Sea lavenders use two different tricks to avoid self-pollinating
Jiao FF, Zheng RQ, Zhai YX, Zhang AQ, Gao YZ, Wei Z, Tian XM.
Pollinators
If you've ever wondered why some flowers have short stamens and tall pistils while others are reversed, this is the plant's built-in matchmaking system for making sure pollinators cross-breed it rather than let it fertilize itself.
Some flowers, like these sea lavenders, come in two mirror-image forms: one with the pollen-making parts high and the egg-receiving part low, and one flipped the other way around. This forces bees to carry pollen between the two forms instead of within one flower, preventing inbreeding. The researchers found that flowers with long tubes and flowers with short tubes solve this puzzle differently: long-tubed ones rely on precise positioning of parts, while short-tubed ones lean more on a built-in chemical rejection of the 'wrong' pollen.
Key Findings
Across 8 Limonium species and 25 populations, inter-morph pollination gave high fruit set while selfing and intra-morph pollination were nearly sterile.
Long-tubular species had more precise reciprocal herkogamy but suffered pollen limitation, with open-pollination fruit set much lower than hand cross-pollination.
Short-tubular species showed greater floral variation and higher natural fruit set with no pollen limitation, relying more on pollen-stigma dimorphism than precise reciprocity.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Sea lavender flowers use two different strategies to force cross-pollination instead of self-fertilizing: long-tubed flowers fine-tune the exact positioning of pollen and stigma, while short-tubed flowers rely more on mismatched pollen-stigma chemistry alone. Both tricks push bees and other pollinators to move pollen between different flower types, keeping the plant's gene pool diverse.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Floral morphology modulates the functionality of distyly in sea lavenders (Limonium).
Distyly promotes cross-pollination via reciprocal herkogamy and heteromorphic self-incompatibility, and how its functionality is maintained in species with contrasting corolla morphologies is worth...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Limonium is a genus of about 600 flowering plant species. Members are also known as sea-lavender, statice, caspia or marsh-rosemary. Despite their common names, species are not related to the lavenders or to rosemary. They are instead in Plumbaginaceae, the plumbago or leadwort family. The generi...