Category Archives: my research

Local boy makes op-ed

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Chicory, Cichorium intybus, which always makes me think of Mr. Longenecker’s biology class wildflower walks (Flickr, jby)

Cross-posted from The Molecular Ecologist.

Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its vandalism of just about every other function of the federal government), but it’s hardly felt like enough. One new option presented when I happened across Science Homecoming, a project to recruit scientists to speak out in support of federal research agencies in the newspapers of towns where they grew up. As Science Homecoming points out, local newspapers continue to have a huge audience across the country, and that’s an opportunity to reach people where they live, with stories that show how the current crisis impacts their local communities.

So I looked up the opinion section editor at LNP/LancasterOnline, the modern incarnation of the paper my parents have subscribed to since I was old enough to read it, which serves central Pennsylvania. I emailed her a pitch that I’d put together following Science Homecoming’s suggestions, and she wrote back to ask for a full column almost immediately. (The topic was already very much on the editorial staff’s radar.) A bit more than a week later, my column is online and in print, alongside a parallel piece from two geoscientists with local roots, on the front page of the Sunday Perspectives section.

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2024, in photos

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Canada Jay taking flight on Rattlesnake Ledge, Seattle (jby)

Occurred to me this morning that I haven’t done a retrospective of the past year’s Flickr photostream as I did last year for plants, and birds, and mammals, and landmarks — and while I’m not going to manage that for 2024, at this point, I can and should still post my favorites. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with the camera, and the processing options in Adobe Lightroom, and I think I got some mighty nice results.

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2023 in plant life

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A western Joshua tree in bloom near Mojave, California. (jby)

Following on from my post of 2023 bird photography highlights, here’s some of my favorite flowering plant images I captured in 2023. Flowers are, of course, easier photography subjects, but I’m still learning how to balance lighting and depth of field to really capture details with the most aesthetic interest and botanic value.

Above, the example with the greatest professional value: Joshua trees in flower this spring, after record-breaking winter rainfall across a lot of the Mojave Desert.

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New paper: Conservation challenges and solutions for the Mojave Desert

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Burned Joshua trees at the site of the 2020 Cima Dome fire in Mojave National Preserve (Flickr, jby)

A big review article, written with Joshua Tree Genome Project co-PI Chris Smith and a bunch of other Joshua tree experts, went online today at Biological Conservation. In it, we attempt to comprehensively describe the challenges to biodiversity conservation in the Mojave Desert, and outline solutions — more detail over on the lab blog, or check out the paper itself via this sharing link, which provides free full-text access through January 20, 2023.

New publication: A genetic fingerprint of coevolutionary diversification

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A red milkweed beetle, Tetraopes tertophthalmus, on its host plant (jby)

A new paper from the lab — coauthored with all three of the Yoder Lab’s graduate student alumni — is now online ahead of print in the journal Evolution Letters. In it, we analyze population genetic data from 20 pairs of plants and herbivores, parasites, and mutualists that live intimately on those plants to test for evidence that the associate species’ population genetic structure aligns with that of their host plants. This is an expected result if adaptation to the host plant drives diversification of the associates — and we found that it is indeed a recurring pattern. This is a pretty neat result, and, I think, a nice contribution to a long-established literature on how intimate associations with plants has driven the diversification of groups like butterflies and beetles.

On making the local news

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This is a bit of a rehash from the social media platform whose name I will not utter here, but earlier this month I made my first TV appearance as an “expert” on Joshua trees, talking about the Joshua Tree Genome Project common garden experiments as a first step towards assisted gene flow to help the trees cope with climate change. It was a weird experience! The reporter emailed to arrange things and I agreed to an interview on Zoom, but I didn’t fully realize I was being recorded for broadcast until we were wrapping up. Mercifully, he selected the most coherent bits of what I told him and I didn’t make too many weird faces.

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New paper: How flowers’ symmetry may affect pollinator diversity

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  • A cluster of blue flowers
    The actinomorphic, or radially symmetric, flowers of a nightshade
  • A honeybee on a white flower
    A honeybee forages on the zygomorphic, or bilaterally symmetric, flowers of a milkvetch

I’m delighted to announce a new paper published today in the Biology Letters, coauthored with Colin Carlson at Georgetown University and a CSUN undergrad researcher, Gio Gomez. In it, we examine a big collection of floral visitation records and find a pattern that pollination biologists have talked about but never quite directly demonstrated: the symmetry of flowers seems to shape the diversity of animals that visit them, and potentially provide pollination services. Here’s a brief “lay summary” we wrote to accompany the article:

For centuries, botanists have understood that the symmetry of flowers — whether or not they are “zygomorphic”, with a single line of symmetry — shapes how they attract and interact with pollinators. We examined 53,609 records of animal visits to flowers in 159 communities around the world, and found that zygomorphic flowers are visited by fewer potential pollinator species. This may explain broad patterns in the diversity of flowering plants, in which zygomorphic flowers are associated with faster formation of new species. It also suggests that plant species with zygomorphic flowers may be at greater risk of extinction due to pollinator loss.

