Judie and Dan Udovic pose by a burned yucca plant.

Two partners, tragically torn apart by a catastrophic fire. Will they be able to find each other and rekindle their relationship?

Mutualists are crucial for reproduction and survival, providing services that include pollen transfer, seed dispersal, nutrient provision, and protection from the biotic and abiotic environment. It therefore seems likely that the impact of habitat disturbance on individual species, and their ability to recover from disturbance, is linked to their ability to quickly re-establish their mutualisms. Remarkably, though, virtually nothing is known about how mutualisms are disrupted by, and reassembled following, many major disturbances, including fires. These gaps in our knowledge are of particular concern in a rapidly changing world, since mutualisms are now believed to be a focus around which biodiversity accumulates in both ecological and evolutionary time. My collaborator Dan Udovic (University of Oregon) and I have been examining fire impacts and subsequent recovery of the mutualism between the yucca Hesperoyucca whipplei and its obligate pollinator, the yucca moth Tegeticula maculata, since the massive San Diego fires of 2003. This study is providing some of the first data on sensitivity, resilience, and reestablishment of mutualisms after a major disturbance. The results are holding many surprises: for example, we expected yucca moths to be more resilient to fire than the yuccas (sincde they overwinter in the soil), but it’s the moths that seem to have suffered the heavier impact. The mutualism itself is recovering much more rapidly than current natural history understanding would have predicted, and we now want to find out why. Unfortunately, we now have a chance to replicate our studies: the fires of 2007 have passed very close to our current study sites.
Want to learn more? Visit Dan Udovic’s web page.