New Paper! Splash-cup plant seed dispersal in Journal of the Royal Society Interface

Splash-cup plants disperse propagules via raindrops striking cup-shaped fruiting bodies. The seeds are ejected at velocities up to five times the impact speed of the raindrop and are dispersed up to 1 m from the parent plant. Here, we examine the effects of cup angles and the presence of seed mimics to understand the dynamics of this unique method of dispersal. Our findings demonstrate that: (i) cup angles that launched seeds the furthest ranged from approximately 30° to 50°, matching the range of angles seen in splash-cup plants. (ii) Seeds travel shorter distances than water droplets alone, and this distance depends on the number of seeds in the cup. (iii) Not all seeds are ejected from initially dry cups, leaving cups with some seeds and some water. (iv) Nearly all seeds are ejected from cups that contain both water and seeds, and those that are ejected travel significantly further than those from dry cups. These results confirm the possibility that the conical shape of splash cup plants may be adapted to maximize dispersal distance and benefit from multiple splash events. Our results also illustrate that future work on these plants should include seeds rather than water droplets alone.

Check it out here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsif.2024.0129

I’ll upload a preprint soon, but in the meantime please email me if you’d like a copy of it.

The experimental setup.
(a) Average dispersal distance for all trials (b) average dispersal distance for trials with seeds only. There are clear differences across treatments and cup angles. Water droplets travelled significantly farther than seed mimics (p < 0.001). Large opaque dots represent mean ± s.e. Translucent dots represent actual data points. Panel (b) shows the same data as in panel (a), but on a different vertical scale and without the ‘water only’ trials, so that the variation with cup angle can be clearly seen for the ‘dry cup’ trials.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *