Someone told me that chefs use blue bandaids, because there is no blue food.
Not just colored blue, but embedded metal to be detectable
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5dg5qs/til_t...
Why blue animals are so rare
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#32Just saw a Blue Jay last week. Chicory has nice blue flowers. Both are common in Chicagoland.
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...
All color is a light scattering effect.. this article makes zero sense to me..
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#33The 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=…
3 of those I would call purple rather than blue.
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
All color is a light scattering effect.. this article makes zero sense to me..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration seems like a decent explanation.
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#35My favorite blue animal: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Dendrobates+Tinctorius+Azureu...
The Sinai agama turns blue during the breeding season to attract females and it might be why blue connote to ribaldry
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Blue birds, blue jays, cerulean warblers, peacocks: all blue birds, but none of them are actually blue" I stand corrected
> 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 o…
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.
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#37>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.
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#38Reminder 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)
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#39The 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 excepti…
> "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.
Re: Why blue animals are so rare
#40>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 feel…
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.