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ToolsAhmed, Sophia, Compton, Stephen G., Butlin, Roger K. and Gilmartin, Philip M. (2009) Wind-borne insects mediate directional pollen transfer between desert fig trees 160 kilometers apart. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 106 (48). pp. 20342-20347. ISSN 0027-8424
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The question of how far pollen can move between plants has implications for topics as diverse as habitat fragmentation, conservation management, and the containment of genetically modified crops. The monoecious African fig tree Ficus sycomorus L. relies on the small, short-lived, night-flying, host-specific fig wasp Ceratosolen arabicus Mayr for pollination. We used microsatellite markers to characterize a geographically isolated riparian population of F. sycomorus growing along the Ugab River in the Namib Desert, Namibia, together with paternity analysis of seedlings from known mothers, to map pollen movement within this population. In this way we tracked insect movements between individually recognizable trees by means of their pollen cargo and documented the movement of C. arabicus between known trees separated by more than 160 km, with a mean distance for confirmed successful pollination events of 88.6 km. The predominant observed movement of pollinators was in a westerly direction, toward the sea, reflecting seasonal nighttime wind direction and the wind-borne dispersal of fig wasps. Our results suggest the existence of an extensive panmictic population of trees that are well suited to overcome the effects of geographical isolation.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | ficus sycomorus,fig wasp,gene flow,spatial structure,pollen dispersal |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Plant Sciences |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Pure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Nov 2013 11:00 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Oct 2022 04:58 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/44271 |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.0902213106 |
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