Cordia danosa

Nectar production, visitors and deposition of pollen in flowers of Cordia nodosa: a species with atypical distyly in the National Forest of Caxiuanã – Melgaço (PA)

COELHO CP; RECH, A.R.; CORREA, F.S.; CARMO, V.S.; CAVALCANTE, M.C.; KANASHIRO, M.

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Keywords: distyly, Cordia, reciprocal herkogamy

Introduction

The old family Boraginaceae is presented from small herbs, shrubs, saplings to large trees (Barroso et al., 1991), and differed in four subfamilies that with molecular assessments were raised to the level of families (Gottschling et al. 2001). Among the elevated subfamilies we can highlight the Cordiaeceae family, which has about 350 species (Judd et al. 1999) and 65 of them in Brazil (Taroda & Gibbs 1986) with a wide diversity in the New World, many with heterostylous feature.

The heterostyly is a genetically controlled floral polymorphism, which are species with two or three floral morphs, distinguishing the height of the anthers and stigma (Ganders 1979, Barrett 1992). Species with two floral morphs that differ in longistylis and brevistylus, the longistylis have low stamens and high stigma and the brevistylus with high stamens and low stigma, in different individuals are called distylous species. Other dimorphisms have been identified in distylous species, such as size and amount of pollen grains, stigmatic surface, stigmatic papillae (Hamilton 1990; Lloyd & Webb 1992). When the species has three morphs: brevistylus (high and medium stamens and low stigma), medistylus (high and low stamens and medium stigma) and longistylous (low and medium stamens and high stigma ) are called trístilicas (Ganders 1979). The distylous condition is the most common, occurring in 27 of 28 families of Angiosperms that have heterostyly (Barrett 1992).
An interesting feature in distylous populations is the discrete distribution of morphs, due to the genetic control of this trait, but recent studies show that people have