What is it about?
A team of researchers at The University of Akron and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego discovered that many species of tarantulas have independently evolved the ability to make these blue colors using nanostructures in their exoskeletons, rather than pigments.
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Why is it important?
Several reasons exist in other species. For example, male butterflies and birds also use nanostructures to appear vibrantly colored, attracting the attention of females during courtship, and different species range from deep blues to greens depending on female preferences. “However, tarantulas don’t see well, so their blue colors could not have evolved for courtship”. Tarantulas also produce a strikingly similar shade of blue across different species. “Even more remarkably, different types of nanostructures all evolved to produce the same ‘blue’ across distant branches of the tarantula family tree. In other words, natural selection has led to convergent evolution”.
Perspectives
While the researchers still don’t understand the benefits tarantulas receive from being blue, they are now investigating how to reproduce the tarantula nanostructures, making color in the laboratory. Because tarantulas’ blues are not iridescent, meaning the color doesn’t change when viewed from different angles, these reproductions could be very useful. “They could be used as pigment replacements in materials such as plastics, metal, textiles and paper, and for producing color for wide-angle viewing systems in phones, televisions and other optical devices”.
Dr Bor-Kai Hsiung
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Blue reflectance in tarantulas is evolutionarily conserved despite nanostructural diversity, Science Advances, November 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science,
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500709.
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