Reproduction in plants can be limited by access to pollen and resources. We previously found that Echinacea plants in the remnants are pollen limited, meaning that if they had access to more pollen they would produce more seeds. However, the long-term effects of pollen limitation are unknown. Do plants that are super pollen saturated and have high amounts of pollen have a higher lifetime fitness than plants that are pollen limited? Also, we know that the plants in the remnants are pollen limited but are the plants in the common garden environment also pollen limited? To answer these questions and more 13 years ago Gretel randomly selected __ plants from p1 half of these plants were randomly assigned to the pollen addition group and the others were assigned to pollen exclusion. Every year, plants in the pollen exclusion have their heads bagged and they are not pollinate, where we hand cross every style in the pollen addition group.
In the summer of 2020, 27 of the original 39 plants were found to be alive 13 of the alive plants were in the pollen exclusion treatment and 14 were in the pollen addition treatment. There were nine plants that flowered, 5 were in the addition group with 12 heads, and 4 in the exclusion group with 6 heads.
Start year: 2012
Location: exPt1
Physical specimens: We harvested 18 heads, these heads are at CBG and have been inventoried and are waiting to be cleaned.
Data collected: Plants survival and measurements were recorded as part of our annual surveys in P1 and eventually will be found in the R package EchinaceaLab. Data sheets were scanned and entered and can be found here: “~/Dropbox/CGData/115_pollenLimitation/pollenLimitation2020”
You can find more information about the pollen addition and exclusion experiment and links to previous flog posts regarding this experiment at the background page for the experiment.
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