leaf resupination, was Alstroemeria pulchella/psittacina
Nathan Lange (Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:45:41 PST)

That exact hypothesis has been mentioned before
with regard to Alstroemeria leaf resupination:
"...resupination may be an adaptation to the
versatility of Bomarea vines to climb upwards,
downwards, and grow horizontally, always
orienting the ab.-top surface of the leaf toward
light, even if this leads to untwisting or double twisting (Hill, 1939)."
http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/…

The above work cites this paper from 1939 for that hypothesis:
Hill A. W. (1939). Resupination studies of
flowers and leaves. Ann. Bot. 3, 871–887.

The discussion in the first paper on the
interaction between resupination and phyllotaxis
with regard to Alstroemeria leaf symmetry is an interesting read.

Nathan

At 11:33 PM 1/31/2013, you wrote:

Alstroemeria and Bomarea are relatives, they share a common ancestor.
Bomarea stems climb on other plants and if you look closely they actually
twist their leaves so that the leaves face the sun (I went out to look at
my plant just now and it did exactly that!). As a result, some of the
leaves will be resupinate (twisted), others will be non-resupinate
(regular). This may be the case with Alstroemeria too, but they don't climb
and the chances of them falling over isn't too great. But if that did
happen, maybe they too can untwist their leaves (experiment with your
plants and see). So perhaps somewhere in the common ancestor of Bomarea and
Alstroemeria, the leaves acquire this twisting mechanism and Bomarea kept
it, some Alstroemeria kept it, and others lost it as Jane pointed out. It
makes sense. If you don't use it, you loose it.

Nhu