Data from: How life became colourful: colour vision, aposematism, sexual selection, flowers, and fruits

ABSTRACT: Plants and animals are often adorned with potentially conspicuous colours (e.g. red, yellow, orange, blue, purple). These include the dazzling colours of fruits and flowers, the brilliant warning colours of frogs, snakes, and inverte- brates, and the spectacular sexually selected colours of insects, fish, birds, and lizards. Such signals are often thought to utilize pre-existing sensitivities in the receiver’s visual systems. This raises the question: what was the initial func- tion of conspicuous colouration and colour vision? Here, we review the origins of colour vision, fruit, flowers, and aposematic and sexually selected colouration. We find that aposematic colouration is widely distributed across ani- mals but relatively young, evolving only in the last ~150 million years (Myr). Sexually selected colouration in ani- mals appears confined to arthropods and chordates, and is also relatively young (generally <100 Myr). Colourful flowers likely evolved ~200 million years ago (Mya), whereas colourful fruits/seeds likely evolved ~300 Mya. Colour vision (sensu lato) appears to be substantially older, and likely originated ~400–500 Mya in both arthropods and chordates. Thus, colour vision may have evolved long before extant lineages with fruit, flowers, aposematism, and sexual colour signals. We also find that there appears to have been an explosion of colour within the last ~100 Myr, including >200 origins of aposematic colouration across nine animal phyla and >100 origins of sexually selected colouration among arthropods and chordates.

摘要：动植物常演化出具有醒目视觉效果的色彩（如红、黄、橙、蓝、紫），此类色彩包括果实与花朵的绚丽色泽、蛙类、蛇类及无脊椎动物醒目的警戒色（aposematic colouration），以及昆虫、鱼类、鸟类和蜥蜴经由性选择产生的艳丽色彩。这类色彩信号通常被认为利用了信号接收者视觉系统中先天存在的感知敏感性。这引出了一个核心学术问题：醒目的色彩与色觉最初的功能是什么？本文综述了色觉、果实、花朵，以及警戒色与性选择色彩的演化起源。研究表明，警戒色在动物界分布广泛但演化历史相对较新，仅在约1.5亿年前开始出现。动物界中经由性选择演化出的色彩似乎仅局限于节肢动物（arthropods）和脊索动物（chordates），同样演化历史较新（通常不足1亿年）。色彩艳丽的花朵大约起源于2亿年前，而色彩丰富的果实/种子则约在3亿年前出现。广义（sensu lato）的色觉则要古老得多，大概率在约4亿至5亿年前就已在节肢动物和脊索动物中起源。由此可见，色觉的演化时间远早于现存拥有果实、花朵、警戒色以及性选择色彩信号的类群。本研究还发现，在约过去1亿年间出现了色彩演化的爆发期：涵盖9个动物门的类群中，警戒色已独立起源超过200次；而节肢动物和脊索动物中，性选择色彩的独立起源则超过100次。