but its dignity begs for comic relief too and so they called it quixote’s candle for cervantes’ errant knight peculiar and beautiful it has many names it reminded the spanish of the tapioca plant in haiti they also called it their dagger and bayonet seeing it like it was born last night those names have purpose the yucca accents the atmosphere unusual and singular in flowery splendor tilting against all odds it brings attention to the whole picture it stands so exalted out of the brown woman thigh hills that roll over and over to the sea pointing to the holy trinity where sea otters are symbiont with kelp and sea urchins it waves in a slow gracious flow along ancient mountains moving groaning seeping wetness from their purple mountain thighs past the shimmering granite boulder tawny kelp rolls in dark blue swells framing the yucca in gold filagree the yucca whipplei spanish bayonet points to the sparkling granite sand beach where condors once ate whales it stands like the orchestra leader not looking like anything else but bringing harmony to look at yucca whipplei when you finally do is to wonder what it is how it grows

PART THREE actual act of ardor

up out of chaparral sage scrub a moth comes to the yucca at night on a santa lucia mountain above the sea at night yucca whipplei flowers open and glisten with light from the moon and sends out a smell for the moth to come in a late winter moonlit night our lord’s candle illuminates the moth’s desire in fluorescent sequence flowers pop out along the ten foot stalk out of the ground and out of the cocoon male and female moths emerge looking for bright creamy flowers across the sage chaparral in lovely yucca petals he fertilizes her and becomes so exhausted he dies then she goes to work on the yucca

Female yucca moth on yucca whipplei pistil pollinating Photo copyright W.P. Armstrong

first she must find a virgin flower yuccas have two smells one to attract the moth another to say she is not a virgin the moth won’t stay in that case she only has one hundred eggs to lay in the flower she wags her antennae for scent if it is a candidate she goes to work on the dual-sexed yucca whipplei yucca flowers’ female and male parts are together in the blossom a low fruiting hermaphrodite the female moth works from stamen to stigma collecting sticky pollina and rolling it in a ball in her maxillary palpi that is a part of her mouth but under her chin adapted to mix the male and female yucca pollen and roll it in a ball which she carries to another flower with fertilized yucca pollen ball in mouth she enters the fold of the new flower’s petals and climbs to the top of the pistil she positions herself on the side of the yucca ovary with her ovipositor inserted in the ovule chamber one tegeticula maculata egg is laid then to carry on the work of pollinating the yucca she crawls to the top of the ovary and uncoils her palpi and draws them back and forth across the stigma now she has successfully pollinated the flower germinating pollen grains in the tubes will fertilize 300 seeds of which her larva will only eat 20 yucca whipplei controls how many seeds it will bear by killing fertilized flowers with too many seeds it abscises the overly fertilized flower by shutting off the nutrient flow that kills all the moth eggs in that flower and the yucca plant controls how many moths it will produce keeping a balance for its sustainability so the moth is grateful for the scent to tell if the flower had been pollinated lest its progeny starve now she marks the yucca flower that she pollinated with a scent so others will know to fly on she only works at night in the morning she curls up in a yucca flower and sleeps till the moonlight beckons for the next night’s work

PART FOUR legacy in a larva

later in the spring inside the yucca ovule chamber a tegeticula masculata larva will hatch and eat some yucca seeds seeds are stuffed in chambers like a six-shooter chambers are in columns in the ovary the moth larva is in one as it grows in the summer high on the yucca it fuses seeds in its column with a silk thread  the moth’s larva has become a fat pink worm and eats the seeds in its column  it only eats 12 to 20 of the seeds the rest are for pollination  in the autumn when the flower is dormant seed capsules break open releasing the seeds except the few remaining fused by silk thread in the larva’s column where now the fat pink larva has room to roam and eats the fused seeds and waits  when the autumn rains come it emerges and drops to the ground or crawls down the stalk we don’t know which because it has never been recorded  on the ground it burrows down makes a silken cocoon with grains of sand and spends the winter covered with sandy chaparral sage

