Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Grass

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why grass is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Grass. Known for being green. Famous for being mowed. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why grass is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of grass? Neutral. Yeah, it's fair. You know, it's there. It's green. Sometimes comfortable to sit on. Sometimes it's too damp to sit on. Mowed lawns, like really nicely kempt lawns, don't do a lot for me either. I don't know. It's fine. But I'll take a kind of wild meadow over a clean mowed lawn anytime.

Yeah. I don't need a lawn to be totally uniform and perfect. And I now have a little bit of a backyard and I've been mowing it with a real mower, which is not the electrical kind. You just push it. Oh, the little push mower. Yeah. Yeah. It's relatively quiet. It feels great. And then I don't worry about the composition of the various plant species. I just cut what's there and I'm glad about it. It's great. Is it one of those mowers that got the little balls in them that the Fisher Price mower that goes like tonkata, tonkata, tonkata, and there's like little balls that I thought that was supposed to be a mower. Is it supposed to be a

vacuum or is it just like a colorful balls push unit? I guess it just trains infants and toddlers to be prepared to push things as adults. Yeah. That society demands be pushed. Get trained for manual labor, babies. Here's a Fisher-Price telemarketer phone. Here's a Fisher-Price pickaxe. Get to work, babies.

Yeah. I get to work, babies. Yeah, and this topic, it's truly background, truly around us not thinking about it. And so many thanks to at Joe Beam on the Discord and many thanks to at Ornery Weevil on the Discord, which especially amazing name by the second suggester there. I love an Ornery Weevil, probably lives in grass. It's very good. Yes. You know what? You're right. I don't spend my time thinking about grass. You think I can devote brain power to thinking about grass? No. This is one of those Zipf topics where I said, okay, I'll find out what's going on with grass.

And it turned out to sort of be the entire topic of plants life on earth. Oh dear. Which is very exciting. Yeah. There's a lot here. And our first fascinating thing is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called bump, bump, bump, bump. It's time to read the numbers. It's time to hear the stats. It's time to learn statistics on this new SIF pod tonight. And that name was submitted by Jacob on the Discord.

Thank you, Jacob. We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to SIFpod at gmail.com. Off of Muppets, this week's numbers quickly bring us into takeaways. But the first number this week is all four of the top four. What? All four of the top four. Huh? And the list we're talking about here is the world's most grown crops by weight. It turns out all four of the top four crops in the world are grasses biologically. in the world are grasses biologically. Huh. Okay. So what kind of grass are we talking here? Are we talking about edible grass? Are we talking about smokable grass?

What source of grass is this? This would be a really fun topic to reveal that I am a 1960s marijuana guy. That would be a real character change. But yeah, this word grass, I think to most listeners probably means lawn grass, turf grass, like a green lawn in the United States. We are going to talk about that a bunch. In order to talk about that, we should talk about sugarcane, maize, rice, and wheat, and many, many other plants that are grasses biologically. Wow, okay. I didn't realize the grass family was so diverse. It's about 10,000 species. Oh, wow.

There's another number. Look at that. It includes many crops, which deserves its own takeaway number one. Kind of most of the crops we eat are grasses. Tell me that we're nothing but a bunch of cows munching on grass. And I like cows so much. So that feels good. I'm into that categorization.

They're so sweet and wonderful. And I wish we could all aspire to that, you know? You can call Alex a cow. He'll be like, thank you. How kind of you. You cow. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. If you go around calling me a Hereford, I will shake your hand. If you call me an Angus, I will high five you. I have a different reaction for each breed. It's great. What about a Highland a Highland cow? Highland. Then I do the woogity, woogity, woogity that Arnold and Gerald do on Hey Arnold. Nice. That's a rare one. Those are my favorite because their hair is so shaggy. They look like little mops. Yeah. Somebody on this season of

Great British Bake Off makes a bread that looks like one of their heads. It's awesome. It's very good. A bread. Wow. That's adorable. All right. So we're all cows essentially eating grass. But last time I checked, Alex, my dinner was not a plate of just grass. So what the heck do you mean most of our crops is grass? This is such a fundamental mind shift to think about it. I love it. It turns out that the about 10,000 plant species in the grass family include the top four crops on earth, sugarcane, grass is really coming down to a few advantageous mutations. There's also human cultivation altering them. But in some cases, even just one mutation turned a wild grass, like a tall grass, into a crop we all eat, which is amazing. like a tall grass, into a crop we all eat, which is amazing. So is lawn grass and the crops that we eat all domesticated, like domesticated from wild grasses?

