Pollen fates and the limits on male reproductive success in an orchid population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Male reproductive success in higher plants depends largely on the fates of pollen, but current methodologies have given only partial insights into this important aspect of plant mating. We present a detailed analysis of the proportions and absolute amounts of stained pollen involved in six key fates for the hawkmoth-pollinated African orchid Disa cooperi. Despite being packaged into pollinaria, high proportions (> 0.95) of the pollen removed from anthers were lost during transport by hawkmoths in both years. The proportion of pollen lost correlated positively with the number of pollinaria removed from a plant, so that pollen export did not vary with pollen removal. Most pollen was dispersed to neighbouring plants, with rare long-distance dispersal up to 65 m. Of the pollen that reached stigmas during both years, roughly equal amounts were involved in facilitated self-pollination vs. cross-pollination, but the relative proportions of these fates differed between years. Contrary to expectation, we found that self-pollination between flowers did not increase with the number of open flowers, even though moths probed significantly more flowers on larger plants. However, during both years the fraction of removed pollen exported to other plants declined significantly with increasing self-pollination on the source plant, indicating that once self-pollination occurred it reduced (discounted) subsequent pollen export opportunities. The packaging of pollen into pollinaria in orchids appears to increase overall transfer efficiency by at least an order of magnitude relative to plants with granular pollen. Nevertheless, considerable uncertainties remain in the male reproductive success of individual orchids.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".