Are Autumn Foliage Colors Red Signals to Aphids 英文参考文献.docVIP

Unsolved Mystery Are Autumn Foliage Colors Red Signals to Aphids? Lars Chittka , Thomas F. D?ring * “…bright colours of leaves in the autumn are a warning signal to insects that lay their eggs on the trees in that season.” —Marco Archetti and Sam P. Brown (2003) [1] “The assumed attractiveness of bright colours to insects would appear to involve the supposition that the colour vision of insects is approximately the same as our own. Surely this is a good deal to take for granted.” —Lord Rayleigh (1874) [2] “Autumn colouring is of great interest in a comparative study of coloration. There is no reason to suppose that the colouring is of the slightest use to the trees, and yet it often displays to an extraordinary degree that beauty and perfectness which we are accustomed to regard as the result of the action of Natural Selection.” —Marion I. Newbigin (1898) [3] Introduction Most living things don’t turn beautiful when they senesce. Aging ?owers, for example, typically become wrinkly and tattered, and their colors become dull. The leaves of many temperate tree species, on the other hand, display veritable ?reworks of colors—just before they fall to the ground and rot. We know that some of the pigments causing this coloration simply become unmasked when chlorophyll disintegrates, while others protect leaves from the combined detrimental in?uences of cold and intense sunlight. Two studies at the beginning of this decade, however, suggested a radically different explanation: that “bright” autumn colors might in fact be signals to aphids, warning them of the defensive strength of the trees that produce them. This suggestion has prompted a fascinating debate between plant physiologists (most of whom believe that the pigmentation serves physiological processes inside the leaves), and some evolutionary theoreticians (who conjecture that such exuberant colors must serve a signaling function). Colors, however, are not simply manifestations of p