Yeah, pretty much, especially because in a place like the United States or Canada, we'll talk later about how these lawn grasses often come from other continents. And so in the process, there was usually some human selection and some human impact on what those look like today. That's really interesting. I mean, it's like I think it's very clear when you've got a chihuahua and you look at a chihuahua next to a wolf, like what humanity is capable of in terms of genetic selection. I think it's less obvious with plants because we look at corn and it's like, that looks natural. Sure. But no, it's it's the ch with plants because we look at corn and it's like, that looks natural. Sure. But no, it's the chihuahua of grasses. Yeah.

I'm especially excited to link people to our past episode about maize, a.k.a. corn. Corn. Me and Katie talk about how that plant started as a tiny, weird little head of grass. And then it has just been something we massively expanded the size of and deliciousness of on purpose as people. Sometimes the change is even more simple to turn a grass into a crop. One source this week is the book 1491 by author and science writer Charles C. Mann. He says that wheat and barley, both of those crops, they come from one key type of mutation. And then we went from there.

With many grass species, their seeds are near the top of the plant, near the very top of that stem or blade. And what happens is the stem shatters. The technical term is shatters, which means the seeds break off and dribble to the ground. There's enough seeds where the weight and everything else just makes them drop and that helps the plant spread. Wild wheat and wild barley are both grasses that had one mutation where they don't drop the seeds. And when humans run with that from there, you get a stalk of wheat with a bunch of delicious seeds, which we call grains or cereals on top of it. And that in a super simple way is the difference between your yard and a field of wheat. There's more to it, but also there's kind of not more to it.

Right. Because like if the seeds fall off of the grass, then it's on the ground. Then you've got to have like a little bird beak to pick off those seeds from the ground. But if they're still on the plant, you can harvest it with a big, big blade, with a big tractor thing, you know, farming instead of just being a, you know, getting a flock of birds to peck at the ground. Little heads up for listeners. Our stats song has definitely Muppets-filled me, maybe for the day. And what I thought about birds, the first bird I thought of was the Swedish chef chasing

that chicken. So yeah, this is going to be a thing today. It's great. Because that chicken's like, great, just gobble up seeds on the ground. We as humans said, I want a whole field of plants that don't drop the seeds. we as humans said, I want a whole field of plants that don't drop the seeds. I will spread and propagate this species in a limited and contained way myself. That's my plan. Yeah. Swedish Chef had those real hands, which freaked me out just a little bit.

The Muppets that have the real hands. Maybe, I mean, when it's a Muppet, like, I think Fozzie has real hands and it's okay. The problem with the Swedish chef is he's humanoid. He haunts my dreams. This broad classification thing, and we've talked about how taxonomy can be misleading, but these plants are related in a fundamental way that is interesting. And it's created a situation where these approximately 10,000 species cover a huge amount of the earth. And another source this week is the book, Grasses and Identification Guide by Yale University botany teacher Lauren Brown. She gives us some numbers. She says grasses cover about one third of the land on Earth.

Wow. And they cover about one half of the United States specifically. Is this before or after we put a bunch of asphalt around? It's after. Yeah. Wow. As much asphalt as we put on the ground, there's also lawns, farm fields in mostly different countries than the United States, forests of bamboo. There are all kinds of plants that are grasses.

Bamboo is a grass, huh? It's a grass, it turns out. It's just different from the Kentucky blue on your fancy lawn. Try your little push mower on a bamboo forest, Alex. See how that turns out. I don't know why I'm being so mean to you, but yeah, you try your little mower on a big bamboo field, Alex. You and pandas giving me a nookie. Yeah. Yeah. Man, bullied by pandas. What a state to be in. Nature's biggest nerd. Yeah, so that's the most global and broad sense of the word grasses. And we won't really talk about crops the rest of the show, but there are all kinds of amazing grasses that most humans are not eating. And here's another number about

that group. The number is up to 90%. That's how much of a grass plant's weight can be under the ground. Like the mass of the plants. Grasses can be mostly made of roots and then very little plants up top. The big exception to that is quote unquote lawn grass. lawn grass. I mean, I know that grass plays a big role in preventing erosion, particularly wild grasses. And I think that was one of the reasons we had the Dust Bowl in the 1940s. We had replaced the wild grasses that had these deep, complex root systems with crops that had less of a root system. And so the topsoil just kind of blew away in dry weather.

So, yeah, it's like understanding root systems is very important for the economy. Yeah, and for all life on Earth. Yeah, that too. Less important than the economy, all life on Earth. Yeah, that too. Less important than the economy, all life on Earth. I mean, is all life on Earth good for the economy? Oh, no. We're thinking too big. Too big.

