Animals were able to see colors long before species developed the riot of colors that enlivens our world today
The nonvenomous Arizona mountain kingsnake, which resembles a venomous coral snake, has a survival advantage by warning off would-be predators that avoid colorful coral snakes.Bold hues of red, orange, yellow, blue and purple help plants and animals communicate with their own species and others in their efforts to survive. Vivid orange dart frogs warn predators of their toxicity. Different birds use a rainbow of plumage to attract mates.
The coloration of living things has evolved slowly: colorful fruitlike seeds started dotting an otherwise bland landscape around 300 million years ago, vibrant flowering plants appeared 100 million years later, and animals—namely cockroaches and butterflies—started sporting bolder pigmentation 70 million years after that. But now, in a puzzling twist, new research shows that animals’ ability to perceive many colors came long before the colors themselves existed for them to see.
An evolutionary trait almost always occurs for a reason; this raises the question of why animals would gain the ability to see distinctions in bright color long before they would need to. According to the new study, color vision likely played an important role in early species’ ability to see whether a plant had living green leaves or dead brown ones or to pick a predator out of the background.
Wiens acknowledges that many aspects of color vision are still a mystery. “There’s a very long fuse before this explosion of color occurred,” he says, “and we don’t really know why.”
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