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Bearing fruit: flower removal reveals the trade-offs associated with high reproductive effort for lowbush blueberry

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An Erratum to this article was published on 20 August 2017

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Abstract

Past studies have shown that taxa from disparate groups often respond similarly to reduced reproductive effort. These common responses imply that high reproductive effort trades off with a consistent set of other life functions for most angiosperms, albeit modulated by their growth form and life history. However, many questions remain about reproductive trade-offs in plants, including just how many other life functions they involve, how diverse these functions may be, and how the severity of these trade-offs may vary through time. To address these questions in a long-lived, iteroparous shrub, we performed flower removal on plots of lowbush blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium (Ericaceae), over 3 years. We found significant physiological differences between removal and control plots for ten diverse traits. Vegetative phenology was shifted earlier by about 20% in removal plots, and removal plots had about 15% more vegetative biomass by mid-season as well. Removal plots produced about 10% more ripe fruit per reproductive node by harvest than control plots, and reproductive nodes in removal plots produced at least one fruit by harvest about 6% more often. While fruit water content and titratable acidity were increased by removal, other fruit traits, such as sugar content and fresh mass, were not. The strength of the removal effect varied significantly by year for seven traits; for many, such as vegetative mass/stem and ripe fruit production/node, the effect was stronger in years with more stressful abiotic conditions. Our results demonstrate that there are tangible but variable costs to high reproductive effort for flowering plants.

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  • 20 August 2017

    An erratum to this article has been published.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Drs. A. Dibble, M. Day, D. Yarborough, and D. Percival for critically reading this manuscript. Thanks also for suggestions by two anonymous reviewers and by the editorial staff, all of which considerably improved the manuscript. Thanks also to the Blueberry Hill Farm staff and to the University of Maine MAFES Analytical Lab for facilitating this research. We also thank our funding sources: The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Grant/Award Number: 2011-51181-30673); the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station (Grant/Award Number: 59156-5501023); and the University of Maine. This is Maine Agricultural Experiment Station Journal number 3569.

Author contribution statement

AWB and FAD designed the experiment; AWB carried out the fieldwork and analyses and wrote the manuscript; FAD provided editorial guidance and financially supported the research. Both authors edited the manuscript and gave final approval for its publication.

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  1. School of Biology and Ecology, University of Maine at Orono, 5722 Deering Hall, Orono, ME, 04469, USA

    Alex W. Bajcz & Francis A. Drummond

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  1. Alex W. Bajcz
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Correspondence to Alex W. Bajcz.

Additional information

Communicated by Katherine L. Gross.

This study moves the science of plant reproductive ecology forward by illustrating that reproductive trade-offs are numerous, diverse, and temporally variable. Several of the trade-offs documented for lowbush blueberry in this study, including those involving fruit shape, fruit titratable acidity, and leaf nitrogen content, have not been previously demonstrated to our knowledge. Our study also illustrates the need to fully characterize the diversity and consistency of reproductive trade-offs for a taxon. For example, several traits, including fruit shape and vegetative mass per stem, traded off with reproductive effort only in years with more stressful abiotic conditions.

The original version of this article was revised: The equation number was incorrectly published in the original article and the same is corrected here.

An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-017-3927-z.

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Bajcz, A.W., Drummond, F.A. Bearing fruit: flower removal reveals the trade-offs associated with high reproductive effort for lowbush blueberry. Oecologia 185, 13–26 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-017-3908-2

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