Rate it in. Again, I'm thrilled about this topic because it becomes brain-explodingly global and covering all plant life. Yeah. becomes brain-explodingly global and covering all plant life. And in general, many grasses are mostly made up of roots with only a little plant above the ground. Because takeaway number two, many grass plants are mostly a root system for a bunch of amazing reasons. There's at least five reasons here for a species of grass to want to grow a massive root system under a relatively small blade above the ground. Can I guess one reason? Yeah. They keep getting eaten by herbivores and cows. That's right. Yeah. With most grass species,

the key parts of the plant that grow the rest of the plant are very, very low to the ground, like just above the part where they stick out of the ground. And so also having an extensive root system helps them survive losing most of their top part to a cow or a lawnmower or something else. Right. So that's why you can mow your lawn or you could have grazers in a field and all the grass doesn't necessarily die. Yeah. My favorite example with that grazing, I'm going to link an amazing piece by science writer Ed Young about North American bison. Oh, bison. Bison. That's a new one. I've never heard of bison before. That's a new one. I've never heard of bison before. And an amazing number in that piece is from a study of how bison trample and graze grasses. The study found that grasses contain 50 to 90 percent more nutrients by the end of the year because bison open up new green shoots to new sunlight, like they eat the taller, older plants,

and then the new plants have more sunlight. And so this grazing can even be beneficial for a population of grass. Yeah, that's what's so interesting is a lot of these, you'll see these relationships between animals where like one animal eats the other or an animal eats a plant, and then it turns out that's actually good for the plant or when you have one animal preying uh on another it doesn't necessarily mean that's good for the individual but it could be good for the entire population due to like making sure the population is not too dense and preventing the spread of disease things like that and it's really cool these relationships with plants because you can like typically is not the case with animals, like where you can eat part of a

living plant and it's still alive. There's such a close and intimate relationship between animals and plants. And it's not always, often it can be sort of mutualism, which is where each party benefits. Yeah. And grass benefit partly by really, really rooting into the ground. I think I'd heard the figure of speech grassroots, like a grassroots movement. And I wondered because I thought, isn't grass like the weakest plant? Why would that be an interesting root? But it turns out, smartly or not, that's sort of referring to the enormous root systems of especially tall grasses and prairies. I have literally never thought of that.

I guess just I've never thought beyond just like, oh, grassroots organization, just not thinking about what it means, just passively accepting this weird phrase. But yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, I've like pulled up a little bit of grass at soccer practice. It's very easy as a little child. And then people are like, we need a powerful grassroots movement. Yeah. Which, you know, in many of our heads should be weak. But it turns out the roots are super strong.

It's cool. Did you ever try to eat grass when you were a kid? No. I wasn't interested, I don't think. Yeah, I was interested in it. The best part is like sort of the part nearest to the ground, though, which I guess is the part you shouldn't eat because that's like the part that grows the grass. But yeah, no, you know, it's pretty good.

I ate a lot of things when I was a kid. Snails, dirt, grass. Our bison listeners are going to be so mad to hear how you ate that. Oh, man. They're going to be like, that's wrong. So I said we have at least five reasons that grasses grow huge root networks. One is that they are able to survive grazing that way. Another related reason is they can survive getting stepped on.

Oh, yeah. That makes sense. That's another thing that's just low-key interesting about grass is that we constantly step on it and it's usually okay. Yeah. I guess if you're nature's carpet, you got to be okay with things stepping on you. Yeah. And stepping can kill grass. can kill grass, but it turns out the worst thing for grass with stepping is if the dirt gets compacted by like very heavy stepping or constant stepping because that gets at the roots. But

otherwise their, their growth parts are very low to the ground. If the top of the plant gets bent or squished, they're, they're usually okay. And they're, they're really built to be stood on primarily because they have extraordinary root systems that keep them in place and are most of the plant. So maybe I shouldn't do river dancing on grass while wearing weighted clothing. Yeah, you should do it in the river, like the name says. You should be on a raft or something. And third reason here is that big root systems let a grass store lots of water under the ground. Yeah.

It just is a lot of physical room to hold on to that. And water evaporates much more slowly under the ground. That's also why a lot of drier parts of the world have robust grasslands as a plant life ecosystem. Right. Because the grass is good at using the water that is there. That makes sense because you have to go through dry spells. And you see this with animals, too, where they will bury themselves underground with toads. They'll form a mucus seal around themselves to kind of hibernate during the dry seasons.

And it sounds like grass has a similar technique where it's retaining all the water underneath the ground in their root system so that they can, you know, the essential part of the grass can survive, even if a lot of the superficial grass is dried out and dead. That's absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. If you see a sort of not healthy looking grass, it could be doing poorly, but also it could be fine under the ground.

