Data from: Flower clades and fruit clades: Trade-offs in color diversification across angiosperms

Flowers and fruits are two major phases of plant reproduction that often
use colorful signals to attract animal mutualists. Fruits develop from the
ovaries of flowers, and both organs use the same suites of pigments to
create color. Due to these developmental links and functional
similarities, we sought to test for correlations in flower and fruit color
lability across clades. We selected 51 clades (2960 species) of
animal-pollinated and animal-dispersed (i.e., fleshy-fruited) plants and
scored flower and fruit color into eight discrete (human-perceived)
categories for the same set of species in each clade. We used stochastic
character mapping to estimate the number and rates of transitions among
colors in flowers and fruits. We demonstrate a negative correlation in the
number of transitions in flower and fruit color across clades (R2 = 0.41;
p < 0.001). Among animal-pollinated and animal-dispersed clades,
67% are “fruit clades” biased towards fruit color lability, while 29% are
“flower clades” biased towards flower color lability. Furthermore, clades
with yellow- or orange-flowered species also tend to have those colors in
their fruits, and red flowers are more common in “flower clades” and brown
fruits in “fruit clades”. These patterns suggest that clades specialize on
one phase of reproduction or the other. Possible explanations include
constraints on energetic investment into either pollination or dispersal;
environmental factors that select for color diversification in one organ
but not the other; or constraints imposed by the underlying structure of
pigment pathways.