Plants Communicating to Animals

Some plants in Madagascar may have evolved fruit colors so that they can be seen by lemurs that are red-green colorblind.

Over millions of years of natural selection, these plants have developed ways to communicate with animals through their fruits, new research suggests, saying something like “choose me.” With traits evolved to match each animal’s sensory capacities or physical abilities, fruits can signal dinner time in the jungle, and further their plant’s survival as a species.

“When I first learned that plants, in a way, behaved — that they were actually communicating information to animals — my mind exploded,” said Kim Valenta, an evolutionary ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a study published recently in Biology Letters investigating the relationship between fruit color and animal vision.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/science/fruit-color-evolution.html