Unless it happens to be allergy season, most people don’t give a lot of thought to pollen.
Unless it happens to be allergy season, most people don’t give a lot of thought to pollen. But new research might change the way we look at a field of flowers.
A collaborative study by Clemson scientist Matthew Koski suggests that pollen color can evolve independently from flower traits, and that plant species maintain both light and dark pollen because each offers distinct survival advantages.
Koski’s research is featured as the cover story of the April issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology and is titled “Pollen colour morphs take different paths to fitness.” Andrea Berardi of the University of Bern in Switzerland and Laura Galloway of the University of Virginia were Koski’s co-authors.
“Plant biologists and evolutionary biologists and ecologists have long been fascinated with understanding the generation and maintenance of phenotypic diversity – why two individuals of the same species have differences in colorization or body type or height,” said Koski, an assistant professor in the College of Science’s department of biological sciences. “We assume that natural selection should reduce the amount of phenotype variation – that there should be one morph that survives the best and dominates the population. But that’s not the case. With flowering plants, for example, when you go out in the field or even in a garden, you can see a huge amount of variation in the colors of petals on flowers. Evolutionary biologists have used flowering plants as models to understand how such a huge amount of variation persists in natural populations.”
Read more at Clemson University
Image: Research by Clemson University College of Science assistant professor Matthew Koski (shown here) is featured as the cover story of the April issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology and is titled 'Pollen color morphs take different paths to fitness.' (Credit: Courtesy of Dustin Fleetwood)
