelers,
Speaker 1: the wind witch, as it is called by the German colonists,
Speaker 1: or leap the field, as the Russian name may be translated.
Speaker 1: It forms a large globular mass of light wiry branches
Speaker 1: interlaced together, and in autumn decays off at the route,
Speaker 1: the upper part drying up. It is then at the
Speaker 1: mercy of the autumn blast, and it is said that
Speaker 1: thousands of them may sometimes be seen coursing over the plane, rolling, dancing,
Speaker 1: and leaping over the slight inequalities, often looking at a
Speaker 1: distance like a troop of wild horses. It is not
Speaker 1: uncommon for twenty or thirty to become entangled into a
Speaker 1: mass and then roll away, as Mr Cole says, quote
Speaker 1: like a huge giant in his seven league boots. Oh
Speaker 1: my goodness, yeah, this is this is exactly what I
Speaker 1: was saying on the highway a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: Because sometimes you would see two that were I saw
Speaker 1: at one point two of them that were bound together,
Speaker 1: and this monstrosity was what jumped in front of a semitruck. Wow.
Speaker 1: I kind of wish I had seen that, But I
Speaker 1: gotta finish the last thing he says, because he describes
Speaker 1: the demise of this, uh, this, this giant in the
Speaker 1: Seven League boots uh quote. Thousands of them are annually
Speaker 1: blown into the Black Sea, and here, once in contact
Speaker 1: with water, in an instant, lose the fantastic grace belonging
Speaker 1: to their dry, unsubstantial texture. They are like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: it is like a witch like melting in the water
Speaker 1: because it's so good the wind, which that I've been
Speaker 1: captivated by that ever since I read it. These things
Speaker 1: are are wind witches. Um. But so, okay, this is
Speaker 1: describing something in like the what they're calling the Russian Step,
Speaker 1: probably the area around the Black Sea, the Black Sea basin,
Speaker 1: or probably around Ukraine. So how does this type of
Speaker 1: plant end up in the United States? Well, beginning in
Speaker 1: the later decades of the nineteenth century, reports of a
Speaker 1: similar plant. I can't be sure they're talking about exactly
Speaker 1: the same species, but it seems likely to me. Uh,
Speaker 1: They're They're at least definitely talking about the same type
Speaker 1: of plants, some kind of tumble weed. UM. Reports of
Speaker 1: a similar type of plants start pouring in from places
Speaker 1: in the Great Plains of North America, places like South Dakota,
Speaker 1: UM and UH. It's hard to know exactly when they
Speaker 1: showed up, but a commonly reported claim put forward in
Speaker 1: a source I'm going to mention in a minute here
Speaker 1: is that they arrived in the United States around the
Speaker 1: year eighteen seventy or sometime in the early eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: possibly in shipments of flax seed contaminated with these Russian
Speaker 1: thistle seeds UM. A commonly given date is eighteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: It is interesting to read reports from the early decades
Speaker 1: of their proliferation on the continent. By the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: invasive Russian thistle had become such a problem that the U.
Speaker 1: S Department of Agriculture Botany Division issued a Farmer's bulletin
Speaker 1: on the subject, authored by someone named L. H. Dewey.
Speaker 1: The l H stands for Lister Hoaxe Dewey, So you
Speaker 1: can actually look up a PDF of this yourself online.
Speaker 1: It's called the Russian Thistle and other Troublesome weeds in
Speaker 1: the wheat region of Minnesota and North and South Dakota.
Speaker 1: This document is actually more interesting and fund to read
Speaker 1: than you might expect for a farmer's bulletin. Uh So,
Speaker 1: so there's a number of tidbits I want to discuss
Speaker 1: from it, but first of all, I just want to
Speaker 1: read directly from it, as it is discussing the difficulty
Speaker 1: that farmers in the planes were facing due to the
Speaker 1: proliferation of tumbleweeds, probably from from Russian thistle. So Dewey writes,
Speaker 1: some of its special characteristics render this thistle much more
Speaker 1: troublesome than other weeds. Again, it's not actually a thistle.
Speaker 1: It is armed with spines quite as sharp and much
Speaker 1: stronger than those of common thistles. Because of these, it
Speaker 1: is difficult to drive horses through a field where the
Speaker 1: plants are abundant. In some sections, the farmers find it
Speaker 1: necessary to bind leathers about the horses legs while at work.
