[HN Gopher] Why blue animals are so rare
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Why blue animals are so rare
Author : qiakai
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-06-26 06:46 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.popsci.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.popsci.com)
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I was hoping to see something about velella, they have a
| shockingly brilliant blue.
|
| Weird that this website seems broken with an un dismissable popup
| on an iphone... not exactly a rare user device.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Just saw a Blue Jay last week.
|
| Chicory has nice blue flowers.
|
| Both are common in Chicagoland.
| cjensen wrote:
| There are many birds which are blue, but none of them have blue
| pigments [1]. It's a light-scattering effect.
|
| [1]
| https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2016/05/09/the...
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Important bit from the article:
|
| When white light strikes a blue feather, the keratin pattern
| causes red and yellow wavelengths to cancel each other out,
| while blue wavelengths of light reinforce and amplify one
| another and reflect back to the beholder's eye ...
| [D]ifferent shapes and sizes of these air pockets and keratin
| make different shades of blue."
| TinkersW wrote:
| All color is a light scattering effect.. this article makes
| zero sense to me..
| Myrmornis wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration seems
| like a decent explanation.
| User23 wrote:
| The best explanation I've read is Feynman's delightful
| _QED_.
| ortusdux wrote:
| "Unlike other bees, they prefer to live alone and not in busy
| hives. "
|
| IIRC, the vast majority of bees are solitary (90%?)
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Isn't it pretty common in marine animals?
|
| Lots of fish, dolphins, whales, etc. Or do they count as grey?
| cubefox wrote:
| Only cartoon fish are blue.
| gilleain wrote:
| Blue tang?
| snoutie wrote:
| Also think so. Plenty of fish are vibrant blue, the blue whale
| is grayish blue but still blue.
|
| Also plenty of birds are blue are they not?
|
| And I totally forgot about butterflies and other insects as
| well
| robofanatic wrote:
| While growing up in Asian country, butterfly pea plants with
| bright blue flowers were common.
| elevaet wrote:
| They make an amazing brilliant tea!
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| or was it ... the white jade bush?
| twism wrote:
| lots of blue birds
| twism wrote:
| "Blue birds, blue jays, cerulean warblers, peacocks: all blue
| birds, but none of them are actually blue"
|
| I stand corrected
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _none of them are actually blue_
|
| The article is just trying to be controversial or something;
| they _are actually_ blue. Structure colors are no less real
| than pigment colors. It 's not an optical illusion or some
| glitch in human perception, bounce white light off a bluejay
| and pass it through a prism, a strong blue line will be
| apparent. That blue light really is there, therefore they
| _really are_ blue.
|
| This notion that only colors coming from pigments are true
| colors is completely arbitrary nonsense.
| nullc wrote:
| They're "true colors" but they aren't the same. Pigment
| colors you can generally grind up and turn into a paint,
| structural colors not so much. Structural colors are also
| often angle and polarization sensitive, not so with pigment
| colors.
| cpfohl wrote:
| _My_ favorite blue animal:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Dendrobates+Tinctorius+Azureu...
| user070223 wrote:
| The Sinai agama turns blue during the breeding season to
| attract females and it might be why blue connote to ribaldry
| pvaldes wrote:
| Glaucus atlanticus
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Blue jays are a pretty easy example of structural coloration
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Someone told me that chefs use blue bandaids, because there is no
| blue food.
| nytesky wrote:
| Not just colored blue, but embedded metal to be detectable
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5dg5qs/til_t...
| Jun8 wrote:
| Here's a good answer from SE:
| https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/56476/why-are-so...
| (spoiler: we don't know). But the second answer speculates that
| blue light was the most available to the ancestors of current
| plants (due to properties of Earth's atmosphere) so they evolved
| to absorb it.
|
| Related question is why plants are green:
| https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/450/why-do-plant...
