![]() But if you structure it the right way, if you spread it out really thin to form the shell of a bubble, you get those shimmering rainbow colors around the edges. If you just look at a little bit of soap, it's going to be colorless. ![]() "A good analogy would be like a soap bubble. "We call these iridescent colors 'structural colors' because they depend on the structural dimensions," says co-author Matthew Shawkey of Belgium's University of Ghent. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes can influence the way light bounces off them, producing bright colors. But pigment isn't the only way to get color. We have melanosomes too - they produce the dark melanin pigment that colors our hair and skin. The "leaves," called feather barbules, are made up of cells that contain pigment-producing organelles called melanosomes. They examined the feathers of 35 species of hummingbirds with transmission electron microscopes and compared them with the feathers of other brightly-colored birds, like green-headed mallard ducks, to look for differences in their make-up.Īll birds' feathers are made of keratin, the same material as our hair and nails, and they're structured like tiny trees, with parts resembling a trunk, branches, and leaves. To answer these questions, Eliason and his international team of colleagues conducted the largest-ever optical study of hummingbird feathers. Why are hummingbirds so colorful? Is it the environment, is it sexual selection? Or is it something about the internal mechanisms, the physics and the way colors are produced?" ![]() "You can look out your window and see drab brown birds, and then you have this glittering gem flutter to your hummingbird feeder. "The big question that keeps me up at night is, why are some groups of birds more colorful than others?" says Chad Eliason, the paper's first author and a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago. ![]()
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