EVOLUTION OF LEAF FORM IN MARSILEACEOUS FERNS: EVIDENCE FOR HETEROCHRONY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using an explicit phylogenetic framework, ontogenetic patterns of leaf form are compared among the three genera of marsileaceous ferns (Marsilea, Regnellidium, and Pilularia) with the outgroup Asplenium to address the hypothesis that heterochrony played a role in their evolution. We performed a Fourier analysis on a developmental sequence of leaves from individuals of these genera. Principal components analysis of the harmonic coefficients was used to characterize the ontogenetic trajectories of leaf form in a smaller dimensional space. Results of this study suggest that the "evolutionary juvenilization" observed in these leaf sequences is best described using a mixed model of heterochrony (accelerated growth rate and early termination at a simplified leaf form). The later stages of the ancestral, more complex, ontogenetic pattern were lost in Marsileaceae, giving rise to the simplified adult leaves of Marsilea, Regnellidium, and Pilularia. Life-history traits such as ephemeral and uncertain habitats, high reproductive rates, and accelerated maturation, which are typical for marsileaceous ferns, suggest that they may be "r strategists." The evidence for heterochrony presented here illustrates that it has resulted in profound ecological and morphological consequences for the entire life history of Marsileaceae.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".