No evidence of a generalized potential ‘cost’ of apical dominance for species that have strong apical dominance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When the shoot apical meristem of plants is damaged or removed, fecundity and/or plant growth may suffer (under-compensation), remain unaffected (compensation) or increase (overcompensation). The latter signifies a potential ‘cost’ of apical dominance. Using natural populations of 19 herbaceous angiosperm species with a conspicuously vertical, apically dominant growth form, we removed (clipped) the shoot apical meristem for replicate plants early in the growing season to test for a potential cost of apical dominance. Clipped and unclipped (control) plants had their near neighbours removed, and were harvested after flowering production had finished but before seed dispersal. Dry mass was measured separately for aboveground body size (shoots), leaves, seeds and fruits; and number of leaves, fruits and seeds per plant were counted. We predicted that: (i) our study species (because of their strong apically dominant growth form) would respond to shoot apical meristem removal with greater branching intensity, and thus overcompensation in terms of fecundity and/or biomass; and (ii) overcompensation is particularly enabled for species that produce smaller but more leaves, and hence with a larger bud bank of axillary meristems available for deployment in branching and/or fruit production. Widely variable compensatory capacities were recorded, and with no significant between-species relationship with leaf size or leafing intensity—thus indicating no generalized potential cost of apical dominance. Overall, the results point to species-specific treatment effects on meristem allocation patterns, and suggest importance for effects involving local variation in resource availability, and between-species variation in phenology, life history traits and susceptibility to herbivory.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".