Intraspecific sexual competition in the clonal gynodioecious herb Glechoma hederacea in response to patchy nutrient distribution

Harris, Nathan A and Varga, Sandra (2020) Intraspecific sexual competition in the clonal gynodioecious herb Glechoma hederacea in response to patchy nutrient distribution. Plant Ecology . ISSN 1385-0237

Full content URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-020-01087-0

Documents
Intraspecific sexual competition in the clonal gynodioecious herb Glechoma hederacea in response to patchy nutrient distribution
Published Open Access manuscript
[img]
[Download]
[img]
Preview
PDF
2020 Harris & Varga Plant Ecol.pdf - Whole Document
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

431kB
Item Type:Article
Item Status:Live Archive

Abstract

Plants have developed numerous strate- gies to maximise resource uptake in response to the highly heterogeneous resource distribution in soils. Clonal growth enables plants to scavenge larger surfaces, potentially maximising nutrient acquisition by selectively growing in nutrient-rich patches. How- ever, the production of clonal units put plants into higher intraspecific competition. In gynodioecious clonal plants, genders usually exhibit sexual dimorphism in several growth and life history traits, but whether the genders have different competitive abilities and whether these are affected by nutrient distribution is underexplored. Here, we investigated whether the genders of Glechoma hederacea have different competitive abilities and whether these are affected by soil nutrient distribution using a greenhouse pot experiment. Female and hermaphrodite ramets were grown either alone or in competition with the same or the opposite gender in two different soil nutrient distributions for four months. Our results show that competition was the strongest factor affect- ing biomass accumulation and allocation. Females and hermaphrodites showed little sexual dimorphism in total biomass accumulation, but they differed in how they allocated this biomass between roots and shoots and in their clonal growth strategies in response to soil nutrient distribution. Taken together, our results indicate that soil nutrient distribution affects the competitive abilities of G. hederacea in a gender- specific manner. In the field, these differences would determine the structure and the dynamics of the two genders within the populations.

Keywords:Clonality, Gynodioecy, Intersexual competition, Itrasexual competition, Soil nutrient competition
Subjects:C Biological Sciences > C180 Ecology
C Biological Sciences > C200 Botany
C Biological Sciences > C100 Biology
Divisions:College of Science > School of Life Sciences
ID Code:43305
Deposited On:10 Dec 2020 11:35

Repository Staff Only: item control page