You don't actually know because so much is below the surface. It's sort of like an iceberg in my mind now, which I love. I had never thought of grass that way. Boats are constantly crashing into it. Like when a boat sees some grass, that's not a good sign. You're off course. And a fourth reason here is that grass can basically bully other plants and keep them out of the area by just putting too many roots in too much of the dirt. So that's just a power move by grass, but you can have a field of grass where it's basically boxing out other grasses,

if people know that basketball rebounding term. Yeah. Nice photosynthesis, nerd. Wow, look at that stamen, four eyes. Maybe the weirdest, coolest reason they'll grow huge root systems is that some grasses primarily multiply by growing new stems underground like we were talking before about some grasses shattering from the top grasses can also spread their seeds with new stems that are called rhizomes and two two grasses that particularly do this are bamboo. Bamboo tends to root very

widely rather than deeply, so it can spread as many new bamboos as possible. And that's how that grass creates what we think of as forests. And another example is sweetgrass, which is a North American grass cultivated and harvested by many native peoples for baskets, fragrances, cultural ceremonies. And they historically have known how to work with that and support that rhizome growth. And so these are all sort of clonal, like you have a forest of bamboo or a big sort of field of sweetgrass. It's like a lot of it's going to be clonal from the same organism. That's right. Yeah. And that's part of how grass has filled a third of the Earth's land, like we said. There's this amazing root system partly supporting that.

I'm so excited to link the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., because they have exhibits of just how big these roots are in a way you never really get to see in the wild. And some prairie grasses can grow roots up to 15 feet deep. There's another number. 15 feet of roots from a grass that is shorter than that above the ground. And it's an amazing extensive network that we don't know about. I'm looking at this photo of the root system of wheatgrass, and there's a gentleman holding it up. And it's like the size of this gentleman, if not bigger. It's like you're looking through the crowd

and you see someone who has a tiny head, but then below that tiny head, they have a huge buff body. I also am remembering our Max Fun Drive BoCo with our buddy David Bell about the Super Mario Brothers movie from 1993. The Goombas in that weird movie are extremely built that way. It's a weird tiny little hat on the biggest body. I've got Goomba proportions. So, yeah, this situation is across many grass species.

So yeah, this situation is across many grass species. There's buffalo grass in North American plains that can go up to eight feet into the ground, even though it's only 10 inches in height. There's vetiver grass is an Indian grass that a lot of people plant all over the world for its root system to hold land in place. Really the main exception is stuff like Kentucky bluegrass. And part of why lawns often need a lot of human care and human attention is that those grasses don't have huge roots. So they struggle in droughts and they trample easily and they lack all of these advantages that we're talking about from the enormous, amazing grass root systems. Tiny and feeble because of less roots. And most of the rest of the episode is going to be about that feeble grass that could be called lawn grass or turf grass. It's what you're thinking of if you're thinking of a U.S. yard.

Yeah. And we have tons more numbers and takeaways about it. The next number is 30 feet. 30 feet or more than nine meters. That is the length of a giant yellow picture of a penis drawn into the grass of a lawn in the UK city of Bath in England. Is this permanent? Is this just a feature that everyone accepts? So it's a prank. Someone did a prank. Okay, nice. I'm very excited to link the picture because it's just fun. It is a big picture of a penis in front of perhaps the nicest and most 1700s English buildings I've ever seen. Can I say about this wiener is it's like sort of just perfectly

geometrically proportioned the the balls I mean anatomically this is not accurate but you know the the ball portions these are basically perfect spheres. Yeah. And then, of course, the shaft part is like this perfectly straight lines. Yeah. It looks like they used a giant compass to create this. A classic prank protractor. Gotta have a protractor for your pranks. Yeah, and I feel like they got the geometry right in order to make very clear it is a penis, just to be pranky, because they drew this

30-foot penis on the lawn of what's called the Royal Crescent. It's even a fancy name. The Royal Crescent is a semicircle of luxurious 1700s homes, all facing a giant grass lawn. It's such a nice place. They film period dramas like Bridgerton at these lovely buildings and lawn. It's a major tourist attraction for Bath. So they chose a really prime lawn to draw the penis on. I wonder if there's like a shot from Bridgerton where you just see this giant wiener in the ground in the background. They're like, oh, whomever shall I choose amongst my suitors?

Is that a giant d***? Good Lord. What if that's in the show, but nobody noticed because of all the other nudity and eroticism? and eroticism. Yeah. And they timed this prank for an event in May, 2023, the Royal Crescent residents organized the coronation party for King Charles III. And two days before that, a prankster drew this 30 foot phallus. According to professional landscaper, Andrea Scharf, they probably used chemicals rather than a mower. Because if you overspray fertilizer or use a salt bath, you can turn grass yellow and a mower wouldn't really get this color change. Right. Now, this is amazing. I mean, I think this is the Maybe the best form of political expression is saying how you feel with giant, beautiful wieners.

Yeah, and it's my favorite example of lawns being a canvas. You know, like many people are going for such a uniform and plain and flat looking lawn that it becomes a space for creativity or a giant penis. And that's something we've invented in the last few centuries. It's really weird. Are we sure, though, this is a prankster and not an alien race trying to communicate with us using the only language they know how through wieners? Wow. I didn't realize crop circles could be a grass topic, but right, weed and corn and everything. Yeah.

