The Portuges Man-of-war is a nasty creature
Posted on 06/21/2021 8:29:35 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet macaws, clown fish, toucans, blue-ringed octopuses, and so many more: The animal kingdom has countless denizens with extraordinarily colorful beauty. But in many cases, scientists know much more about how the animals use their colors than about how they make them. New work continues to reveal those secrets, which often depend on the fantastically precise self-assembly of minuscule features in and on the feathers, scales, hair, and skin—a fact that makes the answers intensely interesting to soft-matter physicists and engineers in the photonics industry.
...The blue end of the spectrum, however, represents a different challenge because few blue pigments are available to eat in nature. Yet blue jays, neon tetras, poison dart frogs, and many other animals found a solution that doesn’t rely on pigments, evolving optical tricks to make blues (and some greens) a different way. They make what are called “structural colors.”
...The diffracted light waves interact with one another; depending on the thickness of each layer and the wavelength of the light, the waves either add up or cancel out. By getting the thickness of the layers just right (100 nanometers), the limpet makes all the wavelengths except blue ones cancel one another out.
At high magnification, the colored barbs (filaments) of feathers have a foamy structure, with small, uniform spheres of air suspended in beta-keratin protein. The light scattering off each air bubble interacts with the light bouncing off neighboring bubbles. “And because they are just the right size to do this, they make a blue color, or a turquoise color, or an ultraviolet color,”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Being blue wasn’t a goal...it was a consequence.
The Color Blue in the Ancient World
Surprisingly, the word blue is simply missing from nearly all other ancient languages. There is no distinct word for the color in Chinese, Hebrew, or Sanskrit. Rather, the color that we call blue is usually grouped in with other colors, like green.
Egyptians, however, did have a distinct word for the color blue, and not surprisingly, they were one of the only ancient peoples who had created blue dye from very early on in their history.In the history of nearly all languages, the word for blue emerged much later than other colors. Through careful examination of ancient texts, linguists have discovered that almost all languages followed a fairly standard timeline of when names for distinct colors were introduced — black and white are the most ancient colors, followed by red.
https://greekreporter.com/2021/01/01/did-the-ancient-greeks-see-blue-like-we-do/
—” 875 million generations for the features seen now to have evolved.”
Far beyond any ciphering that I might understand, guessing that it is not a linear path.
Many dead ends on the evolutionary map.
Any number of generations do not equal an advance, some will be retrograde, and some no change...
And the roving gangs of biologists searching for Darwin statues to destroy and avenge the besmerched pepper moth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria
Not as interesting as the Blur Flugates... but fun
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