Abstract
Variability in floral volatile emissions can occur temporally through floral development, during diel cycles, as well as spatially within a flower. These spatiotemporal patterns are hypothesized to provide additional information to floral visitors, but they are rarely measured, and their attendant hypotheses are even more rarely tested. In Penstemon digitalis, a plant whose floral scent has been shown to be under strong phenotypic selection for seed fitness, we investigated spatiotemporal variation in floral scent by using dynamic headspace collection, respectively solid-phase microextraction, and analyzed the volatile samples by combined gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Total volatile emission was greatest during flowering and peak pollinator activity hours, suggesting its importance in mediating ecological interactions. We also detected tissue and reward-specific compounds, consistent with the hypothesis that complexity in floral scent composition reflects several ecological functions. In particular, we found tissue-specific scents for the stigma, stamens, and staminode (a modified sterile stamen common to all Penstemons). Our findings emphasize the dynamic nature of floral scents and highlight a need for greater understanding of ecological and physiological mechanisms driving spatiotemporal patterns in scent production.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Rayko Halitschke for help with floral compound identification, and to Wittko Francke and two anonymous reviewers for comments that improved an earlier version of this paper. This work was supported by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (FOA11H-317 and FOA13H-190), New York Floral Association, Bertil Lundmans Fund for Botanical Studies, Regnell Botanical Travel Scholarship and Uppsala University. Studies in the Raguso lab were supported by NSF grants DEB-0746106 and DEB-1342792. Studies in the Kessler lab were supported by NSF grant IOS-0950225.
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Burdon, R.C.F., Raguso, R.A., Kessler, A. et al. Spatiotemporal Floral Scent Variation of Penstemon digitalis . J Chem Ecol 41, 641–650 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10886-015-0599-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10886-015-0599-1