Dr. James Fitzsimmons

They're about that long, all poking out of the tree.

They have barbs on them, so they break off in your flesh.

Um, and the tree itself has fire ants living on it too.

No.

Yeah.

It's, it's completely hostile tree.

It's the, the, the palms are really good for thatching.

Um, they might be good to eat, which is why the trees maybe evolved all these defenses, but I grab onto this and I'm like, ah, you know, and of course I let go.

Cause I'm, I'm like a human being, human being.

And so I grab it with my other hand and I grabbed something and it's a vine and it's called by all.

It's got spines too.

So like I got, I got spines in both my hands and I'm falling off this thing.

And eventually sort of, I like, you know, I hit a, uh, I hit a tree with my body and, uh, luckily it wasn't in a scuba tree or anything's pointy, whatever.

But yeah, no matter where you look, there's gonna be, there's this one kind of tree that whatever that chemical substance is in poison ivy, there's one tree where if you chop it with a machete, it'll actually spurt that stuff out at you.

Like it'll actually just fly out at you.

No way.

So you can kind of almost see why the folks at like some of these Maya centers were like chopping down everything.

So what they do is they chop down a lot, they pave over,

They take limestone and they burn it and they make plaster.

And they plaster over tons and tons of forest, right?