It's alien. Aliens are writing to us through grass, maybe. Cool. They love grass. Why don't we? It's like, now tell them that they are heads, Xenor. Do you think they will understand this crop circle means we think they are a bunch of dorks. Speaking of the whole earth, we have done a couple of humongous takeaways and a bunch of numbers.

We're going to take a quick break and then examine the conquest of earth by various grasses and lawns. Wow. I welcome them. Folks, as you know, listener support is what makes this podcast possible. You can hear this show with all the research going into it, all the editing going into it, all of the just plain old effort going into it, that can happen because of listeners directly supporting the show. So thank you to everybody who does that. Go to MaximumFun.org slash join if you think this podcast is worthwhile and think it should exist. I also like that we don't just ask for that. We also try to find a few partners, sponsors, other just awesome things in the world that might be able

to add some extra support and make all of that go further. And we have two this week. One of them is the Museum of Flight. A Queer History of Aerospace is a new audio miniseries from the Museum of Flight premiering October 24th. And let me tell you about the Museum of Flight. They are located in Seattle, Washington. They're the largest private nonprofit air and space museum in the world. And A Queer History of Aerospace explores the ways the LGBTQ plus community has shaped aviation and space exploration and the. And she has amazing stories. She talks about her whole experience and service. And then also she was on base in Washington State when Mount St. Helens erupted. So there's also just a massive natural disaster element

that's very interesting too. Listen at museumofflight.org slash podcast or search the flight deck on your favorite podcatcher. New episode every Tuesday, beginning October 24th. We are also supported this week by Scent Air. And they're not just a friend of the show, they're a friend of my two cats. Their names are Watson and Birdie.

And Scent Air's new pet calming complex is in the air around them. It's designed to soothe cats and dogs from unwanted fears, nervousness, general anxiety. So this reduces pet anxiety as well as removing pesky pet odors from all the spaces that matter. Scent Air is simple, easy to use, nice smelling. It's more than 60 fragrances, are phthalate-free, cruelty-free, safe for families, and EcoVet is certified sustainable. I am in a new home. Pets in general, especially dogs and cats, I feel like they have the wisdom

to know that something has changed. They have the wisdom to be aware of changes in their environment or just changes in your day-to-day. It doesn't have to be a house move. It can just be a busy or different situation. Make that easier on everybody. Give them something that they will enjoy in the air around them with Scent Air.

You can try this luxury home fragrance trusted by the pros around them with Scent Air. You can try this luxury home fragrance trusted by the pros by going to ScentAir.com and using promo code SIFTPOD for an extra 25% off your first order. That's ScentAir.com and promo code SIFTPOD. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every

Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back with two more takeaways. The next one is takeaway number three. The Columbian Exchange caused a grass species apocalypse in the Americas. Uh-oh. Pushed by cattle and palace trends and cars. This is one of the more mind-boggling things, even compared to the other big things we talked about. A lot of the grass we walk on in the modern United States and Canada and the rest of the Americas

was not here before the 1400s. The biggest example is lawn grasses, but there has been a giant transplant of grasses from other parts of the world replacing grass that was here. Literally a transplant. Oh. So. Never actually thought about that word in my whole life. Wow. Never actually thought about that word in my whole life.

Wow. But I guess these would be, it would be an invasive species then in the United States. Yeah, I think by the basic definition of it, it is. Like we're used to it now. Right. And it's just here. Yeah, I mean, it's like honeybees. We think of honeybees as nice, natural.

They are actually invasive species in North America. We have a bunch of native bees who are indigenous to North America, but honeybees are from Europe. Yeah. And that's part of why books like 1491 are just so amazing because so many animals and plants and cuisines we have are combinations or exchanges of these things. So much of Italian food is based on tomatoes and they didn't have tomatoes until after the Columbian exchange. Yeah. And then when I think of Italy in the 1300s, I still imagine spaghetti with the red sauce, which is silly. I don't know. It's just a thing we all do. And grass is maybe the most fundamental form of that misconception. Yeah. Charles C. Mann specifically says that there's a persistent error in illustrations of Native North America where people draw stuff like

