On the ecological significance of pollen color: a case study in American trout lily (<i>Erythronium americanum</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evolutionary ecologists seek to explain the processes that maintain variation within populations. In plants, petal color variation can affect pollinator visitation, environmental tolerance, and herbivore deterrence. Variation in sexual organs may similarly affect plant performance. Within-population variation in pollen color, as occurs in the eastern North American spring ephemeral Erythronium americanum, provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the maintenance of variation in this trait. Although the red/yellow pollen-color polymorphism of E. americanum is widely recognized, it has been poorly documented. Our goals were thus (1) to determine the geographic distribution of the color morphs and (2) to test the effects of pollen color on components of pollen performance. Data provided by citizen scientists indicated that populations range from monomorphic red, to polymorphic, to monomorphic yellow, but there was no detectable geographic pattern in morph distribution, suggesting morph occurrence cannot be explained by a broad-scale ecological cline. In field experiments, we found no effect of pollen color on the probability of predation by the pollen-feeding beetle Asclera ruficollis, on the ability of pollen to tolerate UV-B radiation, or on siring success (as measured by the fruit set of hand-pollinated flowers). Pollinators, however, exhibited site-specific pollen-color preferences, suggesting they may act as agents of selection on this trait, and, depending on the constancy of their preferences, could contribute to the maintenance of variation. Collectively, our results eliminate some hypothesized ecological effects of pollen color in E. americanum, and identify effects of pollen color on pollinator attraction as a promising direction for future investigation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".