In others, there’s more of a spongy filling. In some species, the hairs contain clear layers like the morpho butterfly. Conversely, if you left them alone, they would never fade with time.īlackledge and Hsiung found that these almost all the blue tarantulas rely on structural colors too. If you were to crush the butterfly’s wings, their blue would disappear. These “structural colors” don’t rely on any pigment. The distance between the layers is such that the blue portions of the reflected beams reinforce each other to produce intense bursts of colour. As light hits these stacks, some of it reflects off each layer. For example, if you zoom into the brilliant blue scales of a morpho-butterfly wing, you’ll see tiny layers, stacked on top of each other, and equally spaced. Instead, most blue animals produce their colors using microscopic structures in their hairs, feathers, and scales. Partly, that’s because it’s surprisingly hard to make blue pigments. As NPR once put it, “ animals hacked the rainbow and got stumped on blue.” Sure, there are peacocks, blue jays, morpho butterflies, and regal tangs, but it’s a relatively small list compared to the swollen ranks of animals that are red, yellow, green, or brown. “No, I didn’t realize either, and I work on spiders.”īlackledge and his student Bor-Kai “Bill” Hsiung became interested in these unexpectedly colored spiders because blues are generally rare in the animal kingdom. “Everywhere you look in the tarantula family tree, you can find examples of blue,” says Todd Blackledge form the University of Akron. They are wonderfully named, too: the cobalt blue, the greenbottle blue, the Singapore blue, the Brazilian blue-green pinktoe, and plenty more. Although most of the 900 or so species of tarantulas are varying shades of black or brown, the majority of sub-groups have at least one blue species. Tarantulas: big, hairy, eight-legged, terrifying nightmares to some, adorable pets to others, blue.
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