Joshua trees can beat the heat of the desert with the help of a special form of photosynthesis, according to data presented in the latest peer-reviewed paper from the Joshua Tree Genome Project collaboration. The study is the first “fruit” of a multi-year experiment in growing Joshua tree seedlings in experimental gardens distributed across the…
Diving into the Discourse is the CSUN news room’s interview series, featuring conversations with faculty and staff about their research and educational projects on campus. I sat down with host Carmen Chandler last school year to talk about the lab’s work on Joshua trees, their relationship with yucca moths, and the implications for protecting desert…
UPDATE: The live-stream of the talk will be available on the Evolution 2025 YouTube account, opening up at 6:45pm Eastern time. UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Here’s a followup post with the talk recording and a bibliography. The Evolution 2025 conference kicks off soon in Athens, Georgia, and I’m preparing not one but two presentations for…
Multiple Yoder Lab members celebrated graduations and accomplishments at the end of the 2024-2025 school year. Master’s student Pryce Millikin walked in last Friday’s commencement ahead of his planned dissertation defense in July, and undergrad researcher Daniel Dakduk collected his diploma after finishing classes at the end of the fall semester. A couple weeks earlier,…
This is cross-posted from the Joshua Tree Genome Project website. Yoder Lab grad student Pryce Millikin needs your help observing Joshua trees to figure out where their specialized pollinator moths are active. Skip down to the three steps you can follow to help us, or read more background here: Joshua trees need our help. These…
This summer’s Evolution meetings in Montréal included an event that has become a popular part of the conference: a Story Collider show featuring stories told by conference attendees. The 2024 edition collected tales from “Outside the Distribution”, including personal experiences in fieldwork and navigating the early stages of a research career — and also the…
A new exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, showcases artistic and scientific perspectives on one of the most distinctive species in the MOAH’s own back yard: Joshua trees! Desert Forest: Life with Joshua trees presents creative visual works by a diverse array of artists, in an exhibition running from September…
The next scientific conference featuring Yoder Lab research is already underway, but it’s a good deal closer to our home base than Montréal — the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Long Beach, California. Here’s where you can see the very latest research on Joshua trees and their pollinators, considerably less than two hours from…
More than a century ago, in mid-June 1924, the Los Angeles Times devoted a photo spread and several column inches to the second-hand vacation story of some “Cadillac tourists” who saw Joshua trees bearing fruit. It meant, the Times reported, that rain was coming. M.C. Ellison of Sacramento, who has been touring Southern California in…
The Third Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology — a collaborative meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution — begins its in-person component in Montréal, Québec in less than two weeks. Three members of the Yoder Lab will…
