Beyond floricentrism: The pollination function of inflorescences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Mating by outcrossing plants depends on the frequency and quality of the interaction between pollen vectors and individual flowers. However, the historical focus of pollination biology on individual flowers (floricentrism) cannot produce a complete understanding of the role of pollination in plant mating because mating is an aggregate process, which depends on the reproductive outcomes of all of a plant’s flowers. Simultaneous display of multiple flowers in an inflorescence increases a plant’s attractiveness to pollinators, which should, in general, enhance mating opportunities. However, whenever pollinators visit multiple flowers on an inflorescence, self‐pollination among flowers can reduce the pollen available for export to other plants (pollen discounting) and can increase the incidence of inbreeding depression for embryos and offspring. Therefore, the size of floral displays that maximize mating frequency and quality generally balance the benefits of attractiveness against the costs of self‐pollination. This balance can shift considerably if different flowers serve female and male functions at one time (sexual segregation) and flowers are arranged in inflorescences so that pollinators visit female flowers before male flowers. However, the effectiveness of sexual segregation depends on the extent to which a particular inflorescence architecture induces consistent movement patterns by pollinators. In general, the consistency of pollinator movement patterns varies with inflorescence architecture and differs between pollinator types. Such variation creates many options for the evolution of the diverse inflorescence characteristics observed within angiosperms, which can be appreciated only by moving beyond a floricentric perspective of the role of pollination in plant mating.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".