AI Article Synopsis
- Reproductive interference (RI) can negatively impact the fitness of plant species by causing them to accept incompatible pollen, which leads to fewer successful fertilizations.
- Hand-pollination experiments across six populations of three native Taraxacum species revealed varying degrees of pollen tube penetration from heterospecific (alien) pollen, indicating that stronger RI does not always correlate with more consistent pollen receptivity among individual plants.
- While the study supports the ovule usurpation hypothesis, it also highlights that other factors, like competition for pollinators and the condition of flowers, might influence the effects of RI.
Article Abstract
Reproductive interference (RI), an interspecific mating interaction that reduces the fitness of at least one of the species involved, can lead to exclusive distributions in closely related species. A hypothesis previously proposed is that RI in plants may occur by ovule usurpation, in which pistils lack interspecific incompatibility and mistakenly accept heterospecific pollen, thereby losing an opportunity for conspecific pollen fertilization. However, few comparative studies have evaluated the consistency of the inferred mechanism within and among individuals and populations. We conducted hand-pollination experiments in six populations of three native Taraxacum species that suffered from different levels of RI from an alien congener, T. officinale, and compared pollen-pistil interactions among populations. We also investigated the interactions for eight individual T. japonicum plants whose response to heterospecific pollen deposition had been previously measured. Our results revealed that pollen tubes often penetrated native ovaries following heterospecific pollination in populations suffering from strong RI, whereas they seldom did in populations suffering from marginal RI. However, the relative frequency of the pollen tube penetration was not significantly related to the strength of alien RI. Not all pistils on an individual plant showed the same pollen receptivity following heterospecific pollination; rather, some accepted and some refused the pollen tubes. The relationship between pollen tube penetration following heterospecific pollination and the strength of the alien RI was also not significant among individuals. Our present results generally support the ovule usurpation hypothesis, but suggest that other factors, such as competition for pollinator services, variation in the effects of heterospecific pollen donors, and condition of the native inflorescences, might also affect the observed RI strength.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10265-021-01352-x | DOI Listing |
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