How Do Females Persist? Life History, Environment, and Female Advantage in Gynodioecious Cirsium
Ashini Dias Mahadura, Jakub Šmerda, Tereza Maňáková, Michaela Kubová, Zuzana Halamová, František Zedek, Petr Bureš · 2026
Read How Do Females Persist? Life History, Environment, and Female Advantage in Gynodioecious Cirsium by Ashini Dias Mahadura, Jakub Šmerda, Tereza Maňáková, Michaela Kubová, Zuzana Halamová, František Zedek, Petr Bureš (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13400990.txt.
Description
Ashini Dias Mahadura and colleagues ask, in 2026, why female plants persist in two thistle species where hermaphrodites can both father and set seed. This mixed system, called gynodioecy, poses an evolutionary puzzle: females surrender half their reproductive route, so they must compensate elsewhere to survive in the population.
Comparing a long-lived species with a short-lived one that flowers once, the team found females made up about half of one species but only a fifth of the other. That gap matched female seed advantage, which was strong in the long-lived species and weak in the other. Females produced more flower heads and more viable seeds and lost fewer to predators, though the dominant advantage differed by life history.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ashini Dias Mahadura, Jakub Šmerda, Tereza Maňáková, Michaela Kubová, Zuzana Halamová, František Zedek, Petr Bureš |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 80 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |