期刊
AMERICAN NATURALIST
卷 177, 期 2, 页码 246-257出版社
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/657954
关键词
wind pollination; ovule number; resource allocation; flower size; pollen limitation; pollen-capture efficiency
资金
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- NSERC
- Canada Research Chair's Program
In angiosperms, ovules are packaged within individual flowers, and an optimal strategy should occur depending on pollination and resource conditions. In animal-pollinated species, wide variation in ovule number per flower occurs, and this contrasts with wind-pollinated plants, where most species possess uniovulate flowers. This pattern is usually explained as an adaptive response to low pollen receipt in wind-pollinated species. Here, we develop a phenotypic model for the evolution of ovule number per flower that incorporates the aerodynamics of pollen capture and a fixed resource pool for provisioning of flowers, ovules, and seeds. Our results challenge the prevailing explanation for the association between uniovulate flowers and wind pollination. We demonstrate that when flowers are small and inexpensive, as they are in wind-pollinated species, ovule number should be minimized and lower than the average number of pollen tubes per style, even under stochastic pollination and fertilization regimes. The model predicts that plants benefit from producing many small inexpensive flowers, even though some flowers capture too few pollen grains to fertilize their ovules. Wind-pollinated plants with numerous flowers distributed throughout the inflorescence, each with a single ovule or a few ovules, sample more of the airstream, and this should maximize pollen capture and seed production.
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