r/interesting • u/ApollosCosmos • 4d ago
NATURE Natural rubber being extracted from rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis)
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u/Low_Actuary_2794 4d ago
Glad the crow supervisor was there to ensure proper safety procedures were followed.
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u/CATNIP_IS_CRACK 4d ago
https://reddit.com/link/p7r8s3n/video/a5wlihuqkhnh1/player
That’s a raven.
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u/CrzdHaloman 4d ago
Ravens have a more distinct croak and not a caw, a thicker beak, and fluffy neck feathers. Definitely a crow in the video, which is also surprising since they aren't native to south America where rubber trees are.
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u/HotdoggerSlang 3d ago edited 3d ago
Rubber trees were brought to south asia, so that probably explains why there's a crow near it
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u/VascoJSC 3d ago
Yeah, this is the most likely explanation. South America has Corvids like Jays, but no actual Crows.
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u/Formal_Owl_400 3d ago
Calls are never definitive, with their ability to mimic sounds. But definitely jungle crow.
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u/Nois3 3d ago
Maybe it's a Jackdaw?
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u/CautionPossum 3d ago
“You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows...”
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u/Formal_Owl_400 3d ago
No, it's a jungle crow. Often mistaken for ravens because of their size and large beaks.
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u/Purlasstor 4d ago edited 4d ago
Is the bird’s foot tied to the branch with some sort of black string?
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u/More_Fault_2157 4d ago
Falconer here. That's a piece of leather called a "Jess" that's basically a leash for birds. Gives the handler something to grab when you want to keep the bird in place but won't get in the way if you let the bird go to fly around a bit
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u/Work_Reddit_ 3d ago
he's got a bunch of videos on YouTube I found, sometimes it's tied but most of the time it's not. maybe when it was younger?
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u/Tylendal 3d ago
Don't know about ravens from that area, but at least for crows where I am, the pink around the beak means it's young.
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u/_vfsh 4d ago
Looking closely I think the bird is tagged and there is a stick or piece of grass or something that looks like its tied but it doesn't seem to be connected to the leg tag
E: I watched it 5 more times and I think youre right actually, it moves with the Ravens leg and looks like it might be tied with a knot
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u/Ragnarok314159 3d ago
I bet it’s there to eat bugs that land on the exposed tree.
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u/camz_47 4d ago
How to collect Rubber:
Step 1. Find Rubber 🌳
Step 2. Cut into Rubber 🌳
Step 3. Make sure to have 🐦 supervise process
Step 4. Profit 📈
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u/Sem_Fortuna 3d ago
Step 5. Spend all day in the middle of the jungle milking hard wood.
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u/Fauster 3d ago
You must gather rubber for King Leopold or he will cut off your hands or sell you to Colonel Kurtz!
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u/DepartmentMany5113 4d ago
What is crow's role in this?
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u/LadyZaryss 4d ago
Apparently this process attracts a tonne of mosquitos. Maybe the crow is waiting around to eat them?
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u/DoomshrooM8 4d ago
Isn’t the leg tied to the branch?
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u/The_Tooter_Snooter 3d ago
I guess it could be a pet and it’s secured while the dude films? I cannot imagine it’s economical to have a bird tied to every tree in the orchard.
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u/Bathtub-Warrior32 4d ago
Opportunistic crow waiting for bugs attracted to tree sap's scent.
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u/gruvee 4d ago
Kinda looks like they tied him there as forced anti-bug security
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u/MomentSouthern250 3d ago
oh. come. on. This was such a nice video until now. But good catch, thanks.
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u/POLTERxGEIST 4d ago
The forest union requires there to be one present at any site if humans are being employed as well even if the job is a human one so they just have to be there
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u/Wolff_Hound 4d ago
That's just a placeholder, to extract rubber from tall trees they would use crane.
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u/Emergency-Box-5719 3d ago
I thought everyone had a bro crow. Mine is Russell, but he prefers Russ.
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u/BradL30 4d ago
Forbidden mozzarella!
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u/thestormiscomingyeah 3d ago
Mozerell tree
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u/NothingButTheTruthy 3d ago
"Why are you always dropping the last syllable? You're under-pronouncing everything"
"If anything, I'd say you're over-pronouncing it"
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u/Kor_Phaeron_ 3d ago
Raw rubber (aka liquid latex) has zero food value or calories. It does not digest; it turns solid in stomach acid and can block your digestive tract.
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u/sexraX_muiretsyM 3d ago
whats the source of this info? I couldnt confirm it
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u/Sad-Term-5455 4d ago
I need to squeeze that 🫠
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u/Crimson941 3d ago
You will be regretting for doing that. Up untill today, I still can't shaken off the terrible smell of the rubber tapper sap. Moreover, separating the sap from the cup is not an easy job, the rubber is watery and sticky. Once it stick on the hand or your clothes, taking it off is a tiresome chore.
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u/videogametes 3d ago
What does it smell like?
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u/Just-Luck-7430 3d ago
Sour and pungent, basically like anime convention level of BO
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u/JustHereForCatss 3d ago
So as a MTG player I can squeeze the forbidden mozzarella without fear?
