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Nature is painted with pigments—molecules that produce color by absorbing certain wavelengths and reflecting others. Chlorophyll is the pigment that makes plants green; melanin is a pigment that gives humans our eye, hair, and skin color. But some colors found in nature—especially vibrant greens and blues—are a trick of light. |
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Buckeye butterfly (Junonia coenia) selectively bred to shift wing color from brown to blue. (Photography by Edith Smith) |
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Blue jays aren’t blue; they’re brown. Blue morpho butterflies aren’t blue either. These brilliant blues are examples of structural color, created by the microscopic shape of a material that bends and scatters light in a way that amplifies certain visible wavelengths. Imagine a soap bubble: the film is clear, but you see swirls of color when it floats in sunlight. These nanostructures are what make peacock feathers, beetle carapaces, and butterfly wings so vivid. |
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Buckeye butterflies are usually brown with small (structural) blue flecks. (So far, only the olivewing butterfly is known to have blue pigment.) Over the course of a year, a butterfly breeder mated buckeyes that had the most blue, and this artificial selection forced a “rapid evolution” and created blue-winged buckeyes. Marine Biological Laboratory scientists took the opportunity to study the evolutionary mechanisms that change the tiny overlapping scales that give butterfly wings their color. |
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The giant squid genome has been fully sequenced, allowing scientists to study genes unique to cephalopods. These include reflectins, cephalopod-specific proteins thought to be important for the structural colors used in camouflage. |
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A single gene controls whether Heliconius cydno butterflies will have white or yellow spots. That same gene may also influence preference for white- or yellow-spotted mates. |
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Cephalopods use both pigment and structural color for camouflage. |
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Last fall, Heidi the sleeping octopus put on an amazing technicolor dream show. Was she camouflaging based on her dreamworld? |
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You can’t just ask animals if they’re dreaming, but Margoliash has shown that sleeping birds sometimes have the same brain activity as singing birds. So if a sleeping octopus is ever found to have the same brain waves as a feeding octopus, maybe Heidi was dreaming of feasting on a crab. |
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Ancient DNA:
Geneticists are now able to recover DNA from prehistoric remains.
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Skeeterish:
Scientists attack mosquitoes at the human, bug, and microbe levels.
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