Acknowledgements We thank Dr. S. C. Maberly for helpful suggestions on the manuscript, Jinpu GU and Xianglong MENG for their management of the plants. This work was supported by grants from National Science and Technology Supporting Item (Grant No. 2012BAC06B04), Strategic Pilot Science and Technology Projects of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA05090305), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31170340, 30970202), Special Research Programme of the Ministry of Water Resources (Grant No. 200901009), Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Freshwa- ter Ecology and Biotechnology (Grant No. 2011FB21), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 20100471210).
Resource allocation, as well as the tradeoffs among different reproductive components, plays an important role in the adaptability of plants to different environments. The hybrid may exhibit a higher adaptability in l...