Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren voel Bomb here with another classic podcast episode. This
Speaker 1: one looks into the beautiful diversity of fruits and flowers
Speaker 1: and how plants evolved them in order to attract not us,
Speaker 1: but a variety of local non human animals. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb here. Imagine having to get a specific
Speaker 1: person's attention in a crowded room without being able to
Speaker 1: move a muscle or make any noise at all. It
Speaker 1: sounds impossible, doesn't it. Well, this is the predicament plants
Speaker 1: have found themselves in since time immemorial. How does one
Speaker 1: get the attention of a fast moving animal when one
Speaker 1: is silent, motionless, and also a shrub. Plants have solved
Speaker 1: the problem, though, because necessity is the mother of invention,
Speaker 1: and also because they've had around one hundred million years
Speaker 1: to work on it. Many angiosperms of flowering plants, that is,
Speaker 1: require the help of animals to spread their seeds around, since,
Speaker 1: as we've discuss, they're incapable of doing so themselves. It's
Speaker 1: one thing for mango tree to drop its fruit and
Speaker 1: grow another little tree right underneath the parent, but It's
Speaker 1: quite another for a monkey to take a piece of
Speaker 1: fruit half a mile away and drop the seed in
Speaker 1: a previously mango free zone. This is where the rubber
Speaker 1: meets the road when it comes to angiosperm dissemination, and
Speaker 1: the evolution and ultimate thriving and survival of these plants
Speaker 1: has depended on individual species concocting new ways to manipulate
Speaker 1: the animals they're most likely to come in contact with.
Speaker 1: Two recent studies out of Germany examined the mechanisms by
Speaker 1: which plants learned to flag down the right animals. It
Speaker 1: turns out that those sound and movement are good strategies
Speaker 1: for getting someone's attention. Animal heads are also turned by
Speaker 1: smell and color, and according to this research, plants have
Speaker 1: worked those angles pretty hard. The first study, published in
Speaker 1: the journal Biology Letters, investigates how the color of certain
Speaker 1: fruits can attract specific seed dispersers. The research team compared
Speaker 1: experiments with fruit eating primates and wildlife preserves in both
Speaker 1: the use Uganda and on the island of Madagascar. They
Speaker 1: found that fruit bearing plants had evolved to cater to
Speaker 1: the specific visual capabilities of the main seed dispersing animals
Speaker 1: in each place. Though the landscapes in the two parks
Speaker 1: are very similar. Ugandan seed dispersers, monkeys, apes, and birds
Speaker 1: have tricolor vision like humans, whereas the lemurs in Madagascar
Speaker 1: are red green color blind. The ripe berries on fruiting
Speaker 1: plants reflected this. In Uganda, ripe red fruit on dark
Speaker 1: green foliage showed up better to the animals native to
Speaker 1: that area, whereas in Madagascar, the ready to eat fruits
Speaker 1: were mostly yellow, a color more visible to lemurs. Similarly,
Speaker 1: according to the other study published in the journal Science Advances,
Speaker 1: the fruit in Madagascar is also more fragrant. Those plants
Speaker 1: didn't want to leave their seed dispersal entirely up to
Speaker 1: the visual acuity of a bunch of lemurs. Ripe figs
Speaker 1: on the island are very smelly, which makes sense given
Speaker 1: that colorblind lemurs would have been able to find the
Speaker 1: smelliest fruits in the forest more easily than they could
Speaker 1: find the most brightly colored. The figs that produced the
Speaker 1: most odoriferous cocktail of chemical compounds as they ripened were eaten,
Speaker 1: and thus their seeds dispersed more often on Madagascar, suggesting
Speaker 1: that plants know exactly what they're doing. Evolutionarily speaking. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article Plants evolve scents and
Speaker 1: colors to attract animals. Four Seed Dispersal on how stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot Com written by Jesslinshields. Brain Stuff is production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is
Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.