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| The linked
| post--<https://set.adelaide.edu.au/news/list/2019/08/20/why-is-
| the-...>--is much better about answering the question, rather
| than listing some examples.
|
| Basically:
|
| - Blue is rare in plants since it means leaving high energy
| behind.
|
| - Many animals are a color because of there food, and see above.
|
| - Thus, any blue is trickier, and usually done via scattering and
| mixing rather than a pigment. "The only exception in nature is
| the obrina olivewing butterfly, which is the only known animal to
| produce a true blue pigment."
| pvaldes wrote:
| > "The only exception in nature is the obrina olivewing
| butterfly, which is the only known animal to produce a true
| blue pigment."
|
| That is a bold claim, but a false one. A few butterfly species
| share that pigment. Mussels also have other blue pigments based
| in carothenes that don't depend on iridiscence.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Also, there is a snail that was revered millennia ago for
| some blue ink that could be extracted from it. Several
| religions, notably Judaism among them because it is still
| around today, attach significance to this difficult-to-obtain
| colour.
| lores wrote:
| That's the dye from Hexaplex Trunculus, but it's more of a
| bluish purple than a true blue. There seems to be modern
| ways to turn it into a true blue, but whether the ancients
| had an unknown method is debated and unproven. It's worth
| noting that colour names in ancient times were a lot more
| blurry than now (the famous sea the colour of wine of
| Homer), and blue is still one of the most blurry.
| jcynix wrote:
| The article mentions plants too. But I can list a number of blue
| plants in my vicinity (OK, sometimes a touch of purple too) or
| even in the garden:
|
| [Centaurea cyanus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurea_cyanus
| ?wprov=sfla1)
|
| [Digitalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalis?wprov=sfla1)
|
| [Centaurea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurea?wprov=sfla1)
|
| [Scabiosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scabiosa?wprov=sfla1)
|
| [Phacelia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phacelia?wprov=sfla1)
|
| and last but not least many varieties of
| [Campanula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campanula?wprov=sfla1)
| spullara wrote:
| 3 of those I would call purple rather than blue.
| jcynix wrote:
| I agree, but purple seems to be a similarly rare color IMO.
|
| I could offer
|
| [Chicory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicory?wprov=sfla1),
| [Myosotis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myosotis?wprov=sfla1
| ) and
| [Borage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borage?wprov=sfla1)
|
| as replacements ...
| sdeframond wrote:
| Some _flowers_ are blue indeed.
|
| They are made to stand out, so it is like they are a purposeful
| exception to the rule
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| Blue flowers are extremely common because pollinators are
| attracted to them.
|
| I am pretty sure that they were referring to the plant itself
| being blue (like leaves and stems), not the flowers.
| datameta wrote:
| Fascinating article. But early on I had one question - why is a
| blue that is made by sunlight hitting hair nanostructures
| considered a "simulation" thereby differentiating it from color
| made through sunlight interaction with biochemistry of surfaces
| and subsurfaces?
|
| To draw that out further, by the same logic we might consider
| properties of human-made metamaterials also simulations?
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I believe all of the colors of butterfly wings, and of all
| feathered animals are produced in the same way? I've always
| assumed that "simulation" has a local definition in the study
| of biological color reproduction, where light interactions with
| ultra fine structure at the atomic level is the default, or
| perhaps maybe on the time scale of evolution, the oldest means
| of reproducing color.
|
| Contrast this witb a much coarser structural phenomenon
| manifesting at a level much closer to macroscopic is thus
| considered to be a "cheaper" simulation of that effect, in
| order to derive its same selective benefits but with less of a
| radical genetic shift required for the production of the right
| proteins etc.
| jcynix wrote:
| As for animals, they need to avoid predators. I'd say that blue
| isn't the best color to hide in most areas. So selection should
| favor other colors, unless the color is used as a warning, e.g.
| to signal a poisonous creature.
| barrell wrote:
| Also IIRC (and cursory searches seem to agree) blue is the most
| common/prominent color other animals see
| esafak wrote:
| On a related note, blue LEDs are also the most rare, for
| engineering reasons, and their production led to a Nobel Prize:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2014/press-release...
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Video about the history of blue LEDs by veritasium:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
| knodi123 wrote:
| "...once Nakamura succeeded in creating a commercially viable
| prototype, 3 orders of magnitude (1000 times) brighter than
| previously successful blue LEDs, Nichia pursued developing the
| marketable product. The company's gross receipt surged from
| just over Y=20 billion ([?]US$200 million) in 1993 to Y=80
| billion ([?]US$800 million) by 2001, 60 percent of which was
| accounted for by sales of blue LED products."
|
| And IIRC, in return for that he got a $180 bonus from his
| employer, and a bit later, a Nobel prize.
| zepearl wrote:
| My favourite flower, which I have just discovered: Phacelia
| (blue/violet color) (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phacelia_tanacetifolia )
|
| 1) Seeds easy to find in most stores.
