Fungus gnats might not be a glamorous group of insects but they are important pollinators, especially attracted to plants with dark red flowers. Not much is known about their pollination behaviour and plant species...
How do plant species diverge? The Grant-Stebbin model describes pollinator-driven speciation. The idea is that plants adapt their flowers to work with the mosr effective pollinators in an area. When there are different...
As angiosperms became one of the megadiverse groups of macroscopic eukaryotes, they forged modern ecosystems and promoted the evolution of extant terrestrial biota. Unequal distribution of species among lineages...
About half of all higher plant species are recognizable as evolutionarily recent polyploids, where multiple whole genomes or sets of chromosomes have come together from close ancestors. Additionally, over evolutionary...
Larcombe et al. present a 20-year assessment of reproductive isolation in a forest tree system. They show that intermediate inheritance of floral morphology results in the loss of strong mechanical barriers to zygote...
Hybrid zones that occur across environmental gradients provide excellent opportunities for studying the maintenance of divergent adaptations in the presence of gene flow. They also provide insight into the biodiversity...
In orchid species that have populations occurring in strongly contrasting habitats, mycorrhizal divergence and other habitat-specific adaptations may lead to the formation of reproductively isolated taxa and ultimately...
Why some taxa are more species-rich than others still represents a major conundrum in biology. Ecological opportunities and evolutionary innovations are considered main factors that drive biodiversity, but are sometimes...
Characterizing ecological niches via Landolt indicator values of accompanying species, Sonnleitner et al. found that niches of four groups (two diploids, one tetraploid, one hexaploid) of Senecio carniolicus s.l...
In 1759, Linnaeus convinced his followers that plants could hybridize by crossing flowers in the daisy family and producing intermediate offspring. These hybrids, between Tragopogon pratensis and T. porrifolius, exist...