My favorite wildflower
Pedicularis groenlandica, Elephanthead, isn't it cute?
An unusual albino elephanthead.
posted by Pedicularis @ 11:08 AM
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Pedicularis groenlandica, Elephanthead, isn't it cute? An unusual albino elephanthead.
About Me
- Name: Pedicularis
Pedicularis is a lovely genus of wildflowers commonly known as Louseworts.
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4 Comments:
As I recall, I found that one in the boggy area on the west side of Sheep Lake (the one that is about 2 miles north of Chinook Pass in the Washington Cascades). I don't recall seeing any others.
I have found a few albino elephant heads for several years in the same place in Colorado. This year they are gone. Can albino elephant head flowers reproduce albinos or do they just die out?
I don't know but I can ask a few plant experts and get back to you.
My long-winded plant expert said: "There are a few possible answers, so I'll tackle them one at a time.
First, with a perennial plant, especially one with a branched caudex like most Pedicularis, a mass die-off of white-flowering plants seems unlikely. Perhaps the white ones are somehow weaker and just haven't produced flowers this year.
Second, the white-flowered plants should be able to reproduce. With most color mutations, reproductive function is not lost as it is with structure mutations, where derived parts (such as stamens) tend to revert to the ancestral part (in this case, the petal - this is usually how we get double flowers). There is, however, a remote possibility that the color change somehow made the flower less attractive to pollinators. Again, though, a mass die-off would seem unlikely with a perennial plant.
Last, there is the question of inheritance (simple Mendelian genetics). Assuming that the "few" white-flowered plants are a few in a larger population of pink-flowered ones, and not just a small and isolated population, I feel it safe to say that the allele (gene variant) causing the color change is copmletely recessive to the wild-type (regular). It is also more likely that this condition is a loss of color (where the pigment can't be produced) than a true change of color (where a different pigment is produced). I'll also make one final assumption, that this is a mutation in a single gene with only two alleles. Thus, arbitrarily designating the gene as "P" (for pink pigment), where a "p" allele disrupts the production of pigment (a "white" allele, for convenience), we can call white-flowering plants "pp" (their genotype). Pink-flowering plants could be either "PP", or "Pp", where the one regular version of a gene can take care of that step of pigment production by itself. Since I almost never see white Pedicularis groenlandica, I would assume that "PP" is usually the overwhelming majority. And even if a "PP" breeds with a white "pp", all the offspring will be pink "Pp". White offspring can only be produced by "Pp" x "Pp" (1/4 of the offspring will be white), "Pp" x "pp" (1/2), or "pp" x "pp" (all).
The short answer is that even if the white-flowered plants somehow died out, the genes are probably floating around in the population. White-flowered plants will probably re-emerge in time, or could be brought back by selective breeding (if you could figure out how to cultivate them - I grow Castilleja, which is also a hemiparasite, but I've not heard of anyone having any success with Pedicularis of any sort). Which brings up another point. The presence of white-flowered plants in that particular area could mean that the selection against white flowers there is reduced. In essence, conditions there could be unusually favorable for white-flowered plants, causing a sort of natural selective breeding, such as with the white monarch butterflies in Hawaii. Thus, it's even more likely that the white-flowered plants will persist - and that if the mutation occurs again, the affected plants may have a better chance of survivng there than in other places.
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