Floral reorientation: the restoration of pollination accuracy after accidents

What is it about?

Plants, like animals, frequently suffer from mechanical accidents. The non-lethal collapse of a flowering stalk, for example, can greatly reduce plant fitness if it leads to "incorrect" floral orientation, reduced attraction of pollinators, and poor pollination. When floral orientation is important for accurate pollination, as in flowers with bilateral symmetry, we predicted and founnd developmental and/or behavioural mechanisms that restore "correct" orientation and pollination fitness after accidents. In contrast, flowers with radial symmetry usually lack the capacity to reorient their flowers correctively. This also makes sense because floral orientation usually has a smaller effect on pollination in such flowers.

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