Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature?
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Published 2018-01-09
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Among living things, the color blue is oddly rare. Blue rocks, blue sky, blue water, sure. But blue animals? They are few and far between. And the ones that do make blue? They make it in some very strange and special ways compared to other colors. In this video, we'll look at some very cool butterflies to help us learn how living things make blue, and why this beautiful hue is so rare in nature.
SPECIAL THANKS:
Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History
Bob Robbins, Ph.D. - Curator of Lepidoptera
Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla - Microscope Educator
Richard Prum, Ph.D. - Yale University
Vinothan Manoharan, Ph.D. - Harvard University
SOURCES:
Bagnara, J. T., Fernandez, P. J., & Fujii, R. (2007). On the blue coloration of vertebrates. Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research, 20(1), 14-26.
Cuthill, I. C., Allen, W. L., Arbuckle, K., Caspers, B., Chaplin, G., Hauber, M. E., ... & Mappes, J. (2017). The biology of color. Science, 357(6350), eaan0221.
Kinoshita, S., Yoshioka, S., & Miyazaki, J. (2008). Physics of structural colors. Reports on Progress in Physics, 71(7), 076401.
Kinoshita, S. (2008). Structural colors in the realm of nature. World Scientific.
Prum, R. O., Quinn, T., & Torres, R. H. (2006). Anatomically diverse butterfly scales all produce structural colours by coherent scattering. Journal of Experimental Biology, 209(4), 748-765.
Vukusic, P., & Sambles, J. R. (2003). Photonic structures in biology. Nature, 424(6950), 852-855.
Vukusic, P., Sambles, J. R., Lawrence, C. R., & Wootton, R. J. (1999). Quantified interference and diffraction in single Morpho butterfly scales. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 266(1427), 1403-1411.
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All Comments (21)
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You never notice how rare blue is, until you do, and then you (don't) see it *everywhere*. Leave a comment and let me know what you thought of this week's video! And commence the blue-pun party
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"Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature?" The Sky: am I a joke to you?
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He missed the perfect chance to say "blue-tiful"
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Fun fact: Homer did not mention the color blue once in his famous works ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’. Still, the color of the sea or of the sky was described multiple times. As an Ancient Greek student: Homer used Ancient Greek terms like ‘dark red’, ‘rich purple’ or ‘light green’. Blue did in Ancient Greek not classify as a color worth creating its own, specific term for.
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Nature: "Animals can't be blue!" Chameleon: "Allow me to introduce myself..."
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This blue my mind
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Why is blue rare in nature? Purple: hold my beer
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Ok here's some hypotheses for you: 1. Only primary colors can be derived from structures 2. Using every structure we know of could be combined to construct a tubing with the highest possible light absorption that would still let a specific frequency (eg blue lasers) through. 3. The blue structure in a butterfly wing originally evolved as a way to construct a more matter-efficient functional butterfly wing and blue was just a phenotypical expression of circumstance.
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I remember watching this 6 years ago, and I still remember this, awesome video.
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“Butterflies are awesome” Carries a box of butterfly corpses
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Humans: Blue is rare in nature Aliens: That planet is totally Blue
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What a nice video. Interesting subject, well-founded, nice narration, nice edition, nice illustrations, nice animation! 👏 People that watch have no idea of how much work is required to create such a nice product like this. Nice job, guys!
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nature is miraculous. The way as I see it, for human being it is impossible to know all about nature, but nothing can deter me from being interested in nature
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Meanwhile in a parallel universe: A butterfly has a boxes of human corpses and says "Humans are Awesome!"
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Water- Blue but not really Butterfly-Blue but not really Water=Butterfly
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Thanks so much for this video! I've often wondered whether blue truly existed very much in nature. Looks like it does, but it's rare. I'm also curious about blue in plants. Most of the blue flowers that I know of were engineered to be so.
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Wonderful! Subscribed after I saw my first video from this channel. Most YT content is so boring, but not if I’m learning new things!
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Blue is my favorite color and it's not even real on animals.
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Loved this! What about fish scales and tails? I’m so curious now! I have a pair of German-Blue Rams (freshwater tropical fish), and a tank of blue-gold double swordtail guppies (I didn’t invent these names lol sorry!). There are some blue fish in nature, but now I’m wondering if they’re really blue! 🤯
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blue is my favorite color, and my love for it got deeper when i watched this videom on the other hand, i've not seen butterflies in a while. they were my favorite insects since i was a child... i wonder where they go.
