Influence of sex‐organ positions on pollen transfer and self‐interference in plants with stylar polymorphisms: An experimental approach using three‐dimensional printed flowers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Heterostylous plants are defined by the reciprocal positioning of stigmas and anthers in floral morphs—a trait proposed by Darwin to enhance the efficiency of disassortative (intermorph) pollen transfer. This floral polymorphism may also reduce gamete wastage by minimizing sexual interference between male and female reproductive organs. In distylous species, two floral morphs occur: a long‐styled morph with stigmas positioned above the anthers and a short‐styled morph with stigmas below the anthers. A related floral polymorphism, known as stigma‐height dimorphism, involves variation in stigma height but not anther placement. To test how floral architecture influences pollen transfer and reproductive interference, we used 3D‐printed artificial flowers based on Petunia grandiflora , incorporating real styles and anthers from glasshouse‐grown plants. These artificial flowers simulated distyly and two forms of stigma‐height dimorphism. In flight cage experiments, captive bumblebees ( Bombus impatiens ) from commercial colonies facilitated pollen transfer within and between flowers. We measured pollen grain deposition on stigmas and styles, as well as residual pollen in donor anthers. Our results provided partial support for Darwin's hypothesis: in distylous arrays, reciprocal sex‐organ placement enhanced intermorph pollen deposition, especially in the short‐styled morph. Bumblebee foraging time influenced pollen load, with longer visits to long‐styled flowers resulting in increased pollen deposition. Patterns of self‐pollen deposition—a form of reproductive interference—varied with the degree of spatial separation between sexual organs. As expected, stigma‐height dimorphic arrays exhibited higher self‐pollen transfer than distylous arrays. While not conclusive, our findings emphasize the role of floral morphology in shaping pollination dispersal, self‐interference and pollinator behaviour. The use of three‐dimensional printed flowers demonstrates a promising experimental approach for future studies on plant–pollinator interactions and the functional significance of floral design. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".