Multi-year stigmatic pollen-load sampling reveals temporal stability in interspecific pollination of flowers in a subalpine meadow
Multi-year stigmatic pollen-load sampling reveals temporal stability in interspecific pollination of flowers in a subalpine meadow
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DOI：
10.1111/oik.06447
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Huang Shuang-Quan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fang Qiang;Gao Jie;W. Scott Armbruster;Huang Shuang-Quan
Co-flowering plants may commonly experience interspecific pollination. It remains.unknown, however, whether interspecific pollination is a largely stochastic process or.consistent enough over years to exert selection for traits that can reduce interspecific.pollination or ameliorate its deleterious effects on reproduction. To assess the likelihood.of this precondition being met, stigmatic pollen loads on 17–34 insect-pollinated.plant species over three consecutive years were scored in a subalpine meadow in.southwestern China. Plant species varied significantly in the amount and proportion.of heterospecific pollen (HP) on stigmas. Both the number of HP species and the.proportion of the pollen load that was HP for each recipient species correlated positively.between years (reflected in pairwise correlations for all year-by-year combinations)..Although inter-annual variation was smaller for conspecific pollen (CP) than for HP.loads, species tended to experience either consistently high or consistently low HP.proportions across years. We found that species with higher stigmatic HP proportions.generally experienced lower proportional variation in stigmatic HP, an unexpected.result if high HP loads are the result of rare stochastic events. The novel finding.of between-year consistency in stigmatic loads of heterospecific pollen suggests that.adaption to stigmatic loads of HP is possible, and two divergent strategies may have.evolved: HP avoidance and HP tolerance. The observation of temporally consistent.differences among species in levels of HP supports the idea that natural selection.may be operating either to increase tolerance or to minimize arrival of heterospecific.pollen on stigmas in co-flowering plants. Such adaptations may be important for the.maintenance of high levels of local plant diversity in biodiversity hotspots such as our.study area.
