Summary
Previous workers have noted that seeds of Papaver dubium may germinate either in autumn or in spring and that autumn germinators do not survive a severe winter. If the winter is mild, the proportion of autumn germinators surviving and ultimately reaching maturity can rise as high as 84 per cent. Survivors greatly exceed spring germinators in mean seed output per plant. Even when allowance is made for the lower survival of autumn germinators as compared with spring, the autumn types are still at an immense advantage over the spring types, given a mild winter. Hence autumn germinators are at an advantage over spring germinators in some years but not in others. Autumn germinators which survive are very much taller and flower earlier than their spring counterparts, presumably reflecting their greater competitive ability. The time of germination (autumn v. spring) showed a very low, possibly zero, heritability in the population studied. It is concluded that selection has favoured those plants capable of producing a mixture of the two types of seed.
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Arthur, A., Gale, J. & Lawrence, M. Variation in wild populations of Papaver dubium VII. Germination time. Heredity 30, 189–197 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1038/hdy.1973.21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/hdy.1973.21
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