Why are Blue Fruit so Rare? Of course I mean truly Blue Fruits, not those covered in a glacuous powder giving the illusion of blue color like In BlueBerries & Serviceberries.
I don’t know the answer. I recommend the project “Blue!” for lots of examples of blue organisms. (Blue starfish? I never expected that.) The first journal post for the project discusses the two kinds of blue color in living things.
Likely, blue fruits are rare for the same reason blue in any plant part is rare: anthocyanins tend to produce shades of pink, cool red, or purple, and getting just the right composition for blue is tricky.
Yea… Probably.
I wonder if it’s also harder to see blue fruits compared to red ones out-competing them?
Maybe it’s suffering from the same effect Green Fruits suffer from, blending in with the green foliage (But Blue Stands out at least to my Human Eyes, maybe birds see them differently)?