Tactics for male reproductive success in plants: contrasting insights of sex allocation theory and pollen presentation theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The basic tenet of sex allocation theory is that an organism's reproductive success, through either male or female function, can be represented as a sex-specific, monotonic, increasing function of the organism's investment of resources in that function. The shapes of these curves determine what patterns of resource allocation can be evolutionarily stable. Although SA theory has stimulated creative thinking about plant sexual tactics, quantifying the shapes of male and female gain curves has proven so difficult that other approaches must be considered. I contrast sex allocation theory to a different, emerging viewpoint, pollen presentation theory (PPT), which attempts to address variation in reproductive success by measuring and modeling the quantitative fates of pollen grains. Models suggest that RS through male function depends heavily on the packaging and gradual dispensing of pollen to pollinators, even with the amount of investment held constant. Many plants do deploy pollen gradually, through morphological and "behavioral" mechanisms that range from obvious to subtle. They may thereby influence many aspects of the evolution of sexual modes in plants, including transitions between dioecy and cosexuality. After reviewing the main implications of the models, I discuss recent work aimed at testing some key assumptions and predictions by functional and comparative studies in the genus Penstemon. Species of Penstemon conform to PPT predictions that bee-adapted flowers will restrict per-visit pollen availability more than hummingbird-adapted flowers.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".