Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Bogle 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 a 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 discussed, they're incapable of doing so themselves. It's
Speaker 1: one thing for mango treated drop its fruit and grow
Speaker 1: another little tree right underneath the parent, but it's quite
Speaker 1: another for a monkey to take a piece of fruit
Speaker 1: half a mile away and drop the seed in a
Speaker 1: previously mango free zone. This is where the rubber meets
Speaker 1: the road when it comes to angiosperm dissemination and the
Speaker 1: evolution and ultimate thriving and survival of these plants has
Speaker 1: depended on individual species concocting new ways to manipulate the
Speaker 1: animals they're most likely to come in contact with. Two
Speaker 1: recent studies out of Germany examined the mechanisms by which
Speaker 1: plants learned to flag down the right animals. It turns
Speaker 1: out that those sound and movement are good strategies for
Speaker 1: getting someone's attention. Animal heads are also turned by smell
Speaker 1: and color, and according to this research, plants have worked
Speaker 1: those angles pretty hard. The first study, published in the
Speaker 1: journal Biology Letters, investigates how the color of certain fruits
Speaker 1: can attract specific seed dispersers. The research team compared experiments
Speaker 1: with fruit eating primates and wildlife preserves in both Uganda
Speaker 1: and on the island of Madagascar. They found that fruit
Speaker 1: bearing plants had evolved to cater to the specific visual
Speaker 1: capabilities of the main seed dispersing animals in each place,
Speaker 1: though the landscapes in the two parks are very similar.
Speaker 1: Ugandan seed dispersers, monkeys, apes, and birds have tricolor vision
Speaker 1: like humans, whereas the lemurs in Madagascar are red green
Speaker 1: color blind. The ripe berries on fruiting plants reflected this
Speaker 1: in Uganda ripe red fruit on dark green foliage showed
Speaker 1: up better to the animals native to that area, whereas
Speaker 1: in Madagascar, the ready to eat fruits were mostly yellow,
Speaker 1: a color more visible to lemurs. Similarly, according to the
Speaker 1: other study published in the journal Science Advances, the fruit
Speaker 1: in Madagascar is also more fragrant. Those plants didn't want
Speaker 1: to leave their seed dispersal entirely up to the visual
Speaker 1: acuity of a bunch of lemurs. Ripe figs on the
Speaker 1: island are very smelly, which makes sense given that color
Speaker 1: blind lemurs would have been able to find the smell
Speaker 1: east 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: So It was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: advantageous topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot Com.