|
| 2) Each strand has an array of flowers which bloom serially =>
| quite long blooming timespan (and damage by bad weather is
| limited if it affected only the flowers).
|
| 3) Bumblebees absolutely love them (this year I put exclusively
| Phacelia seeds into 1 of my 2 big pots on the balcony, with max
| seed density, and often there were up to 10 bumblebees at once
| per pot checking them), and I absolutely love bumblebees (they
| look clumsy, they're kind of funny + they absolutely ignore me,
| respectively when they happen to fly in my direction and they
| notice me they take a turn as soon as their flight envelope
| allows them to)
|
| 4) This might be just random or caused by some other factor like
| weather/neighbours/whatever, anyway:
|
| since I planted this year Phacelia flowers and the bumblebees
| started coming I have hardly seen any wasps nor especially
| hornets (I've seen twice a hornet flying by, but it took a large
| curve from my balcony - during the same timespan at the other
| sides of my flat I noticed four times hornets investigating in
| front of the windows). Last year (without Phacelia/bumblebees) I
| had a lot more problems with wasps&hornets => maybe wasps &
| hornets noticed the bumblebees and thought "ah, already
| taken/busy!" and therefore marked my balcony as a no-go zone?
|
| EDIT:
|
| I recommend the app "PlantNet" for Android (
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=829216199869931637... )
| & iOS ( https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/plantnet/id600547573 ):
| take a picture of your plant/flower and you get the name.
| crmd wrote:
| >Organisms that appear blue must absorb very small amounts of
| energy, while reflecting high-energy blue light. Since
| penetrating the molecules that are capable of absorbing this
| energy is a complex process, the color blue is less common than
| other colors in the natural world.
|
| I'm not a biologist, but these sentences immediately reminded me
| of reading articles about my company/technology after press
| briefings and feeling like they butchered a basic concept (or
| more correctly, I failed to explain it in an accessible way).
| Like, the sentences are grammatically correct but don't make
| technical sense.
| elcritch wrote:
| You're not wrong. It appears to be a very garbled technical
| explanation. Mainly that organisms need to absorb low
| frequency/energy light while reflecting higher frequency/energy
| light. I'm guessing that chemically that's harder to do.
| user070223 wrote:
| Reminder to everyone:
|
| Plants are green(On earth) because they reflect the green color
| (which the sun spectrum is strongest) because they have probably
| adapted to better regulate different lightning condition during
| the day, for this they use two different pigments (chlorophyll
| a(blue), chlorophyll b(red); or other pairs)
| setopt wrote:
| One of the best ways to improve crop yields via genetic
| engineering might be to create black plants.
| al_borland wrote:
| If that was optimal, I would expect it would be the standard
| by now. Not through genetic engineer, but through basic
| evolution over millions of years.
| ianferrel wrote:
| Evolution is optimizing for survival, not crop yield.
| buzzm wrote:
| Exactly; see pollinators comment above. Although as tech
| progresses... perhaps we can make black plants as
| attractive to genetically modified pollinators. Do I
| sense a slippery slope here?
| bawolff wrote:
| Having more energy available (all things being equal
| which they aren't) is advantous to both survival and crop
| yields.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| That will only be the case if light absorbence is the
| primary limiting factor for the plant. If something else is
| a bigger limiting factor (e.g., nutrients, pests, water,
| temperature, pollinators, and so on), then a more darkly
| colored plant will not be meaningfully more likely to
| survive and reproduce than its lightly colored neighbors.
|
| Outside of human-directed breeding, we typically only see
| darkly colored plants in locations with low light and with
| few other evolutionary pressures: deep understory tropical
| plants, for example.
|
| Meanwhile, in locations with high light and other
| evolutionary pressures, plants can sometimes evolve to be
| quite pale. For example, desert succulents are often very
| light colors because they need to deflect light to keep
| cool and preserve water.
| User23 wrote:
| There are also no blue pigments in any plant. The various blueish
| flowers use other tricks to reflect blue light.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| To be fair, indigo is a blue pigment and it is present in many
| different plant species. (Mind you, it does not make the plant
| blue; it only becomes blue after exposure to oxygen.)
| karaterobot wrote:
| Hmm, interesting. I thought it was like with popsicles, how the
| blue ones get eaten first.
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