Chocofern: Difference between revisions

Chocoferns split from tis ancestor. It live in the shade beneath carnarbors. In addition to a purple pigment that absorbs yellow light, they have a yellow pigment that absorbs blue light. This allows them to gain energy from parts of the light spectrum that pass through the carnarbor's leaves. Rather than being masked by another pigment, as in Earth plants, the two pigments are contained in separate chloroplast-analogues on the same level of the leaf. The yellow and purple pigments are perceived as brown in the same way an image made entirely of tiny red or blue squares is perceived as purple from sufficient distance. While shade-tolerant, the chocofern grows much better when exposed to full sunlight. Should the carnarbor it lives beneath die and fall to the ground, the chocofern will re-absorb the yellow pigments in its leaves, replacing them with purple pigments. While it may seem inefficient to discard part of the light spectrum, the chocofern's cellular machinery is much better at using yellow light than blue light. This is simply the product of hailing from a long line of purple flora, which have used yellow light for photosynthesis for millions of years. The younger leaves are purple, as usual.