Joshua Tree Genome Project researchers need 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 icons of the southwestern desert face mounting pressures from climate change, development, and wildfires. Conservation organizations and agencies are working hard to make sure the trees have a future by preserving Joshua tree woodlands and replanting damaged populations. But there are important things we still don’t know that could be important — like how Joshua trees’ specialized pollinators will fare in a climate-changed future.
Yucca moths (Tegeticula antithetica and T. synthetica), exclusively pollinate the eastern and western Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia and Y. jaegeriana). The moths emerge when the trees are flowering to meet and mate in the flowers. Each female moth then gathers pollen in specialized mouthparts and carries it from one flower to another, where she lay eggs inside the floral pistil and pollinates the flowers by stuffing pollen into receptive tip of the pistil. As pollinated Joshua tree flowers develop into fruit, the moth eggs inside them hatch, and the moth larvae eat some of the seeds developing inside the fruit before tunneling out and burrowing into the sandy soil to form a cocoon.
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