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u/Crimson941 3d ago
Nah, don't do that dude. It's smell so bad even people's surrounding will either pinch their noses or cursing you. If you do not hit the shower ASAP, the lingering smell of rubber tapper will stick for a very long time. Whenever I am done helping my father's farm, I quickly hit the shower, period.
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u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 4d ago
An astronomical amount of people have died to extract that stuff
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u/iJon_v2 4d ago
At first I was like, “how”?
But then I remembered the Belgian Congo
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u/Moiyub 3d ago
The natives of the Amazon were treated horribly by Spain too. They were given quotas of rubber to harvest and if they didnt meet it they were tortured, mutilated, raped, children handicapped, just pure evil oh wait no thats just normal capitalism.
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u/Icy-Lobster-203 3d ago
Everyone talks about Leopold for this stuff. But even in the main book about this, King Leopold's Ghost, the author has an entire chapter about how all the colonial powers were basically just as bad all over the world, but were more than happy to sweep it under the rug.
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u/TaoofPu 4d ago
Could you expound?
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u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 4d ago
Belgium killed millions of Congolese people to extract rubber from the region.
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u/wittyjokename92 3d ago
Not just killed them. Regularly would train and arm cannibal tribes to be unleashed on villages that failed to meet quotas. Going so far as to force neighboring villages to watch the cannibals execute and devour the victims as a warning of what would happen to them if they failed to produce enough rubber. Chopping limbs off children because their parents didn't work hard enough. And generally just doing the most heinous things imaginable. It wasn't genocide but a nation sized torture.
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u/Moiyub 3d ago
"traditional western christian values"
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u/spicygayunicorn 3d ago
Just like the Bible teaches us train and arm a canibalistic tribe and unleash it on those who don't do what you want
Or wasnt it something about compassion
Ehh lets try the first one
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u/scrotumscab 3d ago
The Bible does have a part where God sends a bear to kill like 20 kids that made fun of a bald man
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u/progorp 4d ago edited 3d ago
Car tires are still mostly made of this. Think how many tires exists and how many trees you need to produce all those, pretty crazy. And they are quite cheap considering how much labour is needed. Harvesters probably gets almost nothing /tire.
Edit: ok, not mostly any more nowadays, which is a good thing of course. But still 20%-30%.
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u/GarminTamzarian 4d ago
IIRC, the history of rubber plantations is extremely dark.
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u/HawaiianShirtMan 4d ago
Yeah, even just a quick glance into the Belgian's rubber plantations in what is now the DRC is horrifying
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u/twentythreeskidoo 4d ago
Horrific before plantations also. The rubber in the Congo was from wild vines and in order to get extract quotas from villagers Leopold's agents would hold their families hostage for example.
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u/CaptainTripps82 4d ago
Wouldn't just hold them hostage, they would cut the hands and feet off of children to spur their parents to work harder
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u/Dickhitzwater007 3d ago
Thats terrible but also why would they cripple the future workforce? Seems kind of dumb...
I can only assume its like blood diamond where they dont take both hands or both feet for example?
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u/defaulticus 3d ago
Because they weren't going to be managing the colony in a generation, some other Belgian guy would. You only need the quota to look good while you're in charge. In fact, its better if output declines under your successor, it makes you look good by comparison. If you can goose output under yourself while sabotaging the next guy, that's basically the ideal outcome.
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u/Predditor_drone 3d ago
Are there any plantations that don't have a dark history?
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u/BroughtBagLunchSmart 4d ago
I know "extremely" is pretty extreme but I still feel you need more descriptive words about how awful that situation was.
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u/Skullcrusher 4d ago edited 3d ago
That's why car tires used to be white before they added carbon black. You also see this in old cartoons
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u/crusoe 3d ago
They were white only very very early on. They quickly discovered carbon black improved wear resistance and resistance to photo degradation.
What you are seeing in cartoons is whitewall tires, in which white paint was applied to make them look like the earliest tires. If you look closer you will see the tread is still black in most cartoons.
Only the very earliest cars maybe up until the 1920s and betty boop would be white.
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u/skr_replicator 4d ago
It's also putting the world on the brink of possible economic collapse, as those trees are all cloned monoculture (to make the rubber they make reliably identical) and could easily get wiped out by a disease (that already happened, and many places are just not able to farm them anymore because they would all just get infected and die). We are just hoping that the disease won't spread to the last few places they can grow these. And if it happens, all natural rubber will be gone, and we won't have tires to put on cars etc, chaos will ensue.
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u/Beneficial-Tea-2055 4d ago
Cars can survive on synthetic tires, airplanes on the other hand can’t.
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u/gk98s 4d ago
Which would be a massive disaster as aeroplanes are the safest way of long distance transport
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u/Rycan420 3d ago
Please elaborate.
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u/soft-wear 3d ago
Natural rubber has very good heat resistance and shape recovery so it handles high friction and high weight very well. Synthetic rubber is substantially worse at both, and both happen to be extremely relevant when your landing a 400 ton airplane at nearly 200 mph.
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u/Rycan420 3d ago
Thanks. So.. could synthetic get there, but more expensive to do so? Or can it not even get there?
