On the Adaptive Value of Physiological Integraton in Colonal Plants

Abstract

In clonal plants, genetically identical ramets arise from a common stolon or rhizome. Anatomical connection often allows physiological integration, the translocation of resources from a larger mother ramet to a developing daughter ramet. Translocation of a limiting resource can reduce the mother's growth while increasing the daughter's growth. Our models predict patterns in resource translocation; the models assume that fitness increases with the expected biomass a genet attains over a season of vegetative growth in a stochastic environment. In each model a ramet's growth depends nonlinearly on its level of a limiting resource. If resource availability varies both spatially and temporally, and a ramet's growth does not depend on its size, an analytical approximation for total genet growth leads to several new predictions. If a ramet's growth increases as a concave function (i.e., a function with decreasing positive slope) of resources level, physiological integration should increase when spatial variance increases and spatial convariance is negative. If a ramet's growth increases as a convex function (increasing positive slope) of resource level (the less likely case), spatial variance—convariance in resource availability has the opposite effect on translocation. Independently of the concavity or convexity of the growth function, increasing temporal variance in the mother ramet's resource availability reduces translocation, and increasing temporal variance in the daughter ramet's resource availability increases translocation. When a ramet's growth increases with both its resource level and its size, translocation and growth in one time interval influence the value of future physiological integration. For this case a stochastic dynamic programming model demonstrates how translocation can depend on time and the sizes of the mother and daughter ramets, as well as on spatiotemporal resource variability. The predictions qualitatively match those deduced from the model of size—independent growth, although translocation often declines late in the season of vegetative growth. The dynamic model also indicates that a large mother ramet should always share resource with a daughter ramet. But a smaller mother ramet should often abandon a daughter and allocate all its available resource to its own growth.