Hello students. This is Plants and Animals of Southern California. And today I want to tell you about the Mediterranean climate. So the mediterranean climate, which I usually spell with a small M to distinguish it from the Mediterranean basin, which is a proper name of a place which is with a big M, of course. The mediterranean climate is a climate that has winters that are relatively mild. So not a whole lot of snow and not a lot of ice. And then summers that have a long drought. So a drought of many months in the summer and then almost all the rain happening in the winter. And the winter relatively mild. So plants grow, then, in the winter. And then they suffer during the summer drought. And the mediterranean climate occurs only in the five places around the world. It's always on the western sides of continents around 30 to 40 degrees latitude. So those five places are California, and then in South America there's a part of Chile that's 30 to 40 degrees latitude that also has a mediterranean climate. South Africa has a mediterranean climate. Australia, the southwestern part and a bit of the southern part. That's a mediterranean climate. And it's a very old one. And then, of course, the mediterranean basin has the largest mediterranean climate, the largest land area that's a mediterranean climate. So, these five places, they have a common climate. And they're very widely geographically separated. You know, like there's a lot of stuff in between all of these five places that does not have a mediterranean climate. What that's resulted in is for organisms that don't move very fast like plants that have heavy seeds, then there's conversion evolution from fairly different starting points to plants that live well in the mediterranean climates around the world. And similarly, there are certain animals that also do well in mediterranean-type climates. And those animals didn't necessarily start out all in one place and then spread out to the five places. Instead, it was organisms that did well in that kind of climate and that ended up in each of their respective sites. And so you have a lot of chaparral-type vegetation in all these places. They're not -- it's not called chaparral. It's called different names from different places. But really thick vegetation, lots of sclerophyllous species. You also have some drought deciduous vegetation that's kind of like coastal sage scrub. These places tend to have some fire, although not all equally. Some have less fire and some have more fire. And they vary also in the age that they've been a mediterranean climate. So California has been a mediterranean climate for long enough so that things co-speciated. And we've ended up with adaptive radiations of groups of plants that work well in the mediterranean climate. So aside from sclerophyllous shrubs, drought deciduous shrubs, another important component of mediterranean climates is lots of geophytes. These are plants that during winter and spring have foliage above ground, but then they die back to what's underneath the ground during the summer and fall. So for instance, tulips or narcissus. Those are things from the Mediterranean basin that are geophytes. And then correspondingly have some really great geophytes in California like mariposa lilies. And we have a lot of things that are related to onions that have bulbs underneath the ground and send up beautiful flowers during the winter and spring and then die back. They're perennials. The bulbs come back year after year. And it doesn't have to be just bulbs. It could also be corms or rhizomes or things like that, like irises. We have a lot of California irises, which are kind of cool. A fourth kind of plant that we find in mediterranean climates is annuals. So we have a lot of winter annuals, plants that germinate right now, as soon as it rains. And they'll finish their whole life cycle by May or June, maybe. And then that plant's done. So then they have to come back again from seeds. Now, these plants didn't necessarily evolve in a mediterranean climate. You know, there's these types of plants live in other climates as well. They're just not very important in other types of climates. And so, say, as California became a mediterranean climate, then there were already onions. And then onions do well in the mediterranean climate of California and they turned into a whole bunch of different species in California. So the radiation of onions into lots of species, that's a Californian thing. But the origination of the geophyte habit, that pre-dates the California -- California adopting its mediterranean climate. And of course, the mediterranean climate in California happens over a long geologic period. And in a way, California kind of didn't exist back then. You know, like the ground we're standing on now was underneath the ocean and it wasn't, you know, it kind of didn't really exist. The Sierra Nevada in some way or other existed, but the area became a mediterranean climate and then there's also been geological change that's established these relatively recent mountains along the coast. And it's that mountain chain along the coast that's really been the location where these adaptive radiations have happened and lots of species have evolved. And it's been in the context of adaptations to a mediterranean climate. Now, there are some organisms that can really go a long way, like mosses have very tough spores that can live for a long time. They can get in an air column. And we have a -- we share a fair number of mosses between, say, Spain's moss flora and California's moss flora without those species living in between. So they're said to be disjunct species. They're said to be disjunct species. And those disjunctions are thought to be due to long distance migration that established the species in the other very distant spot. All right. Well, that's all I have to say about that.