Natural selection by pollinators on floral attractive and defensive traits did not translate into selection via fruits in common milkweed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considering both pollinator and herbivore pressures on plant reproductive and defensive traits is key to understanding patterns of selection for plants. However, phenotypic selection studies connecting floral traits and plant defenses with pollinator activity and herbivore damage remain rare. We used the common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca (Apocynaceae), to study phenotypic selection on attractive and defensive traits, and nectar rewards. We measured herbivore (leaf damage) and pollinator activity (pollinia movement) and quantified selection via female (pollinia insertions and fruit number) and male fitness (pollinia removals). We found selection to increase plant and inflorescence size and to decrease floral size (i.e. petal width) via female fitness. We also detected selection to increase floral but not leaf latex. The lack of selection on leaf latex was congruent with the low herbivory observed, however we also did not observe florivory in the population that would explain the advantage of more floral latex. Interestingly, we found selection on attractive traits differed via pollinia insertions and fruits initiated, suggesting that something other than pollinators was driving selection via fruit production. In contrast to female fitness, we did not find selection on any trait through male fitness, suggesting no sexual conflicting selection, at least through these proxies. Our findings reinforce the importance of the direct assessment of pollinator pressures in phenotypic selection studies before assuming pollinators as drivers of floral evolution by natural selection. Further work in southern populations closer to the centre of the species range, where herbivory and plant defense investment are higher, may help elucidate selection on attractive and defensive traits.
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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".