The evolution of plant mating systems: multilocus simulations of pollen dispersal
Abstract
We simulated pollination in a plant population and explored how pollen dispersal distance and allocation among recipient individuals evolved in response to direct selection on three loci coding for dispersal phenotype and in response to indirect selection on two unlinked "genetic congruence" loci. Fitnesses at congruence loci were chosen to model "genetic" and "ecological" mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the observation that an intermediate outcrossing distance maximizes fitness in some plants. Simulations show (1) that dispersal genotype evolves rapidly in response to direct selection, apparently mediated mainly through competition for access to ovules; (2) that selection for intermediate genetic congruence affects final dispersal genotype in largely predictable ways and does not appear to provoke runaway evolution; and (3) that evolution of dispersal type influences the genetic structure of the population, which in turn influences the evolution of dispersal.
Local Knowledge Graph (7 entities)
Related Works
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.