Kentucky bluegrass, especially drawings of the Cahokia mounds in Illinois, they'll draw grass around or on that, and that just wasn't here. It's very, very hard to imagine Illinois without this green grass, but it didn't have it. But it had. It had native grasses, right? It did, yeah. starting with what invaded, it turns out that so-called Bermuda grass is a species originally from Africa, even though Bermuda is in the Caribbean. So-called Kentucky bluegrass originated in Europe and in the Middle East. A lot of other plants that we see in those fields like clover and dandelions, those are also from not the Americas. There's been a really profound changeover. And before that, the Americas had tall grass prairies,

they had many grass species of various sizes and colors. And to be clear, native people did shape the land and the ecosystems around them. There was farming and foresting and active human intervention in nature and what's here. They also allowed many quote-unquote wild grasses to thrive. For example, in what eventually got renamed New England in the northeastern U.S., the grasses there were mostly annuals, such as broom straw and wild rye and marsh grass. So they would, was their use of these grasses, but sort of also kind of keeping them not necessarily as in like a farm situation, but making use of the grasses that were there? Or would they actively farm these grasses? It was some like gathering, harvesting of grasses, in particular stuff like sweet grass for

making baskets and for making other useful things. The biggest biological difference in super general terms was grazing animals. There were things like llamas and alpacas in the Americas, but Native people weren't generating centuries of labor toward creating pasture grass for sheep or cows or goats or these other animals that were not in the Americas yet. And so they were doing all kinds of farming crops and other things, but just less attention towards a short green grass for animals to eat. So was the introduction of the invasive species purposeful? Like, did we bring these grasses with us intentionally? It was initially accidental, but then on purpose almost immediately after that.

I want to cite a piece for Scientific American by Crystal DaCosta, the blog of the Smithsonian Gardens, digital resources from the Canadian Encyclopedia. There's a bunch of sources coming together for this story. And the beginning is that Europeans start invading the Americas, and there's cargo on their ships, such as hay, that often contained loose seeds of European grasses that could get hauled onto land and germinate. There's also how weeds like dandelions got here. And dandelions are technically flowering herbs, they're not grasses. After that initial accident, then Europeans released livestock that had not been in the Americas to just eat whatever grasses they saw. Because they were like, oh, there's weird different grass. You guys can just eat that.

They didn't co-evolve with the animals that the Europeans introduced. Exactly. Much like many combinations of a new invasive species, the invasive species of stuff like cattle super overgrazed this native grass and wiped it out, usually in one season, wherever they went. And there are different grazing styles of different ungulates, different herbivores. Some will eat grass closer to the ground. Some will eat the top of the grass. Some will eat grass closer to the ground. Some will eat like the top of the grass. So like the, it really is important that the animal match the grass in terms of the, like how much evolutionary history they have otherwise. Like say a bison will eat native grasses in a completely different way, eat different parts of the grass, root around in different ways that actually kills the grass rather than just take some of it and then it can replenish itself.

Exactly. Yeah. This whole thing gets driven by European humans wanting to bring livestock and not caring about whether the livestock were going to kill all the grass. We didn't care about whether we displaced and killed people who lived here. It's hard to imagine us caring about grass. Exactly. They were just being careless. And the thing that kind of snapped them out of not thinking about the grass is that with all the grass dead, their animals started starving, which led to the European humans starting to starve. So they proceeded to request shipments of seeds of pasture grass and of clover. Ah, I see. I see. And then on purpose replanting that where they had just wiped out native grass. Interesting, yeah. I mean, not a lot of planning there. Not a lot of forethought in terms of, you know.

I guess that the grasses that they sent were more resilient against the grazing habits of the animals, given that there was sort of a more co-evolution between those grasses and the domesticated animals that the Europeans brought? That's right. It is engineered by people and I guess you could call it more sustainable. Like once you have caused this apocalypse of the native grasses, then they put in grass that does fit well with the animals that they also invaded with. Right. Like once they ruined everything, they set up something sustainable. Yeah.

Well, you know, hey, waka waka. I know that Muppet. And also, since we're doing a grass episode, I just learned. Wait, I got a joke. Hang on. I got a Fozzie joke. What do you call just learned... Wait, I got a joke. Hang on. I got a Fozzie joke. What do you call it? Wait, what's Fozzie?

Hang on. What's Fozzie? What's Fozzie's voice? Ah, is that kind of it? Oh, yeah, that's the Fozzie. Like, what do you call it when you kill all the grasses that were there? I don't know. It's an herbicide.

Waka waka. I don't know. It's an herbicide. Waka waka. All right. Sorry. Fozzie Bear live at the Scott's Lawn and Garden outlet. Live at Four Seasons Landscaping. Fozzie Bear followed by Rudy Giuliani. Yeah, yeah. And then Statler and Waldorf are like, I don't know who belongs in jail more. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah. And then Statler and Waldorf

are like, I don't know who belongs in jail more. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah. Funny. Good stuff. There's also, just tucking it into this

since we're doing a grass episode and trying to be very comprehensive, I found out clover is not a grass. Oh. What is it? Because it has a different head on it and stuff. It is a legume. A leg grass. Oh, what is it? It has a different head on it and stuff. It is a legume. A legume.

Interesting. Isn't peanuts a legume? It is. Anything with seeds in pods is one of the qualities. And so clover is sort of, kind of related to like peanuts and beans and lentils and stuff. Never would have thought that. Does anyone have like a clover allergy then? Because like if people have a peanuts allergy, could they have a clover allergy?

