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Is allocation among reproductive tissues coordinated with seed size?
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, University of New South Wales, NSW, Sydney, Australia; Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Umeå University, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9040-6674
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, University of New South Wales, NSW, Sydney, Australia; Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia.
2025 (English)In: Oikos, ISSN 0030-1299, E-ISSN 1600-0706, no 4, article id e10969Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

To produce viable seeds, plants must simultaneously allocate mass to other reproductive tissues; however, it remains unclear how big these investments are, relative to seeds, and how much the balance of investment across diverse species reflects broader variation in their life history strategies. In particular, species are known to vary in their seed mass, and the resources they invest in pollen attraction versus seed provisioning. We quantified overall reproductive investment and its partitioning among different reproductive tissues for 14 woody perennial species in a recurrent-fire heath community. Integrating two lineages of evolutionary theory led to the prediction that relative investment in different reproductive tissues would be correlated with a species' seed mass, and the data supported this. Species with larger seeds were found to mature a smaller proportion of ovules, to expend more of pre-zygotic investment on discarded tissues, and to invest more in seed provisioning compared to pollen attraction. These patterns were similar when investment is assessed as nitrogen and phosphorus content instead of biomass. A little more than half of this correlation was phylogenetically conservative, reflecting the tendency for many species in the locally abundant and species-rich family Proteaceae to have large seeds, low seed set and relatively lower investment in pollen attraction. The total biomass of accessory tissues – reproduction-related mass not directly invested in the seed – ranged from 95.8 to 99.8% of total investment for species in this study. Counting only seeds thus substantially underestimates total reproductive investment. Many studies have established that the seed mass of a species positions it along a colonization-competition life-history spectrum. Here we have shown that relative investment in pollen-attraction versus provisioning tissues and in successful versus discarded ovules are also associated with seed mass. The seed mass spectrum among angiosperms is therefore connected with a spectrum of reproductive allocation strategies.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
John Wiley & Sons, 2025. no 4, article id e10969
Keywords [en]
accessory costs, parental optimist, reproduction, seed mass-number trade-off, seed provisioning
National Category
Botany Ecology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-234006DOI: 10.1111/oik.10969ISI: 001391250200001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105001647085OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-234006DiVA, id: diva2:1926636
Available from: 2025-01-13 Created: 2025-01-13 Last updated: 2025-08-04Bibliographically approved

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Abramowicz, Konrad

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