Maternal influences on seed mass effect and initial seedling growth in four Quercus species

Seed mass represents the reserves available for growth in the first stages of plant establishment. Variation in seed mass is an important trait which may have consequences for growth and survival of seedlings. Three mechanisms have been proposed to explain how seed mass influences seedling development: the reserve use effect, the metabolic effect and the seedling-size effect. Few studies have evaluated at the same time the three hypotheses within species and none have evaluated the effect of the mother trees. We studied four Quercus species by selecting five mother trees per species. Seeds were sown in a glasshouse and the use of seed reserves, seedling growth and morphology were measured. Considering all mothers of the same species together, we did not find the reserve effect for any species, the metabolic effect was observed in all species except for Quercus suber, and the seedling-size effect was matched for all the species. Within species, maternal origin modified the studied relationships and thus the studied mechanisms as we did not observe seed mass effects on all mothers from each species. Moreover, the metabolic effect was not found in any mother of Quercus ilex and Quercus faginea. We concluded that a maternal effect can change seed mass relationships with traits related to seedling establishment. The conservation of this high intra-specific variability must be considered to guarantee species performance in heterogeneous environments and in particular in the current context of climate change.