Indigo blue dyes have been important in driving economics through the production of dyer’s weed, Isatis tinctoria and its economic rival, Indigofera tinctoria, which emerged with the expansion of European trade routes to India ( Asiaticus, 1912 Sandberg, 1989 Clark et al., 1993). The earliest known use of blue dyes can be traced to ancient Peru where an indigoid dye (indigotin E132), was used to dye cotton fabric about 6000 years ago, about 1500 years before the first evidences of usage of blue fabric dyes in ancient Egypt ( Splitstoser et al., 2016). In ancient Egypt, the combination of silica (SiO 2), calcium oxide (CaO), and copper oxide (CuO) was used to make Egyptian blue ( irtyu), a long-lasting entrancing pigment representing the color of the sky and heavens that was used for the decoration of statues that can still be observed ( Eastaugh et al., 2004). The color blue has long been highly valued throughout the history of humans. An ecological explanation for our blue preference is that we like clear sky and blue water and increasingly develop a preference for those from young childhood ( Palmer and Schloss, 2010), and indeed color preferences in humans are frequently influenced by important environmental factors in our lives ( Palmer et al., 2013). A blue color preference is also observed in human infant studies ( Teller et al., 2004 Zemach et al., 2007), although infant color vision experiments show evidence for a preference to reddish hues in some contexts ( Franklin et al., 2010). Studies in psychophysics on adult humans from many countries show that blue is the most frequently preferred color hue ( Granger, 1952 McManus et al., 1981 Ou et al., 2004). In this synthesis review, we consider the reported relative rarity of blue flowers in many ecological studies, and subsequently discuss how a different view of flower spectral data can be obtained by considering the vision of major pollinators with the goal of bridging different fields to navigate toward the frontiers of plant color science. When we as human observers use our color vision to document the natural world, we need to be cognizant of the limitations and biases of our perception. Though some savants make earth include the sky Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)– When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, By doing so, we conclude that short wavelength reflecting blue flowers are indeed frequent in nature when considering the color vision and preferences of bees. We thus provide new perspectives emphasizing that, while humans view blue as a less frequently evolved color in nature, to understand signaling, it is essential to employ models of biologically relevant observers. The adaptive value of blue flowers should also be reinforced by nutrient richness or other factors, abiotic and biotic, that may reduce extra costs of blue-pigments synthesis. The subsequent evolution of blue flowers may be driven by increased competition for pollinators, both because of a harsher environment (as at high altitude) or from high diversity and density of flowering plants (as in nutrient-rich meadows). We discuss the fact that most animals, however, have different vision to humans for example, bee pollinators have trichromatic vision based on UV-, Blue-, and Green-sensitive photoreceptors with innate preferences for predominantly short-wavelength reflecting colors, including what we perceive as blue. We first review how blue has been important in human culture, and thus how our perception of blue has likely influenced the way of scientifically evaluating signals produced in nature, including approaches as disparate as Goethe’s Farbenlehre, Linneaus’ plant taxonomy, and current studies of plant-pollinator networks. While blue skies and oceans are a common visual experience, this color is less frequently observed in flowers. 7Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australiaīlue is a favored color of many humans.6Department of Biology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States.5Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer, Norway.4Phenology Lab, Biosciences Institute, Department of Biodiversity, UNESP – São Paulo State University, São Paulo, Brazil.3School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.2Department of Disturbance Ecology, Bayreuth Center for Ecology and Environmental Research, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany.1School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.Tjørve 5 Peter White 6 Mani Shrestha 1,7*‡§ Dyer 1†§ Anke Jentsch 2†§ Martin Burd 3§ Jair E.
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