Why are most flowers yellow in the Galapagos???
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Galapagos Flowers...?
Indeed, there are about 70% ( estimated ) of the flowers of the Galapagos plants white, whitish or yellow (
according to Wiggins and Porter, Flora of the Galapagos Islands, identification key ).
The same book reports that insectes functioning as pollinators are particularly few ( only one sort of bee in contrast to dozens of genera elsewhere in the world ).
So plants have to attract them with the color they prefer, and that`s yellow ( http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:e55FO... )
Most of the butterflies of Galapagos are hawkmoths, visiting flowers in the evening, when yellow and white better show up than other colors.
A further reason could be, that the major part of soil of the islands is red to reddish brown, so that yellow and white contrast strongly.
Only in the regions above 500-550 m over sea level the soil is nearly black and there live almost solely ferns and sedges.
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