Selfing Syndrome

In the first evidence of rapid evolution, scientists have discovered a flower growing in Paris, France is producing less nectar and smaller flowers to attract fewer pollinators.

Parisian pansies

Scientific name - Viola arvensis; Common name - Field Pansy
Habitat - It is a self-pollinating flower, native to Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa.
It is an herbaceous annual plant with serrated leaves, and usually flowers with white all over, except the bottom petal and dehiscent capsules.

Herbaceous plants include plants that have either an annual, biennial, or a perennial life cycle. Annual herbaceous plants die completely at the end of the growing season or when they have flowered and fruited, and then new plants grow from seed.

Recent studies have found that the ongoing convergent evolution of a Selfing Syndrome threatens plant pollinator interactions.

Selfing Syndrome

Selfing syndrome refers to plants that are autogamous and display a complex of characteristics associated with self-pollination.

Autogamous species are those whose ovules are (predominantly) fertilized by pollen from the same flower.

The term was first coined by Adrien Sicard and Michael Lenhard in 2011.
However, it was first described in detail by Charles Darwin in his book The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876).
The flowers of self-fertilizing plants are typically smaller and have little distance between reproductive organs.

The flowers of field pansies growing near Paris are 10% smaller and produce 20% less nectar than flowers growing in the same fields 20 to 30 years ago.

Self-pollination - It is the process by which plants reproduce themselves.
The behavior is contrary to the convention of angiosperms, which rely on insects to pollinate in order to reproduce, an interconnected relationship in nature.
Plants produce nectar to attract insects, which collect nectar for food and transport pollen between plants in nature.
The interlinked give-and-take relationship has evolved over 100 million years of coevolution.

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