![]() But the structural color, created as the snakes' scales scatter light, is practically immortal. When those snakes die, they turn from green to blue, because the yellow pigments fade. ![]() They've evolved a yellow pigment and a blue structural color, and the two combined produce a green effect." Many green snakes and frogs, says Parker, "actually are not green at all. So, some land animals dabble in a little color mixing. That's unfortunate if you want to lurk on a green, leafy planet. "Green is a pigment that animals have really had a problem making," says Parker. Having optical structures like these to make yourself blue also solves a different color challenge: going green. #ColorFacts: A Weird Little Lesson In Rainbow Order hide caption toggle caption Even some of the most brilliantly blue things in nature - a peacock feather, or a blue eye, for example - don't contain a single speck of blue pigment. In fact, of all Earth's inhabitants with backbones, not one is known to harbor blue pigment. "Blue is fascinating because the vast majority of animals are incapable of making it with pigments," Prum says. But other colors - blue especially - are surprisingly tough for a bird's body to create via dietary pigments, says Yale ornithologist Rick Prum. Browns and grays appear frequently among birds, for example, and they can make yellow and red from pigments they get from their food. It sounds simple.īut color isn't that straightforward, as one tanning pill company found out the hard way in the 1980s: The pale people in the company's experiment stayed mostly pale, but developed red palms and red poop.Īnd, Hallager points out, "you can't feed flamingos blueberries and turn them blue."Īnimals, it turns out, have a lot of those sorts of color limitations. It takes months before baby flamingos stockpile enough carotenoids to begin looking pink.Įat pink, become pink. Robins and cardinals get carotenoids from berries, and koi turn orange from munching on algae. Flamingos pick them up from pigment-rich shrimp, crabs and algae. Different carotenoids make carrots orange and beets red, and are responsible for the range of colors in autumn leaves. The adults are pink only because they steal pigments called carotenoids from the foods they eat.Ĭarotenoids, a class of natural pigments, are abundant in plants, where they play a role in photosynthesis. Baby flamingos are knobby-kneed, fluffy and awkward. But they have to have evolved the right mechanisms to do so. Pigments are like a color currency - many animals can take them from plants, digest them or modify them, and eventually display a version of the pigment in their outer layer. Chlorophyll is a chemical that helps plants trap light for photosynthesis it also makes them look green. Many pigments are useful in other ways - granules of melanin, for example, help keep bird feathers strong, and help protect human skin from the sun. ![]() Millions of species and a few mass extinctions later, creatures with fins, fur and feathers have developed ways to make every color in the Pantone chart.Ī lot of the colors in plants and animals come from pigments, colored chemicals that absorb certain wavelengths of light.
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