Welcome

I'm Jeremy Yoder, a doctoral student in the Pellmyr Lab at the University of Idaho. This is my website.

Research interests

In the closing paragraph of The Origin of Species, Darwin contrasts the monotonous mechanics of the nonliving world with the baroque diversity of life: " ... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Today this contrast is borne out by ecological and evolutionary research suggesting that biotic interactions may be more important to the diversification of life than the abiotic environment (see, for example, Schluter's The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation and Thompson's The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution). Understanding the intricacies of biotic interactions and their contribution to the history of life is therefore of central importance to evolutionary biology.

The Pellmyr lab at the University of Idaho studies the evolutionary outcomes of plant-insect interactions, using the classic mutualistic relationship between yucca moths and yuccas as a model system. Yucca moths lay their eggs in yucca flowers, then actively fertilize the flowers using specialized pollen-carrying mouthparts so that the developing moth caterpillars can eat a portion of the yucca's seeds as the flower becomes a fruit. The classic treatise on this fascinating relationship is Riley's "The Yucca Moth and Yucca Pollination" (1892; Missouri Botanical Garden Annual Report), which is available through JSTOR. For details about the latest research on yuccas and yucca moths, please see the publication list on the Pellmyr lab website.

Technical notes

This is version 6.6 of this website. It's the final outcome of a whole lot of time spent teaching myself to write html and css by trial and error. One of the biggest aids in that process was the CSS Zen Garden, so check it out if you want to see some of my creative roots. Generally speaking, I've tried to make the site compatible across platforms, but I usually only preview page edits in Mozilla Firefox, so users of that other browser are duly warned. A note on privacy, too: all pages on this site contain some code from Google Analytics, which is used to collect data on how many people visit the site and how they got there.