Speaker 1: Horses running in the pasture are often injured by having
Speaker 1: the skin in on their legs badly lacerated. The spines
Speaker 1: breaking off under the skin caused festering sores. These sores
Speaker 1: are caused by the irritation. However, not by any poisonous property,
Speaker 1: as is frequently supposed. Hunters find difficulty in getting their
Speaker 1: dogs to work well for prairie chickens in the stubble,
Speaker 1: and the dogs are sometimes injured by the sharp spines.
Speaker 1: Thrashers find it almost impossible to get gloves thick enough
Speaker 1: to keep the spines out of their fingers, yet thin
Speaker 1: enough to work with. Oh, and then he talks about
Speaker 1: how these tumbleweeds can be a fire hazard. Of course,
Speaker 1: so he says, the Russian thistle is the worst rolling
Speaker 1: tumbleweed on the prairie, and in time of prairie fires,
Speaker 1: is easily blown across a fire break of any width,
Speaker 1: carrying fire to stacks and buildings. Yeah. So, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the thing. Not only can they potentially be a
Speaker 1: fire hazard once they arrive at sort of a termination point,
Speaker 1: you know, when they're stuck against the fence or a house,
Speaker 1: but they can be on fire and be in motion.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. And probably one of the more outrageous
Speaker 1: examples of this um was making the rounds on the internet,
Speaker 1: I think back in uh and it took place at
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty acre um prescribed burn at the
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountain arsenal near Denver, Colorado. And if you haven't
Speaker 1: seen this footage, look it up. I think it was
Speaker 1: making the rounds, especially on like BuzzFeed news and stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know what you see is you see firefighters
Speaker 1: out there, you know, engaging in this um, you know,
Speaker 1: intentional burn of the of the landscape there, and a
Speaker 1: dust devil kicks up, so you know, like a small vortex,
Speaker 1: and what does it do. It starts pulling tumbleweeds up
Speaker 1: into it. And uh and and this is I've seen
Speaker 1: footage of this occurring um with tumbleweeds elsewhere, except in
Speaker 1: this case the tumbleweeds are also on fire, so it
Speaker 1: is essentially a dust devil of flaming tumbleweeds. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like it looks like a tornado made out of tumbleweeds
Speaker 1: that are on fire. Right, it seems that, I mean,
Speaker 1: it just sounds like a shark nado sort of a situation.
Speaker 1: But no, it exists. I mean, it would seems like
Speaker 1: the main characteristics that are the problem here that tumbleweeds
Speaker 1: are so they're brittle, you know, fuel their their would
Speaker 1: so they're they're highly flammable, and they're very low density,
Speaker 1: so they can easily be moved around. And of course,
Speaker 1: when there is fire, that creates drafts of air that
Speaker 1: that suck and blow things in different directions on its own.
Speaker 1: So yeah, tumbleweeds plus fire just seems like a nightmare
Speaker 1: to try to control. Now, Naturally, one thing you would
Speaker 1: do to prevent fire from spreading, say in a prairie regions,
Speaker 1: you would have what are known as fire breaks. You
Speaker 1: would have you know, like ditches or areas of cleared
Speaker 1: land where there's no fuel, you know. So it's just like,
Speaker 1: if there is a fire, it's going to be stopped
Speaker 1: here because there's no fuel for it to spread across.
Speaker 1: But if you have tumbleweeds, first of all, they're they're
Speaker 1: likely to gather in fire breaks anyway, because that's the
Speaker 1: kind of you know, they will fall. They will settle
Speaker 1: their seeds in cleared land and grow grow there, so
Speaker 1: they can grow in firebreaks. When they're tumbling, they'll probably
Speaker 1: get stuck in fire breaks and pile up there. And
Speaker 1: uh and even if there's nothing in the fire break,
Speaker 1: if there's tumble if there are tumbleweeds burning on one side,
Speaker 1: they can easily leap over the break and then just
Speaker 1: spread it to the other side. You know, when I
Speaker 1: first encountered this, I also was thinking, Okay, maybe this
Speaker 1: is just a rare thing though, a flaming tumbleweed. I mean,
Speaker 1: just because it's on BuzzFeed news doesn't mean it's an
Speaker 1: accurate representation of reality. Um. But then I was looking
Speaker 1: around at some various folkloric references to tumble weeds, most
Speaker 1: of which I'm gonna say for part two. But there
Speaker 1: was this one bit from a folklore's by the name
Speaker 1: of Thomas Edward Cheney, who lived nineteen o one through
Speaker 1: who specialized in Mormon folklore and folklore of the bad Lands,
Speaker 1: and he wrote this in nineteen fifty nine in Scandinavian
Speaker 1: Immigrants stories quote, A story glows like a tumbleweed on
Speaker 1: fire as it passes on. It may die after or
Speaker 1: a brief and flashy existence, or it may be retained
Speaker 1: in the mind of a jokester until he dies and
Speaker 1: leaves his legacy to members of his family. They in
Speaker 1: turn recall sporadically the stories which particularly resemble their experiences.
