Showing 8 posts tagged butterflies
The Blue Morpho Butterfly is a beautiful brown — yes, brown — butterfly. The microscopic scales on this rainforest butterfly manipulate light, reflecting back an intense blue light that makes them appear blue.
The video above zooms in on the scales. The video below shows the Blue Morpho in action at the Selvatura Butterfly Garden in Costa Rica:
Professor Brian Cox explains how Monarch Butterflies navigate by “monitoring the position of the sun, and compensating for its location in the sky using their internal timekeeping mechanism… even when it’s cloudy.” This is an episode 5 preview of the BBC’s Wonders of Life. Full screen this.
How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation:
…we human beings, who have been trying to make things for only the blink of an evolutionary eye, have a lot to learn from the long processes of natural selection, whether it’s how to make a wing more aerodynamic or a city more resilient or an electronic display more vibrant… one of the most often-cited examples is Velcro, which the Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral patented in 1955 after studying how burs stuck to his clothes…
More than a decade ago, an MIT grad named Mark Miles was dabbling in the field of micro-electromechanical and materials processing. As he paged through a science magazine, he was stopped by an article on how butterflies generate color in their wings. The brilliant iridescent blue of the various Morpho species, for example, comes not from pigment, but from “structural color.” Those wings harbor a nanoscale assemblage of shingled plates, whose shape and distance from one another are arranged in a precise pattern that disrupts reflective light wavelengths to produce the brilliant blue. To create that same blue out of pigment would require much more energy—energy better used for flying, feeding and reproducing.
Miles wondered if this capability could be exploited in some way. Where else might you want incredibly vivid color in a thin package?
From Smithsonian Mag.
The Hidden Beauty of Pollination. You’ve seen this video before. It was a part of Louie Schwartzberg’s TED Talk in 2011, but frankly, it’s so amazing that it’s worth watching and posting again on its own!
This video was shown at the TED conference in 2011, with scenes from “Wings of Life,” a film about the threat to essential pollinators that produce over a third of the food we eat. The seductive love dance between flowers and pollinators sustains the fabric of life and is the mystical keystone event where the animal and plant worlds intersect that make the world go round.
via Boing Boing.
Handling wild Silver-Spotted Skippers (Epargyreus clarus). Footage of technique and them playing games, landing on my head, etc.
Another from YouTube user Precarious333’s treasure trove of insect videos.
