Warming springs push female katsura trees to sync with males
Wu H, Jiang M, Wei X
Phenology
The katsura tree lining your local botanical garden or arboretum blooms in a narrow window each spring, and whether male and female trees sync up determines whether seeds form at all.
Katsura trees are dioecious, meaning individual trees are either male or female, and they have to flower at the same time for pollination to happen. Scientists found that as spring temperatures rise, female trees shift their bloom dates faster than males do. That actually brings the sexes closer in sync, which is a surprising upside to warming that most people wouldn't expect.
Key Findings
Male katsura trees flowered and leafed out earlier than females under most temperature conditions, confirming sex-based differences in spring timing.
Female flowering was more sensitive to temperature increases than male flowering, advancing more rapidly per degree of warming.
Warming tended to narrow the gap between flowering and leaf emergence in males but not females, suggesting sex-specific shifts in how these two events are coupled.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Male and female katsura trees don't respond identically to warming springs: females shift their bloom timing more sharply with temperature than males do, which could actually close the pollination window between the sexes rather than disrupting it.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Sex-specific responses of flower and leaf phenology to spring warming of a dioecious tree species.
Spring phenology is closely linked to plant growth and reproduction and is highly sensitive to environmental changes. For dioecious species, the temporal overlap between female and male flowering i...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Cercidiphyllum is a genus containing two species of plants, both commonly called katsura. They are the sole members of the monotypic family Cercidiphyllaceae. The genus is native to Japan and China and unrelated to Cercis (redbuds).