structural color
1. Pigment granules create colors: damselflies
"The brilliant metallic colours of many Odonata, especially damselflies, derive from the structural arrangement of pigment granules. Pigment in the wings of such species as Agrion virgo is similarly distorted by light to produce resplendent shifti...
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Email2. Carotenoids create yellow color: American goldfinch
"The coloration of feathers can be caused by carotenoids (usually producing yellow, orange and red), melanins (usually producing brown, black and grey), other pigments (such as found in some parrot feathers) or by nano-scale reflective tissues (us...
3. Eyes improve foraging abilities: aye-aye
"While color vision perception is thought to be adaptively correlated with foraging efficiency for diurnal mammals, those that forage exclusively at night may not need color vision nor have the capacity for it. Indeed, although the basic condition...
4. Hairs create colors: weevils
"Other insects, such as weevils, owe their magnificent sky blue or metallic green colours to a clothing of fine scaly hairs." (Wootton 1984:140)
5. Layers create multihued appearance: beetle
"Gymnopleurus virens beetles have shells that change from red in the centre to green around the edges or from green to blue…the shells are made of thousands of ultrathin layers, with each successive layer slightly twisted in relation to the...
6. Wood self-assembles: trees
A better understanding of how the cell wall of wood forms will someday help wood scientists assemble wood-like composites without using trees. The current hypothesis is that the cell wall of wood does not require biochemistry to form, but self-ass...
7. Wing scales diffract and scatter light: Morpho butterflies
"Brilliant iridescent colouring in male butterflies enables long-range conspecific communication and it has long been accepted that microstructures, rather than pigments, are responsible for this coloration. Few studies, however, explicitly relate...
8. Spicules are rigid structural materials: sponges
"There are yet other rigid materials, what Wainwright et al. (1976) refer to as 'stony materials' and Vincent (1990) calls 'biological ceramics.' These are distinguished by being very heavily mineralized, with more mineral (some inorganic salt) th...
9. Body surfaces reflect light to create colors: jewel beetles
"The Buprestid beetles…as well as many ground-beetles (Carabidae), are different again in that the body surface producing the colour is hardened and quite permanent and sculptured into subtly varying shapes that reflect light at different w...
10. Morphotex structural colored fibers
Morpho butterflies remain a vibrant blue throughout their lives, without ever needing a coat of paint to spruce up a dull finish. The scales on their wings are made of many layers of proteins that refract light in different ways, and the color we ...
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