Abstract
The reserve ovary model is a key hypothesis proposed to explain why plants produce surplus flowers and posits that plants may utilize surplus flowers to compensate for losses from floral herbivory. We tested this hypothesis in the prairie plant Eryngium yuccifolium and its floral herbivore Coleotechnites eryngiella. At five Illinois tallgrass prairie sites, we collected central, primary lateral, and secondary lateral inflorescences from E. yuccifolium to determine whether damage by the larvae of C. eryngiella to the flowers in earlier developing inflorescences would be compensated for in later developing inflorescences. Coleotechnites eryngiella does extensive damage to the central and primary inflorescences and little damage to the secondary inflorescences. Later maturing inflorescences did not compensate for early damage by increasing seed production in later inflorescences. The secondary inflorescences of E. yuccifolium may only compensate for catastrophic damage done to the central and primary inflorescences early on in development, serve as additional advertisements for pollinators, act as pollen donors, or allow the plant to take advantage of “ecological windows” of high pollinator and low herbivore abundance. Our findings were spatially and temporally consistent and did not support the predictions of the reserve ovary model in the E. yuccifolium–C. eryngiella system suggesting that in this system, alternate, proximate, and ultimate causes need to be explored for the production of surplus flowers.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission for permission to use prairie sites for this study. This work was supported in part by the Illinois Natural History Survey and a 2004 Summer Fellowship from the Dept. of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) to CAD. Comments from K. Robertson, S. Downie, M. Berenbaum, D. Moore, J. Taft, C. Ivey, and J. Foster helped improve this study and this manuscript. We thank A. Davis for discussions on path analyses used in this study.
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Danderson, C.A., Molano-Flores, B. & Raghu, S. Impact of floral herbivory by Coleotechnites eryngiella Bottimer (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae) on the reproductive output of Eryngium yuccifolium Michaux (Apiaceae): a test of the reserve ovary model. Plant Ecol 197, 277–284 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-007-9377-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-007-9377-7