Sex-ratio variation and the function of staminodes in Aralia nudicaulis1This article is part of a Special Issue entitled “Pollination biology research in Canada: Perspectives on a mutualism at different scales”.

Aralia nudicaulis L. is a clonal dioecious herb common to forested ecosystems in eastern North America. Across 15 sites, the frequency of female ramets ranged between 5% and 95%. This variation was used to examine hypotheses involving the life history and pollination biology of A. nudicaulis. Because female reproductive function is thought to incur greater resource costs than male function, we predicted that female ramets should (i) be more common where resources (and light in particular) are more abundant and (ii) have lower rates of survival than male ramets. However, there was (i) no significant association between light availability (measured as canopy closure) and female frequencies across sites and (ii) ramet ages were skewed towards older ages for females, not males. Female A. nudicaulis produce staminodes that render female inflorescences visually similar to male inflorescences. We experimentally manipulated the presence–absence of staminodes and found that pollen receipt by females without staminodes was substantially lower than for plants with intact staminodes. Finally, pollinators tend to prefer visiting male over female flowers. We were interested in evaluating whether such preferences might scale up to the population level, with higher pollinator abundances at male-dominated sites. However, we instead found a strong positive association between pollinator abundances and female frequencies. Although there is unlikely to be a causal relationship between them, the identification of a common variable underlying variation in female frequencies and pollinator abundances might reveal key insights into the factors regulating the life history and pollination of forest understory plants.