EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF THE POLLEN-LIMITATION CONCEPT: EFFECTS OF POLLEN QUANTITY AND QUALITY
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pollination commonly limits seed production, as addition of pollen to stigmas often increases fecundity. This response is usually interpreted as evidence that plants' stigmas receive too few pollen grains to maximize ovule fertilization (quantity limitation); however, many genetic studies demonstrate that poor-quality pollen can also reduce seed production (quality limitation). We explore both aspects of pollen limitation theoretically with a dose-response model that incorporates a saturating negative-exponential relation of seed production to pollen receipt. This relation depends on aspects of ovule production, pollen import, pollen-pistil interactions and seed development, all of which can contribute to pollen limitation. Our model reveals that quantity limitation is restricted to the lowest range of pollen receipt, for which siring success per pollen grain is high, whereas quality limitation acts throughout the range of pollen receipt if plants do not import the highest-quality pollen. In addition to pollinator availability and efficiency, quantity limitation is governed by all post-pollination aspects of seed production. In contrast, quality limitation depends on the difference in survival of embryos sired by naturally delivered pollen vs. by pollen of maximal quality. We briefly illustrate the distinction between these two components of pollen limitation with results from the mistletoe Tristerix corymbosus. Our model also shows that the standard pollen-supplementation technique neither estimates the total intensity of pollen limitation nor distinguishes between its quantity and quality components. As an alternative, we propose a methodological protocol that requires both measurement of seed production following excess pollination with only outcross pollen and quantification of the dose-response relation of seed output to pollen receipt. This method estimates both the total extent of pollen limitation and its two components. Finally, we consider the influences on quantity and quality limitation, which reveals that quantity limitation probably occurs much less often than has been inferred from pollen-supplementation experiments. These interpretations suggest that an expanded perspective that recognizes the fecundity consequences of pollination with poor-quality pollen would promote ecological understanding of pollen limitation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 it