Author: Susan Milius / Source: Science News
A year when vandals trashed a Joshua tree in a national park during a U.S. government shutdown is a good time to talk about what’s so unusual about these iconic plants.
The trees’ chubby branches ending in rosettes of pointy green leaves add a touch of Dr. Seuss to the Mojave Desert in the U.S. Southwest. Its two species belong to the same family as agave and, believe it or not, asparagus. And the trees bloom with masses of pale flowers erupting from a branch tip.
“To me [the flowers] smell kind of like mushrooms or ripe cantaloupe,” says evolutionary ecologist Christopher Irwin Smith of Willamette University in Salem, Ore. His lab has found a form of alcohol in the scent that actually occurs in mushrooms, too.
It’s tough to tell how old a Joshua tree is. Their trunks don’t show annual growth rings the way many other trees do. The desert trees became headline news in January when vandals trashed at least one of them at Joshua Tree National Park (SN Online: 1/12/19).
What gets biologists really excited about Joshua trees is their pollination, with each of the two tree species relying on its own single species of Tegeticula moth. That could make Joshua tree reproduction highly vulnerable to climate change and other environmental disruptions.
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