Sexual reproduction and variation in floral morphology in an ephemeral vernal lily, Eyythronium americanum

Abstract

In a riparian population of Erythronium americanum (Liliaceae) in central New Jersey, experimentally self-pollinated plant produced markedly fewer fruit and fewer seeds per fruit than hand-outcrossed and open pollinated plants, even though differences were not evident between pollen tubes that penetrated stigmas from self or foreign pollen. This weak self-compatibility and a positive relation between the percentage of seeds set by outcrossed plants and the distance between pollen donor and recipient plants indicate that this population could be susceptible to inbreeding depression.Limited resources for seed development apparently constrained maximal seed production, based on low seed set (40.6%) by hand-pollinated plants and positive correlations for these plants between plant size and the number and size of seeds set. In contrast, naturally-pollinated plants set a smaller proportion of their ovules, suggesting that limited pollinator service reduced the quantity of seeds produced in this population. Free-foraging bees usually removed more than half of the available pollen in a single visit, so that individual plants probably have few opportunities to disseminate their pollen.Even though sexually reproductive ramets produce only a single flower per year, less than a third of variation in floral morphology is associated with variation in plant size. Within the flower, the sizes of some closely associated structures, such as the style and ovary, and the anthers and filaments, vary essentially independently of one another. Production of nectar and pollen, the ultimate attractors of pollinating insects, was positively correlated with flower size.

Going to great lengths: selection for long corolla tubes in an extremely specialized bat–flower mutualism

“…Alexandersson & Johnson 2002;Anderson & Johnson 2008) could be due to unmeasured covariates (those plants with larger flowers also produce more nectar, larger display size, more ovules, etc. ; see Harder et al 1985). The experimental design used here also allowed exploration of the effects of flower length on pollinator behaviour.…”

INBREEDING EFFECTS IN CLARKIA TEMBLORIENSIS (ONAGRACEAE) POPULATIONS WITH DIFFERENT NATURAL OUTCROSSING RATES

“…Fecundity estimates of plants which survived to reproduce, and fitness estimates for all plants, as in Table 6. 1979; Price and Waser, 1979;Gouyon and Vemet, 1980;Schemske, 1983;Jolls, 1984;Kesseli and Jain, 1984;Levin, 1984;Schemske and Pautler, 1984;Harder et al, 1985;Stevens and Bougourd, 1988), but some exceptions are known where seed set following self-pollinations was not less than seed set ofoutcrossed flowers (Schoen, 1983;Karron, 1989).…”

The Effects of Herbivory on Paternal Fitness in Scarlet Gilia: Better Moms Also Make Better Pops

“…Pollen counts were conducted using a Coulter Counter (Harder et al 1985). Pollen viability was assessed using a nitro blue tetrazolium stain (Hauser and Morrison 1964).…”