Answer: Plants colour their fruits to flag down the right animals
Explanation: Why are raspberries red and bananas yellow?
A scientific debate has raged for decades about whether plants evolve to produce fruits of particular colours to attract particular animals to help spread their seeds. A new study appears to have finally settled it.
Researchers looked at similar plants in two similar mountain rainforests in Uganda and Madagascar and found that the palette of fruit colours in the two forests is tuned to the way the local fruit-eating animals see the world.
Hungry black bears drawn to residential areas in search of fruit trees, berries
In Uganda, most fruits ripen to a bright red — standing out against the green leaves when spotted by the birds and the local monkeys, which have colour vision similar to ours.
In Madagascar, where the mostly nocturnal lemurs can't tell the difference between red and green, the ripe fruits tend to be green — but shades of green that contrast brightly against the leaves when viewed with "lemur vision," the study, published in the journal Biology Letters, found.
Plants talking to animals
Plants typically signal to the animals when the fruit is ripe by changing its colour — something scientists consider to be a form of communication.
So it might seem obvious that plants would evolve and produce fruit of the right colour to attract the right animals to eat them.
But scientists have found proving this theory isn't so easy, and many previous studies show no evidence of that kind of evolution.
Plus, there are other possible explanations for why fruits are the colours they are. Perhaps it's just genetic, and therefore all related plants in that lineage have the same colour. Or maybe it's because the plant happens to make pigments of that colour for other plant parts.
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