Female and male costs of reproduction must be equal in dioecious Cape plant genus Leucadendron (Proteaceae)

The Cape Leucadendron genus is dioecious, with extreme vegetative dimorphism displayed in some species – females having much larger leaves and fewer branches than males – whereas other species are monomorphic. Leucadendron is ecologically diverse, with some species with canopy stored seeds (serotiny) and others with soil stored seeds. These features mean that the Cape Leucadendron is an ideal genus to study the costs of reproduction for the different sexes in plants, and to determine whether vegetative dimorphism could be due to unequal costs. Here we use the unique aspects of the fire-prone Cape environment in which leucadendrons occur to show that the costs of sex must be equal between the sexes. Leucadendron populations are single aged because they only recruit after fires that kill all adults. Therefore, because the sexes have the same lifespans, they must have the same lifetime extent of vegetative versus reproductive allocation. Also, ecologically similar hermaphrodite Proteaceae co-exist with dioecious taxa. To co-occur, dioecious and hermaphrodite taxa must have the same mean post-fire fitness. This implies that dioecious females must have double the reproductive output that a co-occurring hermaphrodite has. This is only possible if the costs of reproduction are the same for the sexes and that the sexes use the same resources for reproduction. Finally, because males and female co-occur, they must be competitively equivalent to maintain natal sex ratios. These three factors suggest male and female allocate equivalently and therefore that vegetative sexual dimorphism is unlikely to be due to differences in allocation.