Pollinator Limitation, Autogamy and Minimal Inbreeding Depression in Insect-pollinated Plants on a Boreal Island
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We studied the pollination biology of 18 common insect-pollinated plant species on Kent Island, a boreal island in the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. Under natural conditions, fruit set was relatively high in most of the species studied [although it was very low (<1%) in Maianthemum canadense]. Hand-pollination increased fruit set in five of seven species examined (71%), indicating that fruit set may commonly be limited by the availability or behavior of pollinators on Kent Island. Twelve of 17 species examined (71%) were capable of substantial autonomous self-pollination (autogamy in the absence of pollinators), although fruit set averaged higher in open-pollinated flowers (65.7%) than in flowers from which insects were experimentally excluded (49.6%). The number of seeds per fruit was also less in autonomously self-pollinated flowers in two species (Rhododendron canadense and Ledum groenlandicum). In at least one species (Iris versicolor), rates of autonomous selfing were higher on Kent Island than on the mainland. Stamen-excision experiments in I. versicolor demonstrated that fruit set required pollen transfer in the absence of pollinators (i.e., agamospermy did not occur). In hand-pollination experiments, five of six species (83%) (R. canadense, L. groenlandicum, Smilacina trifolia, S. stellata and I. versicolor) showed no evidence of inbreeding depression in terms of percent fruit set, fruit size or number of seeds per fruit.Overall, our results demonstrate that for many insect-pollinated plant species on Kent Island, pollinators are likely to be limiting, autogamy is common and inbreeding depression is negligible. Although pollinator limitation and autogamy regularly occur in mainland habitats as well, a review of the literature suggests that they may be more common on islands such as Kent Island. If such island-mainland differences are general, they may arise because genotypes and species capable of self-fertilization are more likely than obligate outcrossers to colonize and become established in isolated habitats.
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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".