Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature?

When he moved to America, he was determined to see what it takes to live, and he discovered that it was simple to keep himself alive. He was determined to survive on one dollar a day and bought food at the grocery store in bulk. While attending the University of Pennsylvania, he and a classmate rented a ten-bedroom apartment.

Butterflies ARE awesome.

There is no doubt about that.

Those moths are a group that have adapted to being active during the day, so if you're

You get a benefit if you are active during the day: Light can be used to communicate.

You probably already know this, but butterflies exhibit the most vivid and intricate designs of all insects.

There's a strong reason behind that, too:

Butterfly wings' hues convey messages like "I'm toxic" or "I'm a man."

yet not all butterfly hues are made equal. "and this is my territory."

On a butterfly wing, if we close our eyes, we can see that tiny scales are what give the color.

Actually, it's how butterflies and moths earn their scientific names.

All of those scales—orange, red, yellow, brown—contain pigments, chemical molecules that

absorb all hues but those we can see.

All hues are absorbed by black scales.

Animals, including butterflies, birds, and even people like me, do not naturally produce these pigments.

they are created using foods we consume.

Flamingos may have informed you of the following: They are gray when they are born, but the carotenoids in the crustaceans they eat help them turn pink.

Therefore, with regard to these hues, you are what you consume.

But blue is an exception.

Blue is "different," as you can see when you move the camera and see how the hue shifts.

Yes, it does.

It looks like a hologram.

This is due to the fact that these butterflies lack blue pigment.

They appear blue, but are they truly blue?

That is true!

Yes.

Butterfly, you're lying to me!

These butterflies are Blue Morphos, which are among the most beautiful of all butterflies.

They did create the butterfly emoji, after all.

The blue hue is not the result of a pigment.

When I discovered how this worked, it kind of blew my mind. The blue actually derives from the shape of the wing scale itself.

These tiny ridges are visible when we zoom in very closely on a blue wing scale.

If we cut the size in half and take a closer look, we can notice that those ridges resemble small Christmas trees.

trees.

The blue tint of the Morpho wings is caused by how the branches are arranged.

Some of the light that enters reflects off the top surface.

However, some light enters the layer and bounces off the base surface.

For the majority of light hues, waves reflecting from the top and bottom will be out of phase, cancelling each other out and obviating that light.

However, blue light has the ideal wavelength because the reflected light waves are in phase with one another.

that hue reaches our eyes.

There is only blue light that may leave this hall of mirrors.

In order to make the blue even more pure, a pigment at the base absorbs stray red and green light.

This is how the amazing iridescent blue is created.

the wing's tiny composition in and of itself.

All of this occurs as a result of the way light bends as it transitions from the atmosphere into another substance.

Therefore, the blue goes away if we fill all those tiny spaces with something other than oxygen, like alcohol.

Technically speaking, this "changes the index of refraction," but in everyday language that simply implies

The appropriate way to bend blue light has changed.

The filter for the tiny light is damaged.

up until the alcohol burns off.

The color then reappears.

But the rainforest is where these butterflies reside.

You would imagine that the moment they were wet, they would lose their color.

Watch this, then.

These wing scales are constructed from a substance that naturally repels water.

How about this feather from a blue jay?

We can see that the color is gone when we look through it.

no blue coloring.

Light-scattering tiny beads are placed evenly across each feather bristle.

Blue light is eliminated.

Instead of changing as we walk, the color is more consistent because these feather structures are messier than the highly organized ones we see in butterfly wings.

from every angle.

Feathers on a peacock?

Once more, the feather's shape—not its color—is what matters.

However, it is brighter here because the light-reflecting structures are more organized, like a crystal.

from a particular angle.

Even the hue of the monkey—WHOA, let's keep this PG—is produced by the

Thanks to skin structures rather than pigment, light waves can be added to and subtracted from.

Yes, even your blue eyes are a result of structures rather than colors.

The bluest living species outside of the water nearly solely create their hues using microscopic structures, and each one is somewhat different.

No known animal, including no birds, mammals, or reptiles, produces the blue pigment.

across its body.

In actuality, only one butterfly is known to have figured out how to create a real blue color.

In nature, the color blue is exceedingly uncommon.

However, there is only one exception that we are currently aware of, and these are over here named

an olivewing.

Their blue pigment is an evolution.

We don't know much about them, they're not very common, and I'm not aware of any.

a different blue pigment.

That butterfly is truly unique.

Why is practically all of the blue found in nature comprised of structures rather than pigments like everything else?

else?

Here is the best theory so far from the experts I spoke with who research color in response to the question: Birds and butterflies developed the capacity to fly at some point in the distant past.

a blue light to see.

They still didn't have the ability to paint their bodies that color, though.

But if they could, it would be similar to going from the original Beatles to Sgt. Pepper's.

It represented fresh chances for surviving and communicating.

It would have taken innovative chemistry to make some blue pigment out of thin air, and

It was impossible to simply encode that recipe into their DNA.

Evolution found it far simpler to gently alter the shape of their bodies.

at the most tiny scale, and instead produce blue using physics.

They employed engineering to resolve a biology issue.

What I admire about this is that for hundreds of years, curious individuals have been captivated by these colors.

years.

In the 1600s, Robert Hooke observed peacock feathers under one of the earliest microscopes and said, "These colors are only fantastical ones."

Scientists have been researching these blues ever since Isaac Newton noted something peculiar about them.

Not just because the science is fascinating, but also because it is lovely.

Regarding your curiosity, thanks for watching.