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Sex allocation in gynodioecious Cyananthus delavayi differs between gender morphs and soil quality

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Sex allocation in Cyananthus delavayi.

Abstract

Gynodioecy, where females and hermaphrodites coexist in the same natural population, is particularly suitable for predicting the ecological pressures that drive the stability of gender polymorphism. Since females have a disadvantage in that they only contribute to the next generation via ovules, they should gain an advantage via other means, of which resource allocation is an important component. Thus, to study their sex allocation is very helpful to understand how the dimorphic sexual system is maintained in natural systems. We studied the sex allocation patterns and reproductive output of the gynodioecious Cyananthus delavayi in three populations with different soil qualities (organic matter, N, P and K). The hermaphroditic flowers and pistils were much larger than those of female individuals. Although both gender morphs invested similar biomass in the pistils, females allocated more of their resource pool to the seed production, while hermaphrodites allocated more to pollinator advertisement. The pollen production of hermaphrodites did not differ between populations, suggesting that pollen production by hermaphrodites was not limited by soil nutrients. Fruit set of females, but not hermaphrodites, decreased with declining soil quality, whereas seeds per fruit of both females and hermaphrodites were highest in poor soils. Overall, this study shows that females achieve greater reproductive success by allocating more of their resource pool to enhancing seed production, which should favor their presence in gynodioecious populations. The hermaphrodites achieve reproductive success from both pollen and seed production, and unnecessarily reduce their allocation to pollen production. Soil quality should explain, at least partially, the sexual allocation patterns. Furthermore, some of our findings contradict previous hypotheses, thus adding a new example to the body of research on plant sex allocation and the development of future theories.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Yi XJ and Meng JX for their assistance in data collection, and Joelle Hoggan and Jane Marczewski for editing the English of this paper. Prof. Spencer C.H. Barrett gave many useful comments on the first version of this manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB03030112 to H Sun) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 31500185 to JG Chen, U1136601 to H Sun, 31200183 to Y Niu, 31470321 to Y Yang and 31360049 to ZM Li).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, China

    Jianguo Chen, Yang Niu, Yang Yang & Hang Sun

  2. School of Life Sciences, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, Yunnan, China

    Zhimin Li

Authors
  1. Jianguo Chen
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  2. Yang Niu
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  3. Zhimin Li
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  4. Yang Yang
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  5. Hang Sun
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Correspondence to Yang Yang or Hang Sun.

Additional information

Communicated by Dolf Weijers.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Plant size (estimated as above-ground vegetative mass, Guo et al. 2010a, b), varied by population, but within populations, females and hermaphrodits did not differ
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Chen, J., Niu, Y., Li, Z. et al. Sex allocation in gynodioecious Cyananthus delavayi differs between gender morphs and soil quality. Plant Reprod 30, 107–117 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00497-017-0303-4

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