Would it need more energy to build up a better photosynthesis pigment than it would yield?
Would dark plants get warmer, losing more water?
At least in cold, dark, humid climate, black plants should do much better.
Imagine all those cute little deers bumping their nose in a pitch black forest…
Well, OK, what other pigment captures the energy of sunlight even as well as chlorophyll does? Until something evolves a substance of a color other than green that can do the same job the green part of spectrum is going to stay unused.
The quandry here is that plants are green because they reflect the middle part of the spectrum, preferring to absorb energy from the fringes of visible light: red and blue/violet. Wouldn’t it be easier for plants to target the center of the spectrum, absorbing yellow/green/blue and reflecting purplish-brown?
The hypothesis I recall reading about is that the ancestors of all green plants were once the lowly competitors to the red- and blue-reflecting types. Perhaps they sat beneath the other types in a pool of water, absorbing the spectrum fringes which was the only light that trickled down after the competitors gobbled up the rest. Then something happened to the (seemingly more sensible) competitors, leaving us with green-reflecting plants.
I can’t find a citation for this hypothesis, and I’m not sure if the federally funded Deep Green Project supports or refutes that old hypothesis. Here’s another article which refers to an interesting but unrelated finding from Deep Green.
According to this, the predominant green color of plants is an accident that stuck. And how!
The quandry here is that plants are green because they reflect the middle part of the spectrum, preferring to absorb energy from the fringes of visible light: red and blue/violet. Wouldn’t it be easier for plants to target the center of the spectrum, absorbing yellow/green/blue and reflecting purplish-brown?
The hypothesis I recall reading about is that the ancestors of all green plants were once the lowly competitors to the red- and blue-reflecting types. Perhaps they sat beneath the other types in a pool of water, absorbing the spectrum fringes which was the only light that trickled down after the competitors gobbled up the rest. Then something catastrophic happened to the (seemingly more sensible) competitors, leaving us with green-reflecting plants.
I can’t find a citation for this hypothesis, and I’m not sure if the federally funded Deep Green Project supports or refutes that old hypothesis.
Here’s another article which refers to an interesting but unrelated finding from Deep Green.
The quandry here…
The hypothesis I recall reading about…
I can’t find a citation for this hypothesis. Here’s a link to the federally-funded Deep Green Project. I’m not sure if their findings support or refute the hypothesis I mention.
Here’s another article which refers to an interesting but unrelated finding from Deep Green.
Here’s the link for Deep Green.
My own seat-o-the-pants theory…
I think it is merely an evolutionary holdover from when chlorophyll developed in algae and small cellular-colony sized plants in the oceans. If you’ve been under water, green wavelengths seem to be absorbed very quickly by water (green things appear much darker, even black) so chlorphyll didn’t have much green energy to absorb down there and never developed the ability. By the time plants made it onto land, the photosynthesis process was too hard-wired to adapt to make use of the green wavelengths.
So plants, being not very smart, didn’t notice yet there’s no light-stealing competitor around anymore?
But nature evolved many accessory pigments, beside A there’s Chlorophyll B,C,D,E, Phycoerythrin, Phycocyanin, ß-Carotene, Xanthophylls…
taking care of other parts of the spectrum. They can’t be all that old. And elodea, an aquarium plant, uses more red light than green!
But in the wavelength/absorption diagram, there’s still a hole in the green. No, IANAGolfer 
Maybe it’s really just because deers wouldn’t dung a dark forest…
There are plants with black leaves, like this one:
Ophiopogon Planiscapus (the photo doesn’t do it justice).
Speaking as an idiot who knows nothing about plants, I cant help but notice theres a bush with red leaves growing in my front yard.
quandary - Function: noun - Inflected Form(s): plural -ries
a state of perplexity or doubt
Anyway, the explanation is obvious; it must be God’s favourite colour.
<runs for cover>