We released this work as a preprint on bioRxiv awhile ago, but you can now find the final “official” version of the peer-reviewed paper on the Biology Letters website.

This is an exciting paper because it’s my first foray into pollination ecology proper, and because of its place in that broader field of research — and also because it’s the first paper I’ve published with a student coauthor since starting on faculty at CSUN. On top of all that, the project has been a really nice bridge between my interests (mutualism) and Colin’s (host-associate community ecology), and it’s kicked off a collaboration that has produced some even more exciting results, coming soon to a preprint server near you.

New paper: Meta-analysis of local adaptation experiments compares sources of natural selection

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Low clouds surround mountaintops in the San Gabriel Mountains. The analysis in the new paper suggests that selection by abiotic factors like high-elevation conditions may often be weaker than selection created by interactions between species. (Flickr: Jeremy Yoder)

Local adaptation, in which populations of a species become better able to survive and thrive in their home environment than in conditions found elsewhere in the species’ range, is a widespread pattern that evolutionary biologists have long used to study the causes and consequences of natural selection. My newest paper, which is now online ahead of print in The American Naturalist, combines data across many studies of local adaptation to answer a persistent question about the history of life on Earth — has evolution been influenced more by selection arising from environmental conditions, or by interactions among living things?

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2018 photos: Fieldwork (and tourism) in Spain and France

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2018.06.20 - Gruissan
Gruissan, a coastal village near Narbonne.

If I’m really going to take my digital life off Facebook, I have to get serious about tending to a more distributed version of that site’s functions. Exhibit A is my Flickr account, which I’ve gotten lax with updating — I was almost a year behind with uploading images there! The holidays have been a good chance to catch up, though, and I’ve finished updating through a trip to Spain and France for fieldwork last June.

I was there to take samples of Medicago truncatula along the Spanish and French Mediterranean coasts — ridiculously pretty territory, even when a snafu with my car rental meant I had to do a fair bit of collecting by mass transit and rental bike. I flew into Madrid (with a layover in London), then to the Spanish coastal town of Málaga; then I spent most of a week in and around Narbonne, France, and finished with a day in Paris before flying home (again via London). It was my first time in both Spain and France, and my first time in Europe in more than a decade.

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New paper: Conflict and communication in mutualism

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Medicago truncatula, or barrel clover, a member of the legume family that hosts bacteria in its roots. The bacteria transform nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into fertilizer for their host plant, and the host feeds the bacteria with sugar. Experiments with barrel clover and its mutualists have shown that signals between the plant and the bacteria are important in this interaction, and provide an inspiration for the evolutionary models built by Yoder and Tiffin. (Flickr: jby)

I’m very excited to see this in virtual print — it’s a new model of coevolution between mutualists that takes into account signals between the partners as well as the benefits they provide each other (or don’t).

Yoder JB and P Tiffin. 2017. Sanctions, partner recognition, and variation in mutualism. American Naturalist doi: 10.1086/693472.

I’ll try to write about this in more depth at some point, but here’s the lay summary at the American Naturalist website:

Mutually beneficial relationships between species, or mutualisms, are ubiquitous in the living world, with examples ranging from flowering plants that rely on animal pollinators to fish that clean the teeth and scales of other fish. Mutualisms are often imperfect — one partner or the other varies in the quality of the help it provides. Evolutionary theory predicts that this should break up the relationship, but most mutualisms hold together in spite of partners that take the benefits of mutualism without properly paying them back.

This paradox may be explained by the fact that there’s more to mutualism than trading goods or services. This is a key result of mathematical evolutionary models published in the American Naturalist by Jeremy Yoder and Peter Tiffin, biologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Minnesota. Yoder and Tiffin built a mathematical evolutionary model of mutualists that communicate before trading resources, and compared it to simpler models with only resource-trading or only communication. In the model with communication and resource-trading, host could “sanction” by cutting off resources to prevent poor quality partners from taking over, but evolution of the signals sent by partners and the hosts’ response to those signals maintained variation over time. Neither of the simpler models could do this. With only resource-trading, sanctions eliminated all poor-quality partners, and all variation; with only communication, poor-quality partners took over the mutualism.