As the sun rises over Kibale National Park in Uganda, red berries and orange figs hang in the rain forest’s canopy. They’re waiting for monkeys, apes or birds to scan the foliage, eat the ripe fruit and either spit or defecate seeds far from their sources, spreading their next generation to a new location.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, in the similarly mountainous rain forests of Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park, yellow berries or fragrant, green figs await lemurs, the frugivores of this jungle. They’ll search the forest all night for their feast, later scattering the seeds.

Over millions of years of natural selection, these plants have developed ways to communicate with animals through their fruits, new research suggests, saying something like “choose me.” With traits evolved to match each animal’s sensory capacities or physical abilities, fruits can signal dinner time in the jungle, and further their plant’s survival as a species.

“When I first learned that plants, in a way, behaved — that they were actually communicating information to animals — my mind exploded,” said Kim Valenta, an evolutionary ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a study published recently in Biology Letters investigating the relationship between fruit color and animal vision.