Leaf fluctuating asymmetry is not a reliable indicator of stress

作者：Maria Májeková, B. Springer, Viktoria Ferenc, Michal Gruntman, Katja Tielbörger · 发表于：Functional Ecology · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2435.14564 · 被引用次数：11 · 研究领域：Morphological variations and asymmetry、Leaf Properties and Growth Measurement、Botanical Studies and Applications

Abstract Stress experienced during development in organisms with bilateral structures could result in developmental instability, which is expressed as subtle non‐directional deviations from perfect symmetry, known as fluctuating asymmetry (FA). As such, FA has been proposed, and extensively used, as a trait indicating stress for many organisms with bilateral structures and many types of stress. However, while this concept may apply to animals, the evidence for plants' main vegetative structures, that is, leaves, remains equivocal, and a comprehensive synthesis on this topic is still missing. We designed observational field and controlled greenhouse studies, combining different growth and leaf forms across multiple stress gradients, comprising 21 species and 80 populations. We measured FA as the difference between the left and right area of the leaf, an approach that accommodates diverse leaf forms. We used high‐precision, blind, single‐person measurements and tested for other forms of symmetry and the effect of leaf size. We further complemented our study with a systematic literature review of FA in plant leaves, compiling 51 studies comprising 72 species, 23 stress types and 131 unique entries (species × stress type). We consistently found no effect of stress on leaf FA in any of the studied species in both our field and experimental gradients. In the systematic literature review, only 39% of the unique entries showed the expected increase in FA with stress, 53% showed no ef...