Nell Greenfield Boyce

There's all this data out there on solar panels.

And she found that trees in Europe get exposed to less solar radiation than

than trees in the northeast U.S.

You know, so she's saying, like, maybe they just have less need for this kind of red sunscreen.

Again, it's, you know, a correlation.

It's suggestive.

No.

OK, so there's this whole other line of thinking.

And I was talking with one evolutionary biologist who's named Marco Archetti at Penn State.

And he's been skeptical about this idea that red pigments are there to protect the tree from sunlight as it's trying to recover its nutrients and store them away.

He has this whole other idea about why some trees evolve to turn red.

And it basically boils down to protection from insects.

Oh, so the kind that lay eggs in autumn.

Why?

Why?

Well, basically, he thinks the red, you know, like in nature, red is often like a warning signal.

Right.

And so he thinks the red could basically be telling them, don't lay your eggs here.

Like, this is not a good place for you.

And when he published this idea years ago, it was really controversial.