Supermales even more superior outdoors.

A plant that tests out as a supermale in a greenhouse can prove even more of a stud in the wild.

As in most plants, flowers of the wild bladder pod have both male and female parts. In this desert-dwelling mustard species, however, "some were supermales, and some-were real wimps," reports Randall J. Mitchell of the University of Akron in Ohio.

He and a colleague hand-pollinated four compatible plants with a mix of the plants' pollen, a flower's worth from each donor. Some of the donors produced more abundant pollen, consistently fathering more seeds than others. For a unique twist, Mitchell set the four plants in a remote desert spot to see if natural pollinators--bees and bee flies--produced the same result.

There, the most virile of the males proved even flashier than in the greenhouse, sometimes siring 71 percent of seeds in another plant, Mitchell's team says in the January American Journal of Botany. He speculates that its abundant pollen draws more insects. Also, such plants might exaggerate their male traits at the expense of seed production, he adds.