Plant Size, Sexual Selection, and the Evolution of Protandry in Dioecious Plants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is frequently observed that males of dioecious plant species flower earlier in the season than females, although the generality of this pattern has not been quantified. One hypothesis for earlier male flowering is that females require more time for resource acquisition before reproduction; another is that selection for access to unfertilized ovules favors early-flowering males. Here I show that protandry is indeed the usual pattern in dioecious plants--males typically initiate flowering before females--and I propose a new hypothesis to explain this pattern. In many natural plant populations, individuals that begin flowering early are larger and--in the case of females or hermaphrodites--therefore more fecund. When this population-level seasonal decline in size is included in simulations of flowering time evolution in a dioecious plant, males evolve earlier flowering onset than females. Correlations between size (or condition) and reproductive phenology are widespread and likely contribute to the prevalence of protandry in both plants and animals, but their importance seems to have been overlooked by botanists. I suggest that sexual selection (specifically, male-male competition for access to high-quality ovules) may play a more important role in the evolution of flowering phenology than has previously been recognized.
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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".