Joshua trees are bizarre. I say this as an expert in Joshua trees.
Joshua’s trees seem weird – their winding branches end in bouquets of stiff knife -shaped leaves, which die to hang on the branches and the trunk like a negligent fur. When the trees of Joshua flourish – which is not every year, since they grow in the hard habitats of the Mojave desert – their flowers are yellow -white and fleshy, with a smell of strange mushrooms. Perhaps the strangest of all, these flowers are pollinated by only one, and only one, species of butterflies, which are roughly the length of your miniature, your colorful dusty black, and which live their own very strange life cycle entirely centered on the trees of Joshua.
Some people wonder why I spend So much time and energy Think about these strange trees. People living in cities of the Mojave desert like Lancaster, California, love Joshua’s trees very much, but they also told me “God did them in this way.” (I am not disagreeing, but I want to know why the all -powerful did this way.) Or there is the moment when my own mother – a parish nurse for our Congregation in Landisville, a family of farmers, very concentrated on practicality – directly asked my mentor of higher education why anyone would take the trouble to study small butterflies like Joshua pollinators. (I almost spontaneously burned embarrassment; he just laughed and said he had done it because it was fun.)
Lately, it seems that the government itself asks this question, and also: why would someone use taxpayers’ funds for research like mine?
The National Science Foundation supported years of research on Joshua Trees via grants to this graduate mentor, and now to me and my collaborators on the Joshua Tree Genome project. We asked for this funding with detailed project proposals, which have experienced several cycles of examination, rejection and revision of experts.
But people appointed by President Donald Trump radically reorgan the National Science Foundation, dismissing dozens of agency expert staff in anticipation that Congress will accept their proposal to reduce the budget of the independent agency by 55%. They would have liked to animate the agency far from the financing of “science focused on curiosity” and towards “applied” subjects such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nuclear energy. If you cannot name immediate use for your research, this new national science foundation of Trump-Iifies would not care to finance it.
This really ignored the functioning of science, however. The applied research is based on a basis of exploration, DIY and puzzle resolution which may not have an obvious objective.
Discovery of hot spring
One of the most famous examples of my field is the Thermus Aquaticus bacteria, discovered by joyfully growing up in a hot source of Yellowstone National Park, at temperatures well above the limits of life as we knew.
An enzyme of Polymerase DNA isolated from these bacteria which like hot water has proven to be the key to a laboratory protocol called chain reaction by polymerase. The PCR, as we call it, allows us to make many copies of DNA sequences in the laboratory, a first critical step to read and decode these genetic sequences.
This discovery unlocked genetic research and biotechnology that revolutionized medicine, agriculture and environmental sciences. The seed of this revolution was the financing of the subsidies of the National Science Foundation for microbiologists who wanted above all to know what lived in the strangest habitat of a national park.
I cannot promise that Joshua Trees will give us the next biotechnological revolution. But I can look at the more important questions to which we could answer by studying these strange thorny trees.
The pollination of Joshua trees by a single kind of butterflies serves as informative contrast with the vegetable and pollinating interactions which play in more common and more complicated situations, such as the pollination of fruits and nuts by wild insects and domestic bees. By studying the simplified system of Joshua Trees, my graduate mentor learned how cooperative relationships and pollination remain cooperative, with two resources and trading services of different species, even when they have incentives to cheat.
My laboratory also studied how the weather influences the very sporadic annual flowering of Joshua Trees. Most of the years, they flourish prolificly, or not at all – and until recently, we did not know what made the difference between Bloom or Bust. For this project, we have developed software to use automatic learning models formed with data that is easy to collect, which can work well for many other plant species. This could be useful in agriculture, or in planning to protect rare plant species, or even to understand how the limit environment where different species can live.
Explore drought tolerance
Perhaps the most exciting, the Joshua Tree Genome project learns how Joshua trees are facing the heat and stress of the drought of the desert.
Measure the physiology of sowing Joshua Tree planted in experimental gardens in warmer or cooler environments, my collaborators test the idea that they can light a special photosynthesis form – the process by which plants make sugar from sunlight and carbon dioxide – to survive hot and dry deserts. It is very useful for a desert plant, of course, but studying it can also suggest means to improve drought tolerance in culture species.
Of course, none of these research applications on Joshua trees can take place. For each thermus aquaticus, there are hundreds of scientific projects that end with anything more than an article of research evaluated by peers and good memories of work in the field. But we need these hundreds of studies focused on curiosity to find a lucky and changing discovery of the world.
In 2024, the National Science Foundation’s expense plan amounted to approximately 1% of all federal spending, and it supported hundreds of thousands of scientists and students from Lancaster, California, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Cutting funding for all this science means that we will simply learn less about the world. This means fewer opportunities for new technologies and new diseases, and fewer scientists have trained to find them. We may not know what discoveries we lack without funding from the National Science Foundation – but we will certainly miss the progress we lose.
Jeremy B. Yoder, a graduate of Lancaster Mennonite High School, is an associate professor of biology at California State University Northridge, where he studies how the interactions between species have shaped the biodiversity of the earth. He is a founding collaborator of the Joshua Tree Genome Project. Bluesky: @ jbyoder.org