Environmental context shapes sex-specific costs of reproduction in a dioecious plant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Trade-offs between current reproduction and future performance are fundamental constraints on evolution. In dioecious plants, females and males can differ in how much of a limiting resource they allocate to reproduction, creating trade-offs that could be sex specific and environmentally dependent. If so, physiological differences in resource use are expected to coincide with differential costs of reproduction for females versus males, but how these costs are expressed across environmental contexts remains poorly understood. METHODS: We tested the hypothesis that the expression of sex-specific reproductive trade-offs is environmentally dependent in dioecious broadleaf arrowhead (Sagittaria latifolia). We conducted a 2-year common garden experiment manipulating nutrient availability and reproductive investment to quantify sex-specific physiological costs using photosynthetic measurements and indices of nitrogen content. KEY RESULTS: As expected, the expression of reproductive trade-offs depended on both sex and resource availability. At the lowest nutrient level, males experienced reproductive costs as reduced leaf nitrogen content and photosynthesis following flowering in year 1 and as reduced leaf nitrogen content and size in year 2. Across all nutrient conditions, females showed fewer detectable physiological costs. CONCLUSIONS: Together with results from previous studies of S. latifolia, our study shows that males and females incur reproductive costs in different physiological currencies, with males allocating more nitrogen than females. These costs become evident only under nitrogen limitation, highlighting how environmental context governs the expression of sex-specific life-history trade-offs.
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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".