Sexual interference revealed by joint study of male and female
pollination success in chestnut
Abstract
Pollination is a key step of plant reproduction, allowing individual
plants to produce offspring as father, mother or both. However, few
studies exist that consider together male and female pollination
success. This implies studying both mating system, through paternity
analyses, and seed set, by measuring the percentage of flowers giving a
seed. Studying these two processes together is needed as they are not
independent: gaining fitness advantage through one sex can incur fitness
costs through the other due to various tradeoffs including direct sexual
interference. Hence, we developed the first spatially explicit
mixed-mating model integrating these two interactive processes, by
coupling a mating model with a fruit set model, therefore jointly
exploring pollen export and import. We used as model an
insect-pollinated tree species, chestnut. We carried out a paternity
analysis based on nearly exhaustive sampling of potential pollen donors
in an intensively studied plot of 273 trees belonging to three
interfertile chestnut species and including both male-fertile and
male-sterile individuals. We collected a large dataset of 1924 mating
events. We further performed fruit set measurements for 216 trees. Our
process-based model predicts fruit set with great accuracy, but only if
we account for self-pollen interference and associated ovule
discounting, a form of sexual interference. This model represents an
important step forward for fundamental pollination studies aiming at
comprehensively exploring pollen emission, transport and reception in a
single study, thus clarifying the consequences of pollination on male
and female fitness.