If you go to San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences has an impressive array of butterflies like this one to watch, enjoy, and collect on your arms, if you have awesome butterfly-attracting skills. You can find them pretty much all over the world, with the exceptions of the polar ice caps and arid deserts.But the coolest thing about them, and the one that makes almost everyone smile, is their color. Of course, you can find butterflies of any color of the rainbow, and many more than that: in crimson red, vibrant orange, sparkling gold, verdant green, iridescent blue, majestic purple, stylish black, the list goes on and on. :)
What's even cooler, for biologists and other interested minds, is why and how butterflies are so colorful. Evolutionarily, there are a multitude of reasons for striking colors: warning signals (bright colors often mean poison in nature), reproduction (color is attractive), temperature (dark colors, especially black, absorb heat), and camouflage (because not being eaten is a good survival strategy).
How do butterflies have such striking displays? Yes, most have ordinary pigments that make them a certain color or other, but some have structural color too. Lepidoptera (the order that includes butterflies and moths) means "scaled wings." These scales in turn have several layers off of which light reflects and interferes constructively, creating vivid, intense displays of a certain color, just because of the physical structure of the scales. Combine this with regular pigmentation, and you might have a blue iridescent scales and red pigmentation that cause you to see purple, blue, or red depending on the angle. So cool!!! :D And so we get the amazing displays we see all over the world.
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