Downloaded and ready to have a close read of it!

Brooke nailed some key ideas: "We, too, have to learn to live within the fire regimes in which we find ourselves — that we have, in fact, created for ourselves. Like it or not, we have to become fire-adapted."

A big thanks to UCLA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology for hosting me while I worked on this, and to all the legends in the Tingley Lab that shared ideas with me and showed me around LA and surrounds. Plus this fox squirrel outside my office window that encouraged the example in Figure 1 #GoBruins

Our thinking was shaped by some excellent empirical work on intraspecific variation.

To name a few:
🪲Boheman weevils (Santos et al. 2025)
🐿️Eastern fox squirrels (Potash et al. 2020)
🦗Pygmy grasshoppers (Forsman et al. 2011)
🦎The Mediterranean lizard Psammodromus algirus (Álvarez-Ruiz et al. 2021)

We show that fire-related traits in animals can vary within species, affect fitness, and be heritable – and extend a recent plant-focused application of ‘trait-fire mismatch’ to animals.

And we develop the concept of 'trait–fire mismatch':

A type of phenotype-environment mismatch that brings together ecological and evolutionary fire science and supports forecasts of fire-driven environmental change.

We show that variation in fire-related traits – such as bark thickness, resprouting, serotiny, and smoke-induced germination – is widespread within plant species.

We examine plant traits through the lens of fire science.

Traits such as resprouting and serotiny help plants thrive in fire-prone areas.

Thank you! Feels good to share this work. And it was fun to learn more about bats while working on this with microbat expert and lead author Amanda!