Speaker 1: Many such stories die without the folklorist or anyone else
Speaker 1: getting them into the written language. Now that's just a
Speaker 1: good quote. About just sort of the nature of storytelling.
Speaker 1: And I just kind of like what he's actually trying
Speaker 1: to relate there. But I also love that, like that
Speaker 1: that here is the flaming tumbleweed as a as a
Speaker 1: metaphor to explain that, and clearly like one that's not
Speaker 1: so novel as to be foreign. I guess two people
Speaker 1: of of of this part of the country, Like, he
Speaker 1: doesn't have to stop and say, let me tell you
Speaker 1: a story about a tumbleweed that once caught on fire,
Speaker 1: and how gonna use that to make my point? No,
Speaker 1: like the tumbleweed on fire seems to be just you know,
Speaker 1: more or less off the shelf, even if it feels
Speaker 1: a little novel to many of us. But I like
Speaker 1: that metaphor. Actually it has both, uh in terms of
Speaker 1: oral storytelling. It has both its strengthen its fragility there
Speaker 1: because a tumble wheat on fire will burn up pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: and so it's it's very fleeting, it's very ephemeral. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, it's you know, it spread super easily,
Speaker 1: so if it if it reaches another fuel source, there
Speaker 1: it goes. But anyway, so in this document, this Department
Speaker 1: of Agriculture document, from the eighteen nineties. LH. Dewey goes
Speaker 1: on to talk about some of the same kind of
Speaker 1: problems we've already discussed in the modern age. You know
Speaker 1: that they will pile up against buildings, that they will
Speaker 1: pile up against fences, that they will will choke fields,
Speaker 1: that they will even if you kind of mulch them down. Uh.
Speaker 1: That they may do some good in in nourishing the land,
Speaker 1: but just that they're hard to deal with when they're
Speaker 1: in their bulky form. They just get stuck in all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff and and cause these huge problems. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was another very interesting note I came across in this.
Speaker 1: There was more just to kind of uh something mentioned
Speaker 1: in passing in this document, but I thought it was
Speaker 1: sociologically interesting. So, in discussing where Russian thistle comes from,
Speaker 1: Dewey says, all the evidence points to the idea that
Speaker 1: it was imported in contaminated shipments of flax seeds that
Speaker 1: were received in in the States around eighteen seventy three
Speaker 1: or in the early eighteen seventies, And then he goes
Speaker 1: on to say, quote, there is evidently no foundation whatever
Speaker 1: for the theory which is too often related as a
Speaker 1: fact that it was first sewn in South Dakota by immigrants,
Speaker 1: either for forage or to inflict an injury on an enemy.
Speaker 1: So at least as early as the eighteen nineties, people
Speaker 1: were spreading a completely baseless rumor that this invasive plant
Speaker 1: was due to immigrants who had sowed the weed on purpose,
Speaker 1: possibly even with the intent to cause harm. Very much
Speaker 1: uh mo on the Simpsons immigrants, I knew it was them.
Speaker 1: But then later Dewey is talking about how quickly he's
Speaker 1: trying to document how quickly the Russian thistle spread. Uh.
Speaker 1: He says, quote in many localities where a few plants
Speaker 1: were first seen four or five years ago, every spot
Speaker 1: of land where the sod has been broken is now occupied.
Speaker 1: On every badger burrow and overfed spot in the prairie,
Speaker 1: on every roadside, railroad, embankment, firebreak, and neglected garden, On
Speaker 1: every field of early plowed land or stubble, maybe seen
Speaker 1: a patch of thistles. Again, not thistles. These are the tumbleweeds. Uh.
