RESUMO
Most plants produce floral nectar to attract pollinators that impact pollination and seed production; some of them also secrete extrafloral nectar harvested by insects that may influence the plant reproductive success. The aim of this study was to analyze the effects of excluding pollinators and/or ants on the per-plant reproductive success in two species (Dyckia floribunda Griseb. and Dyckia longipetala Baker, Bromeliaceae) that produce floral and extrafloral nectar. The hypothesis states that both ecological processes (pollination and ant defense) involving nectar-mediated animal-plant interactions are beneficial for plant reproductive success. We expected the highest decrease in the plant fruit and seed sets when the pollinators and ants were excluded, and a moderate decrease when solely ants were excluded, compared to the control plants (those exposed to pollinators and ants). In addition, a lower natural reproductive success was also expected in the self-incompatible D. longipetala than in the self-compatible D. floribunda, as the former totally depends on animal pollination for seed production. D. floribunda and D. longipetala presented similar trends in the response variables, and the expected results for the experimental treatments were observed, with some variations between species and among populations. The ecological function of nectar is important because these two plant species depend on pollinators to produce seeds and on ants to defend flowers from the endophytic larvae of Lepidoptera. The study of multispecies interactions through mechanistic experiments could be necessary to clarify the specific effects of different animals on plant reproductive success.
RESUMO
The Anacardiaceae is an important and worldwide distributed family of ecological and socio-economic relevance. Notwithstanding that, molecular studies in this family are scarce and problematic because of the particularly high concentration of secondary metabolites-i.e. tannins and oleoresins-that are present in almost all tissues of the many members of the group, which complicate the purification and amplification of the DNA. The objective of this work was to improve an available DNA isolation method for Schinopsis spp. and other related Anacardiaceae, as well as the PCR protocols for DNA amplification of the chloroplast trnL-F, rps16 and ndhF and nuclear ITS-ETS fragments. The modifications proposed allowed the extraction of 70-120 µg of non-degraded genomic DNA per gram of dry tissue that resulted useful for PCR amplification. PCR reactions produced the expected fragments that could be directly sequenced. Sequence analyses of amplicons showed similarity with the corresponding Schinopsis accessions available at GenBank. The methodology presented here can be routinely applied for molecular studies of the group aimed to clarify not only aspects on the molecular biology but also the taxonomy and phylogeny of this fascinating group of vascular plants.
