Name: How the Morpho Butterfly Gets its Iridescent Color
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By studying the structural color of morpho butterflies, scientists are learning more about producing color without using pigments or paint.

How does nature produce a color that looks so unnatural?

How the Morpho Butterfly Gets its Iridescent Color

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By studying the structural color of morpho butterflies, scientists are learning more about producing color without using pigments or paint.

How does nature produce a color that looks so unnatural?

Nature

How the Morpho Butterfly Gets its Iridescent Color Published: January 12, 2022NARRATOR: It’s the morpho’s iridescent blue that intrigues Serge and other researchers the most. They want to understand how nature produces a color that looks so unnatural.SERGE BERTHIER: (Translated from French) What we see here is a close-up of this wing. We see that the blue comes from the background scales. And there are scales here that clog the joints on top of them. These are covering scales, and they are transparent. You can see through them.NARRATOR: The morpho uses a very peculiar way to generate color. It is a structural color, which is intrinsically different from a pigment color.JESSICA WARE: This is in contrast to regular pigment, pigment or, like, granules of pigments that are in the cells that give something of a yellow or of a red or green color.NARRATOR: The pigment color results from the partial reflection of daylight. When a pigment reflects a red color for instance, it means it has absorbed all the other colors.JESSICA WARE: But then there’s this other type of coloration that’s actually not caused by a pigment.NARRATOR: The structures that produce the color of the morpho are visible under the microscope. The wings show a regular pattern of raised surfaces, each one just one-ten-millionth of a meter, in size. It’s the size of these structures that produce the wing’s iridescence.JESSICA WARE: It’s caused by little bumps or “rugosities,” they call them, little deviations in the smoothness of the insect’s skin. And when light bounces off of that, our eyes perceive it as being, sort of, metallic, shiny or iridescent color.NARRATOR: The blue of the morpho’s wing is not due to pigmentation, but is generated by the structure of the wing, itself. When light strikes the wing at certain angles, its nanoscale features selects only the blue frequencies, which are reflected, resulting in an iridescent, metallic appearance.The surprising new insight into structural color has inspired researchers to control light and produce color, without chemicals or paint, in all sorts of other materials.

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How the Morpho Butterfly Gets its Iridescent Color

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