On the Discord, if you have a clover allergy. Yeah, please. I would be fascinated to know what that's like. I hope you're okay. It's not my job to worry about it. Anyway. So this wave of European-driven and livestock-driven grass change, that leads to further grass seed exports, especially because not only are farmers releasing livestock animals onto grass, they're often not managing it totally well. And so if animals overgraze a patch of the field, briars and bushes and other different plants will move in. And so then farmers responded by wanting

more seed to undo that. This builds up a huge grass seed industry for agriculture. And that sets the stage for grass seed sellers to say, hey, could I also sell this to homeowners? And they do. And so then we get a lawn industry and there's many stages and starts and stops of that. But the earliest lawn owners are the very wealthiest people in the colonial North America and South America. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. I know. The wealthy doing something kind of ornamental? You'd never expect it. The particularly big drivers of this were Britain and France. The wealthy people in those countries, because they had nobility, were setting up huge lawns

at country houses in England or especially palaces in France. And in the 1700s, you needed huge amounts of servants and human labor to do what later stuff like lawnmowers would do. So it took enormous wealth to have, you know, the kind of lawn around Downton Abbey, let's say, or Versailles. You needed like 500 Alex's with pairs of scissors, clipping each blade of grass individually. There's also an odd thing that we also ran into in the ice cream episode we did recently. There's a time period in like the mid 1700s, late 1700s, where Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were key trendsetters for bringing rich European people's stuff to the United States.

Apparently, Washington was particularly influenced by English country houses. Jefferson was blown away by a visit to Versailles, and both of them decided they wanted lawns at their estates. And, of course, enslaved people to maintain it. Right, which sucks. I understand copying France, but I thought we were just in like a war with England. It's interesting that we're like, well, we won the war.

Now we're going to copy your lawns because we actually think that kind of rocks. Like there wasn't any like we're calling it freedom grass now because we hate England. That's true. We were treating ourselves as a new country and separate from those places. The richest Americans tried to get lawns. But before the U.S. Civil War, it was pretty much just the richest Americans. In the later 1800s, basic lawn mowing technology starts coming around. And by the 1900s, two trends made lawns common all over the United States. One was lots of people trying to have their own piece of property, often with a small lawn. And the other was people gaining mass-produced mechanized luxuries, in particular cars.

help you maintain a lawn, but with road traffic, people started to feel like they needed to have a nice lawn to make their house look nice to people driving by. Street traffic of cars- Oh, that's wild. Led people to feel social pressure about their lawn in particular. That's wild. So it's like, someone's driving by and they're being a little looky-loo. I want them to see my lawn with its little gnomes and flamingos and signs saying, in this house, we support Herbert Hoover, whatever the, whatever the, you know, politician at the time. That rainbow sign, but for a regressive 1920s politician. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Like when people were just walking around town, you felt like, ah, not that many people are going to see my house. And then once people, especially living on key roads, were being driven past, they thought they're only going to see my place really fast. So the paint needs to look nice on the front and the lawn needs to look uniform it needs to be a good green blur when they're going by i feel like cars changed american culture so much and not in an in not really in a good way entirely uh i actually wrote a whole episode of that about that on the summer news about. I'm going to link it. It's great. The whole suburban thing in the U.S. It's like, you know, just having your own little house, having your own little yard and kind of having these little bubbles rather than people living closer together.

Yeah, and cars in that exact way really did complete the invasion of new grasses across the Americas and especially the United States and Canada. We were talking about pavements earlier. Pavement has contributed to the replacement of grass. In a lot of other cases, we've just replanted grass from outside the Americas. The thing most removed by that is North American prairies. The thing most removed by that is North American prairies. Because before the Columbian Exchange, we estimate that North America had about 170 million acres of tall grass prairie. I know that's not a number you can hold in your head, but it's just big. 170 million acres.

No concept of what that is, Alex. None. It's now smaller. Today, less than 4% of that prairie still exists. Wow. It's really up there with the rainforests of South America in terms of habitats that have kind of gone away or shrunk. Hmm. Well, I hate that. Yeah.

The good news is people have noticed and are trying to bring it back in places like Fermilab in Illinois. But it is tricky just because of cities and roads. And also one other European concept that the United States really ran with, which is golf courses. Ah, yes. Everyone knows that a golf course is not a prairie. Nope. The most amazing thing to me is that it turns out the U.S. government helped. In the 1920s, the golf industry was seeking help developing better turf grasses for year-round golfing, and they did that by collaborating with the USDA.

