🌼 Usia flies uphold the distylous balance in Linum narbonense, while less efficient visitors may disrupt it, subtly biasing floral function and shaping plant reproduction. (10/10)

👉 doi.org/qc2r

#PlantScience #PollinationBiology #FloralEcology #AoBpapers

🌸🔬This study highlights the importance of evaluating both the quantity and quality of pollen received to truly understand pollination success.
The pollen tube–pollen grain ratio proved a powerful tool for linking pollinator behavior to reproductive outcomes. (9/10)

🪰 Insects of the genus Usia (Bombyliidae).
When Usia visitation rates were low, pollen quality on short-styled stigmas dropped sharply, suggesting these flies are key to maintaining proper morph reciprocity. (8/10)

Results:
👉 Long-styled flowers consistently received good-quality pollen.
👉 But short-styled flowers showed high variation in pollen quality, often lower than expected under the null model. (7/10)

Hand-pollination experiments helped define a baseline (a “null model”) for how pollen tubes should respond when pollen transfer is perfectly legitimate (between opposite morphs). 🌿 (6/10)

Across 12 populations and 16 samplings, the study examined 3,494 stigmas to assess two key aspects of pollination success:
📊 Quantity proportion of pollinated stigmas and pollen loads.
⚖️ Quality a novel measure linking pollen tube growth to pollen grains deposited. (5/10)

🐝🪰But what happens when pollinators don’t perform ideally?
Deviations from this precise pollen exchange can weaken the system and bias reproductive success, an aspect rarely studied in species with open corollas like L. narbonense (Linaceae). (4/10)

In distylous species, flowers come in two forms:
✨ Long-styled (pin) and short-styled (thrum).
Their reciprocal organ positions promote cross-pollination between morphs, relying on pollinators to carry pollen from one to the other, perfectly aligned. (3/10)

How do pollinators maintain, or disrupt, the elegant balance of distyly?
This new study on Linum narbonense explores how insect visitors shape pollen transfer between floral morphs, revealing that not all pollinators are equally faithful. (2/10)

🌿 The study highlights how target enrichment is reshaping taxonomy in morphologically reduced, ecologically flexible plants, revealing narrowly distributed taxa that may be conservation priorities in Australia’s saltlands. (8/8)

👉 doi.org/qbtw

#PlantScience #PlantTaxonomy

🪸 Yet, some Tecticornia complexes remain unresolved, large aggregates likely hiding multiple novel taxa. Further molecular and morphological work is needed to untangle these. (7/8)

🌳 Despite extensive gene tree discordance, Salibaits outperformed Angiosperms353, yielding better-resolved trees and clearer relationships. Missing data had little effect on the overall topology. (5/8)

🔍 They used target enrichment with two bait sets, the standard Angiosperms353 and a custom-designed Salicornieae bait set (nicknamed Salibaits). This allowed them to capture hundreds of nuclear genes to build phylogenetic trees with improved resolution. (4/8)

🌏 Researchers sampled multiple accessions across nearly all recognised species of Tecticornia in Australia to reconstruct their evolutionary history and test whether current species classifications hold up genetically. (3/8)

🧬 Tecticornia is the most species-rich genus in the Salicornieae tribe, halophytes that dominate salt lakes and coastal flats across Australia. But with their tiny, reduced morphology and extreme ecological plasticity, identifying species has been notoriously difficult. (2/8)