Format: ORAL

Bodil K. Ehlers

Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University, Denmark

Some plants are able to discriminate and alter their competitive phenotype towards a conspecific neighbor, depending on its genetic relatedness. This has spurred a large interest in studying kin selection in plants during the last two decades. The ability to show positive kin discrimination may create positive frequency dependent interactions in plant communities with implications on species co-existence and assembly as well as consequences for agronomy where selection of crops with more co-operative behaviors may prove fruitful. Whether plants actively avoid competing with their kin and the fitness consequences of such behavior is, however, tricky to study experimentally as alternative hypotheses may predict similar outcomes. Questions of importance are, what type of experiments could we conduct, which plant traits should we study and what are the results to expect in order to decide if we find evidence of kin recognition and kin selections or not? I will present examples from different experiments and discuss how we may or may not interpret these as evidence for kin recognition and kin selection.