Like, the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped develop the grass for golf courses today. Yeah, there's basically the government subsidizing golf courses, and when you live in a city like Los Angeles, you'll notice that most of the big green spaces are either like golf courses or cemeteries, essentially. Yeah. And I'll link our graveyards episode because we hit on that some there too, but they all pretty much replaced something else. And the thing might've been a forest. It might've been different from a grassland. But in some cases, we saw one grassland, paved it, built over it, and put in different grass

in a truly apocalyptic way if you are a stalk of buffalo grass that can think. You would see that and think aliens have terraformed the planet. What a nightmarish existence to be a stalk of grass that can think. Oh, yeah, don't do that. You have no mouth. You have no eyes to cry with, no mouth to cry out with. This is horrible. Why did you say that? Anyways, horrors beyond our comprehension aside.

And in terms of regions having totally different grasses than other regions, we have one more fast takeaway for the main episode about the rest of the earth. Because takeaway number four. There are so many grass species on earth. There are two endemic grass species in Antarctica. Oh, hey. Antarctica has native species of grass, even though it is Antarctica. Look at you go, grass.

You go get that. You go get that icy butt of the planet. Or head. I mean, you know, it depends on which way you flip the planet. I think of it as an icy butt. But, you know, everyone depends on which way you flip the planet. I think of it as an icy butt. But, you know, everyone to each their own. Yeah. And right away, if people want a deep dive on Antarctica, there's a whole Passif episode about Antarctica that we'll link.

Because it is just, especially on maps, tucked away as if it doesn't exist. Right. Like it's just sort of a big ice cube where there's nothing but basically ice cube and penguins. Yeah, it's the size of the United States and Mexico put together, including Alaska and everything. It's humongous, but we don't really think about it down there. Yeah. It's also the coldest and driest and windiest continent on Earth. It's also covered by permanent ice and snow in many portions.

So one of our sources is the British Antarctic Survey. They estimate that less than 1% of Antarctica is, quote, colonizable by plants. Less than 1%. Wow. Tough crowd, that ice. It comes to grass. Waka waka. Yeah, and other sources here are the Australian Antarctic Program and reporting from The Guardian and from Smithsonian Magazine. They cover the situation where there is an area called the Antarctic Peninsula. It extends north from the rest of the continent toward the bottom of South America.

If people have seen a picture of Antarctica, there's a point, and that's the peninsula. picture of Antarctica, there's a point and that's the peninsula. And it is warm enough and de-iced enough to have lichens, mosses, algae, kelp, and maybe most astonishing, two native species of grass. They're called Antarctic hairgrass and Antarctic pearlwort are the two grasses. Pearlwort is a weirdly pretty and disgusting name. Yeah. And the plant looks really nice. I'm going to try to fit it into the social image for the episode. It has beautiful yellow flowers.

It's beautiful. It's great. It's like a little starburst of flowers. It's beautiful. I think it would be ecologically messed up if I tried, but I kind of want it in my garden or something. It looks great, but I shouldn't bring it here. That's the thing we've been talking about. Oh, it starts grass apocalypse too. Right?

Yeah, it's very pretty. grasses. It's not some limited Antarctic version. They have vascular systems, they have flowers, they can perform photosynthesis, and they can photosynthesize at temperatures below zero because they're adapted to Antarctica. That's fantastic. It's cool that this exists. We think of Antarctica as just dead with some penguins swimming around it, and it has its own grasses. They're also a little bit of a signifier of global warming because they are thriving more than they have in the past. They're spreading more than they have in the past. And we think it's mainly because of rising global temperatures allowing that.

Yeah, that's, you know, good for them, but maybe bad for everything else. Yeah, like I'm still thrilled they exist. And I guess I'm glad they're one more way we can tell that's happening. Like in the most recent decade that they were studied, 2009 to 2018, Antarctic hairgrass spread five times faster than it had in the previous 50 years. Whoa. And Antarctic pearlwort spread 10 times faster than it had in the previous 50 years. So we are changing the climate and this lovely grass is one indicator. The penguins are going to be really happy for a time where they're like,

great, we got these cool lawns and then everything's going to start melting. And they're like, wait a minute. Right. They're in the exact 1950s close of the beginning of the suburbs of the baby boom. What could possibly go wrong? Hey, folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, most of the crops we eat are grasses.

Takeaway number two, many grass plants are mostly a root system for a bunch of amazing reasons. Takeaway number three, the Columbian Exchange caused a sudden grass species apocalypse across the Americas, which got pushed by livestock and palace trends and cars. And takeaway number four, the earth is so grassy, there are two native grass species on Antarctica. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprisingly bizarre origins and psychology of AstroTurf. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 14 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows.

It's special audio just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of books, such as Grasses and Identification Guide by Lauren Brown, 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. We also use tons of digital resources from PBS, National Geographic, the U.S. Botanic Garden, the Canadian Encyclopedia, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadagoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode. And join the free CIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 118. That is about the topic of the Great Lakes, as in the five largest lakes in North America. Fun fact, Lake Superior contains more water on its own than the other four Great Lakes have put together. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating, So How About That? Talk to you then.