Speaker 1: The seeds are not here and there as with eastern weeds,
Speaker 1: but they are everywhere. The few plants introduced four or
Speaker 1: five years ago have seeded the land for miles in
Speaker 1: every direction. Um. And then the last thing in the
Speaker 1: document is a section I actually found somewhat hilarious where
Speaker 1: he issues recommendations that are they're like pure just like
Speaker 1: vilification propaganda. I mean not like obviously, you know, these
Speaker 1: tumbleweeds can be a huge problem, and I'm not saying
Speaker 1: like I'll just ignore them, but he like recommends that
Speaker 1: every school house in America should have a Russian thistle
Speaker 1: in the school house so that the pupils may become
Speaker 1: familiar with it quote and teach them to kill it
Speaker 1: wherever they find it, as they would kill a rattlesnake.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. I really feel for for many of
Speaker 1: us that, you know, they didn't grow up in tumble
Speaker 1: weed country or haven't been visiting tumbleweed country during the
Speaker 1: times that they're on the move. Like this is just
Speaker 1: kind of a uh, this this great adversary that's been
Speaker 1: there the whole time and we and I feel like
Speaker 1: I didn't really recognize it until just now. Well I
Speaker 1: think it is technically now in all forty eight contiguous
Speaker 1: US states, so it's everywhere. Yeah, Like I mean it
Speaker 1: is in Georgia, the state where we uh, we record this,
Speaker 1: but I do not recall ever having seen it or
Speaker 1: you know, identified it as such while I was here.
Speaker 1: I certainly have not had that experience of you know,
Speaker 1: the herds of of them moving across the high ways.
Speaker 1: So I can only imagine how Georgia drivers would would
Speaker 1: would respond to that. We don't take kindly to stuff
Speaker 1: invading our highways. Now, I just wanted to mention a
Speaker 1: few other interesting facts that came across in another article.
Speaker 1: I was trying to look for a a more recent
Speaker 1: article about the spread of the different tumbleweed species, especially
Speaker 1: ruscent Russian thistle and related species in the US. So
Speaker 1: there was one I read from eighteen in the UC Boulder,
Speaker 1: Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine by a UC Boulder professor
Speaker 1: of evolutionary biology and ecology named Jeff Mitten and Mitton
Speaker 1: covers some of the same ground we've already talked about that,
Speaker 1: for example, that tumbleweed is a is a structure. It
Speaker 1: is a type of strategy for reproduction that is employed
Speaker 1: by many plants, but that in the American context, most
Speaker 1: of the time when people see a tumble weed or
Speaker 1: talk about a tumble weed, they're usually talking about this
Speaker 1: Russian thistle species A Salsula tregas or Calie tregas. And uh,
Speaker 1: he said, is interestingly that genomic analysis in California has
Speaker 1: revealed that the tragus the main species, was introduced to
Speaker 1: the US multiple times, at least twice from different places,
Speaker 1: so there were multiple introduction events. And he emphasizes again
Speaker 1: something that that has come out from multiple sources we've
Speaker 1: looked at that tumbleweeds became especially common as they took
Speaker 1: hold in otherwise barren areas or in quote over graized sites,
Speaker 1: So abandoned farm lands or or overused ranch lands could
Speaker 1: be especially good places for uh, for for these things
Speaker 1: to take root. They do better in cleared land where
Speaker 1: they can scatter freely, where their seeds don't have to
Speaker 1: compete with native grasses and shrubs. So it seems like
Speaker 1: one way to have a place resist colonization by the
Speaker 1: by the tumbleweeds is just to have plenty of natural
Speaker 1: native vegetation covering the land. One last thing I want
Speaker 1: to mention that that Mitton brings up in the article
Speaker 1: is that, uh, you know, sometimes discussion of of aggressively
Speaker 1: spreading non native species of plants can I don't know
Speaker 1: it caused people to think of a plant as being
Speaker 1: wholly without use or merit in any You know, it
Speaker 1: can provide no nourishment to anything at all. And while
Speaker 1: tumbleweeds can certainly be a big problem for for humans
Speaker 1: and other life forms, uh Mitten points out that some
Speaker 1: animals can eat the sprouts of of these tumbleweed plants
Speaker 1: and and can get nourishment from them, especially when they're
Speaker 1: young and green, but he says that herbivores do tend
Speaker 1: to avoid them once they've reached their their thorny brittle
Speaker 1: adult state. Though he points out one interesting historical fact
Speaker 1: about their use as nutrition in in American history. He
Speaker 1: says that tumbleweeds quote were one of the last plants
Speaker 1: growing during the dust Bowl nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: when many farmers and ranchers were unable to keep anything
Speaker 1: growing to feed cows and horses. Russian this sole hey
Speaker 1: is credited with saving the beef cattle industry when other
Speaker 1: sources of hay disappeared. Oh wow, So this is a
Speaker 1: species of plant that that plays rough, but when when
Speaker 1: nobody else can hack it, it is still there and
Speaker 1: you know, in its young form it, it can be eaten.
