Fast evolving flowers drive cactus diversification
preprint
OA: closed
Abstract
The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. However, this remains to be tested in detail across many diverse plant groups. Here, we test this in the cactus family, an iconic and rapidly diversifying plant family, by using the widely recorded but underexplored metric of floral length. Floral length itself shows no association with speciation rate. In contrast, the underlying rate of floral-length evolution is a strong positive predictor of speciation. The rate at which floral traits change is more important for generating new species than any particular floral form. Specific morphologies, which are shaped by adaptation to pollinators, are less important than previously thought. This work emphasises the role of “evolvability” in plant macroevolution and provides new evidence for the floral diversification hypothesis. Trait rate is more important than trait state.
Full text
2,106 characters
· extracted from
oa-doi-fallback
· click to expand
This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.
You must log in to post a comment.
There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.
This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.
Add a Comment
You must log in to post a comment.
Comments
There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.
The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. However, this remains to be tested in detail across many diverse plant groups. Here, we test this in the cactus family, an iconic and rapidly diversifying plant family, by using the widely recorded but underexplored metric of floral length. Floral length itself shows no association with speciation rate. In contrast, the underlying rate of floral-length evolution is a strong positive predictor of speciation. The rate at which floral traits change is more important for generating new species than any particular floral form. Specific morphologies, which are shaped by adaptation to pollinators, are less important than previously thought. This work emphasises the role of “evolvability” in plant macroevolution and provides new evidence for the floral diversification hypothesis. Trait rate is more important than trait state.
https://doi.org/10.32942/X2PH1C
Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Plant evolution, cacti, cactus, flower, floral, morphology, cactaceae, succulents, speciation, Diversification
Published: 2025-08-22 15:50
Last Updated: 2025-08-22 15:50
CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Data and Code Availability Statement:
Open data and code will be made available upon acceptance
Language:
English
Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Ask this paper
Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00