Update: La Nacion has an article featuring the work (en Español).
Iriartea deltoidea in Manu National Park, Peru. Photograph by C. E. Timothy Paine.Normally I wouldn't make a big deal about one of my own papers, but I'm making an exception this time because it involves a really nice piece of work by a graduate student for whom I served as an associate advisor. Uzay Sezen collected seedlings of the palm Iriartea deltoidea in Costa Rica from two secondary forest plots that his major advisor, Robin Chazdon, has been using for long-term studies of forest regeneration. He genotyped the seedlings and all reproductive trees in the plots using AFLPs, and he inferred the parentage of the seedlings. From these data was able to determine the spatial pattern of recruitment into the secondary forest.1
Like many animal-dispersed trees, seedlings of Iriartea deltoidea tend to be found in clumps. Such clumps are often centered around reproductive I. deltoidea individuals, suggesting that the clumps represent seeds derived from the closest reproductive individual.
Well, you can probably guess where this is going from the way I set that up. That's not what we found at all. Instead (quoting from the abstract)
Iriartea deltoidea in Manu National Park, Peru. Photograph by C. E. Timothy Paine.Like many animal-dispersed trees, seedlings of Iriartea deltoidea tend to be found in clumps. Such clumps are often centered around reproductive I. deltoidea individuals, suggesting that the clumps represent seeds derived from the closest reproductive individual.
Well, you can probably guess where this is going from the way I set that up. That's not what we found at all. Instead (quoting from the abstract)
Few seedlings were offspring of the closest reproductive trees. Seedling patches observed beneath reproductive trees originate from dozens of parental trees. Observed patterns of seedling distribution and spatial genetic structure are largely determined by the behaviour of vertebrate seed dispersers rather than by spatial proximity to parental trees.If you'd like to read more, here's a link to a copy of the paper at the website of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B.2 Enjoy!
1Notice how I say "he" did this and "he" did that. That's because Uzay did all of the collecting (with help from field assistants), all of the DNA extraction, all of the PCR, and all of the runs of FaMoZ for parentage analysis. Robin and I provided advice on sampling design, analysis, and interpretation, but Uzay was clearly the lead on this work, which is why he's first author.
2I'm afraid that we didn't have enough funding to pay the fees to make the article open access. If you're at a college or university, you'll probably be able to get access. If you can't, e-mail me and I'll send you a PDF. On a related note, if you follow the link, you'll see that it's to the "First Cite" release. The DOI doesn't seem to be working yet. Sorry about that.
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