The Real Reason Leaves Change Color In the Fall
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You've probably heard that leaves of deciduous trees change color in autumn because they lose their green chlorophyll molecules, allowing the underlying yellow-orange pigments to shine through. However, this doesn’t explain why the leaves change color in the first place. Deciduous trees drop their leaves each year to avoid the high cost of winterizing them, but this seasonal shedding would be too wasteful to be worth doing if it meant/far too wasteful if the trees lost all of the valuable nutrients they laboriously extracted from the soil to build their leaves earlier in the year. So each fall, deciduous trees recycle their leaves before dropping them. That means taking apart cells and photosynthetic apparatus from the inside out in order to recoup...
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You've probably heard that leaves of deciduous trees change color in autumn because they lose their green chlorophyll molecules, allowing the underlying yellow-orange pigments to shine through. However, this doesn’t explain why the leaves change color in the first place. Deciduous trees drop their leaves each year to avoid the high cost of winterizing them, but this seasonal shedding would be too wasteful to be worth doing if it meant/far too wasteful if the trees lost all of the valuable nutrients they laboriously extracted from the soil to build their leaves earlier in the year. So each fall, deciduous trees recycle their leaves before dropping them. That means taking apart cells and photosynthetic apparatus from the inside out in order to recoup...
