Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff, Lauren Bogle bomb here. Imagine having to get a specific person's attention in a crowded room without being able to move a muscle or make any noise at all. It sounds impossible, doesn't it. Well, this is the predicament plants have found themselves in since time immemorial. How does one get the attention of a fast moving animal when one
is silent, motionless, and also a shrub. Plants have solved the problem, though, because necessity is the mother of invention, and also because they've had around a hundred million years to work on it. Many angiosperms of flowering plants, that is, require the help of animals to spread their seeds around, since,
as we've discussed, they're incapable of doing so themselves. It's one thing for mango treated drop its fruit and grow another little tree right underneath the parent, but it's quite another for a monkey to take a piece of fruit half a mile away and drop the seed in a
previously mango free zone. This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to angiosperm dissemination and the evolution and ultimate thriving and survival of these plants has depended on individual species concocting new ways to manipulate the animals they're most likely to come in contact with. Two recent studies out of Germany examined the mechanisms by which plants learned to flag down the right animals. It turns out that those sound and movement are good strategies for
getting someone's attention. Animal heads are also turned by smell and color, and according to this research, plants have worked those angles pretty hard. The first study, published in the journal Biology Letters, investigates how the color of certain fruits can attract specific seed dispersers. The research team compared experiments with fruit eating primates and wildlife preserves in both Uganda
and on the island of Madagascar. They found that fruit bearing plants had evolved to cater to the specific visual capabilities of the main seed dispersing animals in each place, though the landscapes in the two parks are very similar. Ugandan seed dispersers, monkeys, apes, and birds have tricolor vision like humans, whereas the lemurs in Madagascar are red green
color blind. The ripe berries on fruiting plants reflected this in Uganda ripe red fruit on dark green foliage showed up better to the animals native to that area, whereas in Madagascar, the ready to eat fruits were mostly yellow, a color more visible to lemurs. Similarly, according to the other study published in the journal Science Advances, the fruit in Madagascar is also more fragrant. Those plants didn't want to leave their seed dispersal entirely up to the visual
acuity of a bunch of lemurs. Ripe figs on the island are very smelly, which makes sense given that color blind lemurs would have been able to find the smell east fruits in the forest more easily than they could find the most brightly colored. The figs that produced the most odoriferous cocktail of chemical compounds as they ripened were eaten, and thus their seeds dispersed more often on Madagascar, suggesting
that plants know exactly what they're doing, evolutionarily speaking. Today's So It was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other advantageous topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot Com.