PART FIVE moth emerges and goes to work with the warm spring rains the yucca whipplei blooms the yucca moth tegeticula maculata emerges from the ground and breaks out of the cocoon it is ready to conduct such a refined devoted act of reproduction in such a singular testimony to mutual need that it must be love  it immediately looks for yucca flower  first the male must fertilize the female so they fly together to a yucca flower crawl inside the petals and do it then he dies from exhaustion  if there has been enough moisture our lord’s candle will begin to flower in february and keeps it up for months usually till june yuccas closer to the sea flower first they start on the bottom and pop open in sequence up the stalk in a magnificent inflorescence each is open only a few days  at one time flowers all along the stalk will be in one of all the phases for the whole process the plant lives four to seven years the moth lives just a few days a perfect symbiosis evolved over millions of years the most rare and sublime we know in the world  it doesn’t exist elsewhere as it does here with tawny kelp beds framing its creamy flower or alongside redwoods in a limestone waterfall after tegeticula maculata pollinates in its three-night frenzy the yucca seeds will scatter in an autumn wind and the plant will die     PART SIX the historical yucca whipplei as the climate changed in the mexican mountains the yucca needed more moisture so it could flower it migrated here like the great cone trees and madroño look to the mountains to see yuccas go to the top along the mountains along the ocean grow manzanita berries chaparral peas and scrub sage always somewhere in the middle even when off to the side a yucca whipplei stands right up ten feet tall with a thousand flowers out of a huge granite boulder against the dark blue ocean with a feathery tawny kelp filagree frame around it from the seed in rocky hillsides yucca whipplei sprang to life and grew for seven years as a thorny rosette close to the ground until its time to bloom for reproduction when it died the native people used it for many purposes they used the roots for shampoo and the bulb for roasting it was a community event each family bringing its harvest along the big sur south coast salinans dug great fire pits when the coals burned down they added stones then the yucca roots and more rocks then built a new fire on top and roasted the yucca for a day or two they roasted the yucca flower buds and stalks for food from it too they made a flour for cakes to be stored the natives used the live yucca too they made fiber from the stalk and leaves to weave rope fishing lines nets baskets belts sandals headbands tie canoes planks together and start fire to harvest the yucca whipplei without harming it natives separated the roots from the plant with a wood wedge just before the yucca flowered they trimmed the leaves down to close to the base so to get more flowers it felt like sugar cane and tasted like a baked potato it could be pounded and made into cakes dried and stored and used later for stews much life happens in the santa lucias of ventana and big sur yuccas are but a symbol hundreds of plants find their southernmost or northernmost home in the santa lucias sometimes they live alone as a last stand sometimes in perfect synergy with others or an oddity that dramatizes the harmony yuccas came from mexico and went no further north in the canyon the redwood went no further south madroños and manzanitas came too from mexico and live here on bold mountains up from the sea yucca whipplei and tegeticula maculata have been studied since 1892 as proof of darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection and used to explain mutualism and coevolution if the moth had not found the yucca it would have dead-ended most likely and the yucca needed a pollinator it tried many allures until the moon worked they found each other and evolved to need only each other they depend entirely and exclusively on each other and take from each other just what is needed to keep going never has a moth picked one plant to be its host and transferring the plant’s pollen particularly with such specific behavior yuccas can generate rosettes around itself but these are copies of the parent and cannot move more than a few feet in some places a subspecies can send out shoots underground to produce plants nearby but these are just copies yuccas cannot pollinate without the moth tegeticula maculata has no other function in life but to pollinate the yucca it’s a perfect relationship that creates a spectacular symbol of wondrous nature in many places but hardly so amazing as in coastal santa lucias by its unusual appearance it brings attention to the awesome symmetry and synergy of the coastal range that is the last home to incredible diversity   story and yucca photos by jack ellwanger special editorial assistance by Margie Whitnah december 2002 SOURCES: June 1999`Oecologia.’ Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the June Oecologia. Maureen Gilmer Journal – Gazette Ft. Wayne, Ind. Mar 17, 2002 Source: The American Naturalist, Nov 1996 v148 n5 p827(21) Evolution of pollination and mutualism in the Yucca moth lineage. Olle Pellmyr, John N. Thompson, Jonathan M. Brown and Richard G. Harrison University of Chicago Press Ecology, Sept 1997 v78 n6 p1655(6). Pollinating seed eaters: why is active pollination so rare? Olle Pellmyr Ecological Society of America Susan Milius Science News Vol 156 1999 National Academy of Sciences of the United States, August 3, 1999 v96 i16 p9178(6). Forty million years of mutualism: evidence for Eocene origin of the yucca-yucca moth association. Olle Pellmyr and James Leebens-Mack BioScience, Dec 1995 v45 n11 p741(2). Moths escape from evolutionary dead end. (coevolution of the yucca plant and yucca moth) (research update from annual meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences) Julie Ann Miller W.P. Armstrong Cal Poly Land CalFlora Database US Dept. of Agriculture Forest Service Database Alan Gold, Indian Uses of Desert Plants, Desert USA Aker, C. L. 1982. Spatial and Temporal Dispersion Patterns of Pollinators and Their Relationship to the Flowering Strategy of Yucca whipplei (Agavaceae). Oecologia 54: 243-252. Marylee Ramsay and John Richard Schrock The Kansas School Naturalist, May 1992 Emporia State University and Central States Entomological Society

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