1. Flower colour differs dramatically between populations for some plant species, yet we know little about what drives this variation. Such polymorphisms can be influenced by plant-pollinator interactions, but whether they are also influenced by pollinator-mediated plant-plant interactions is unknown. 2. We test whether flower colour polymorphisms can arise through convergence (facilitation) or divergence (competition) of flower phenotypes resulting from plant-plant interactions mediated by the shared, and only, pollinator (orange-breasted sunbird) of ten Erica communities...

Lachenalia J.Jacq. ex Murray (Asparagaceae; Scilloideae; Hyacintheae) is a large and morphologically diverse genus of more than 140 bulbous species endemic to southern Africa. Previous attempts to infer a well resolved and robustly supported phylogeny of Lachenalia using Sanger sequencing of candidate loci and/or morphological characters have been largely unsuccessful. Consequently, the current infrageneric classification is artificial and there is a need to explore alternative avenues to produce a phylogenetic classification. In this paper we...

Differences between males and females are usually more subtle in dioecious plants than animals, but strong sexual dimorphism has evolved convergently in the South African Cape plant genus Leucadendron. Such sexual dimorphism in leaf size is expected largely to be due to differential gene expression between the sexes. We compared patterns of gene expression in leaves among ten Leucadendron species across the genus. Surprisingly, we found no positive association between sexual dimorphism in morphology and...