Month: September 2022

SEX RATIO SKEW. "Data suggest that males will generally be less sensitive to increased aridity than co-occurring females and, consequently, extreme male-biased sex ratios are possible in a significant number of populations. The effects of male-biased sex ratios are likely to cascade to dependent community members, especially those that are specialized on one sex." https://lnkd.in/e_imfDq View in LinkedIn

SPECIAL CASE OF THE FIG. "Mechanisms ensuring the evolutionary stability of dioecious fig–pollinator mutualisms, in which female fig trees engage in pollination by deceit resulting in zero reproductive success of pollinators that visit them, are poorly understood." https://lnkd.in/e8CyHKf View in LinkedIn

AVOIDANCE OF INBREEDING. "Among the sexual strategies to avoid inbreeding in flowering plants, sexual dimorphism promotes the evolution of dioecy." https://lnkd.in/e8CyHKf View in LinkedIn

DIOECIOUS ANGIOSPERMS. "The transition from monoecy to dioecy in plants is an important event in the evolution of angiosperms, with dioecious species occurring in half of all plant families but representing only 6–7% of all species." Angiosperm success as a group is remarkable. https://lnkd.in/e8CyHKf View in LinkedIn

EXTINCTION AND SPECIATION. "In clades with a large number of dioecious species, Vamosi and Vamosi found a higher extinction rate as well as a lower speciation rate than in their non-dioecious sister clades, a difference that may be explained by the strong sexual dimorphism displayed by dioecious species." https://lnkd.in/e8CyHKf View in LinkedIn

CHEATING PLANTS. "One of the consequences of such sexual specialization is that reward levels to pollinators often differ between male and female flowers as a result of sexual selection. Such specialization leads, in some cases, to cheating by one deceptive sex, which can be either male or female." https://lnkd.in/e8CyHKf View in LinkedIn

SIGNIFICANT UNKNOWNS. "Sex allocation in plants is often plastic, enabling individuals to adjust to variable environments. However, the predicted male-biased sex allocation in response to low resource conditions has rarely been experimentally tested in hermaphroditic plants." https://lnkd.in/dPykU22 View in LinkedIn

THEORETICAL PREDICTIONS. "Sex allocation theory predicts that individuals with fewer resources will be more male-biased while individuals with more resources will be more female-biased, based on the differential fitness gain curves of allocation to male and female functions." https://lnkd.in/dPykU22 View in LinkedIn

"PLASTIC SEX allocation in response to variable resources represents a flexible allocation strategy for coping with environmental heterogeneity, and can evolve by natural selection given genetic variation for plasticity." https://lnkd.in/dPykU22 View in LinkedIn

CASE STUDY 1. HERMAPHRODITE MANGROVE FISH follows. This case study investigates a fish with considerable reproductive flexibility, leading to a deeper understanding of the cost tradeoffs of each choice. View in LinkedIn