Speaker 1: It may not be the best food source in the world,
Speaker 1: but but the bovines can ingest. Anyway, I think that'll
Speaker 1: have to do it for part one of our series
Speaker 1: on the Wind, which the tumbleweed. But we've got a
Speaker 1: lot more interesting stuff to talk about in part two.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we've got some some crazy tumbleweed variants that
Speaker 1: may interest you. We've got we've got we've got a
Speaker 1: few Mongolian riddles we're gonna share. Uh. So there should
Speaker 1: be a lot of a lot of interesting territory to cover,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna go ahead and let this particular tumbleweed
Speaker 1: episode snap off at the roots and begin tumbling its
Speaker 1: way uh to listeners out there obviously, even though fire
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, with creativity in the metaphoric sense. Right. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm sure we have a number of listeners out there
Speaker 1: who have a lot more experience direct experience with tumbleweeds,
Speaker 1: and yes, we would love for you to share your
Speaker 1: experiences with us, uh, encountering tumbleweeds rolling across the highways
Speaker 1: and into your house and so forth. Um, let us
Speaker 1: know you know how to get in touch with us,
Speaker 1: and we'll share that information here in just a second.
Speaker 1: But hey, in the meantime, if you would like to
Speaker 1: listen to additional episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind podcasts. Feed Core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Speaker 1: On Monday's we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do
Speaker 1: an artifact or a monster fact episode. On Fridays, we
Speaker 1: do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside
Speaker 1: most serious matters and just to focus in on a
Speaker 1: strange film and discuss a strange film. Um oh. I
Speaker 1: should also point out that I was just looking to
Speaker 1: to revamp some of our you know, placeholders social media presences,
Speaker 1: and our Instagram account has been locked up for over
Speaker 1: a year. Nobody knows how to get into it. It's
Speaker 1: a ghost house. So we have a new Instagram. If
Speaker 1: you're into Instagram and you want to follow us, you
Speaker 1: can follow us at st b y M Podcast. That's
Speaker 1: our handle there. But I should also point out that
Speaker 1: we also have a separate Instagram for Weird House Cinema,
Speaker 1: and that one is just Weird House Cinema. That's the
Speaker 1: that's the Instagram handle, and uh, that one I've actually
Speaker 1: updated so it has like a still from every episode
Speaker 1: of Weird House Cinema that we've done this far. So
Speaker 1: that's a fun way if you just want to follow
Speaker 1: Weird How Cinema stuff. And I'll probably be updating that
Speaker 1: because because every now and then, when I'm watching a
Speaker 1: movie for a Weird House, I'll have to like take
Speaker 1: a picture of something on the on the on the
Speaker 1: TV screen, um, and this might be a place where
Speaker 1: I would share that. So so yeah, I'm liable to
Speaker 1: actually use that account for things beyond just the mentioning
Speaker 1: of new episodes. This is this is phone camera photo
Speaker 1: of a TV screen. Yeah, that medium has more heart. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think the first one the post I did on
Speaker 1: that Instagram account was it was just a picture I
Speaker 1: took off the screen during Hands of Steel, where it
Speaker 1: has the text at the end that pops up and
Speaker 1: says it was a day in our near future the
Speaker 1: era of the cyborg had begun Arizona movie, so it
Speaker 1: ties in to what we're talking about here today. Not
Speaker 1: unrelated to Tumbleweeds. There you go, drifting along with the
Speaker 1: tumbling cyborg. Okay, anyway, huge things. As always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hi, you can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i
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