I feel like most things have been optimized so much or the corners cut sim much that we won’t “lose” something when we do lose the way to get something, we’ll just have to adapt to a less effect and/or more expensive alternative.
Except when we actually can’t.
Which of these is that?
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u/soft-wear 3d ago
Current synthetic rubber simply can’t get there. In fact airplane tires already use synthetic rubber in the core, it’s just the tread that’s 100% natural rubber.
But your hunch is correct in that current synthetic rubber is as optimized as it’s getting and where it’s at now it doesn’t even have the tear resistance to handle initial impact, let alone the heat.
Basically the only option is another source for natural rubber, which exists (Dandelion rubber) but is currently cost prohibitive and lack anywhere near the production capacity to be useful.
So as is often the case we’re playing Russian roulette with tree disease vs industrial scale alternatives. Problem is, we have no idea how many bullets are in the chamber.
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u/Dovahkiinthesardine 3d ago edited 3d ago
Natural rubber is polyisoprene, but specifically cis-1,4- polyisoprene
We can make 1,4-polyisoprene very cheaply via radical reaction, but it results in a mixture of the cis- and trans isomers (same atoms, different geometry). This results in slight differences in material properties.
We CAN synthesize the cis-1,4-polymer with catalysts but its more expensive and you have to add a bunch of additives to achieve the exact same properties because natural rubber isn't a pure compound
Saying synthetic rubber is worse at x property isn't accurate because we can tune the properties a lot, and we can replace natural rubber fully in theory. There just is no reason to
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u/Adabiviak 4d ago
Girlfriend was involved in getting a big research project off the ground to find alternative sources of this sort of natural rubber for this reason (I think the main thrust was to breed a tree that produces this that's also fast-growing, critter resistant, and not locked to the tropics, like something we could grow in (future given climate change) US soil. If we lose the remnants of those trees, things will get weird as you say, and while this administration has been kind of stupid about research money allotments, there is money here. This particular project got kind of derailed when the primary owner/coordinator dipped though.
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u/Amereius 4d ago
The natural rubber production is highly unethical because of how badly the harvesters are payed, it's basically slavery. There's a good documentary in YT and the large tire manufacturers refused to give any comments in it. They know bad it is.
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u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman 3d ago
Synthetic rubber production isn’t exactly rainbows and sunshine itself, as it’s all petroleum based.
At least using trees somewhat moderates emissions as new rubber tree growth slowly soaks up degraded/emitted rubber carbons, whereas synthetic derived rubbers just purely add pollution.
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u/AmbiTheAirforceRuna 4d ago
Just FYI, this and the process to make it useful, stinks so fucking bad
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u/StabYourFace 3d ago
What does it smell like? I'm assuming not like rubber tires in a tire shop
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u/AmbiTheAirforceRuna 3d ago
Unfortuantly no, love that smell. Its kinda acidic smell. Like....rotting plastic meat if that makes sense. Like you know its not meat, but smells like rotting meat and just claws at your throat and nostrils.
Worst part is, you DO get used to it and become paranoid about your smell for the next few days
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u/More_Fault_2157 3d ago
I made another comment but let me reiterate for the people who care more about the bird than the rubber.
I'm a falconer and I train birds of prey. On its legs are what's called a Jess. It's made of leather and it's used as a leash of some sort. You can grab them to keep the Bird in place as needed. They don't have a capability to tie the bird though. So that bird is actually loose and can fly to another branch if needed. Birds of prey and other birds can become bonded to people and they choose to be with you rather than forced
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u/ApollosCosmos 3d ago
Yes I thought it would be something like that, it doesn't look distressed from being restrained and probably familiar with the person.
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u/earpicky 4d ago
Anyone know why the last three cuts were made?
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u/RosettaStoned6 4d ago
To increase the flow rate towards the main cut as it flows to the collection bowl. The additional cuts are all angled towards the main vertical cut.
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u/DownvoteForGrammar 3d ago
This video is fake, in reality the sap slowly accumulates out of the cuts and trickles down over hours. In this video there's probably someone off screen with a bowl of pre-made rubber pouring it down the cut. You can see them spill a drop on the guy's thumb 2 seconds in.
This is what it really looks like:
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u/Crimson941 3d ago
This is correct. Usually it taken days just to fill up the a single cup. My dad usually make the cut during the week days and my brothers and I occasionally help collecting the sapa on either Saturday or Sunday.
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u/Intelligent-Edge7533 4d ago
Serious question: How much is natural rubber like that used today versus synthetic? It seems like it would take a lot of trees and effort and time, be more of a seasonal supply, etc.
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u/Blitzer046 3d ago
It's about half. I could find that 29 million tonnes of rubber was produced in 2022, and 51% was synthetic rubber, which is derived from petroleum.
There are concerns about the ongoing production of natural rubber (latex) due to climate change, plant disease and a volatile market price. Trees have a non-production phase of 7 years before having a productive phase of about 25 years. Farms are often small and family-owned and growers may rip out rubber trees if there is a more lucrative cash crop.
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u/Heavy_Drag7585 4d ago
Whoops there goes another rubber tree
Whoops there goes another rubber tree
Whoops there goes another rubber tree plant
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