Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Creature Feature: The Physics of Animal Color

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

An episode of Creature Feature where Daniel and Katie talk about the physics of how animals look so brilliant, and how some people can see in the UV.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm your host of Mini Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, we're talking about all the beautiful colors in nature. blues and greens and reds and browns and purples and ultraviolet. There are so many colors in the animal kingdom and in the natural world, but it is really interesting how these colors are actually produced, and it's not always straightforward. And in fact, what we see with our human eyeballs

may not be what other animals see with their incredible eyeballs. Discover this and more as we answer the eight, old question, is there a berry that's so incredibly blue? It's just going to trick you into doing its dirty work? Joining me today is friend of the podcast, who I have been on his podcast quite a bit, host of the amazing physics podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, and particle physicist Daniel Whiteson. Welcome. Hello, hello. Very glad to be here, although I can't boast to be host to any parasites as far as I know. As far as you know, although you probably have some Demodex parasites on your eyelashes, as do most people. I contain multitudes, I suppose. Little societies

living on our eyelashes. Is there anything cuter than that? Well, me and my little societies are very excited to be here to talk to you about colors in the natural world. Yes. So I thought this would be right up your alley because we are talking about the physics of colors in nature. Because, you know, when you see a color, it feels pretty straightforward. That thing is just somehow painted that color. But it is actually much more complex how it works in nature. Things aren't just kind of painted with a paintbrush. And in fact, there are some incredible ways that colors present themselves, and incredible ways that animals will perceive these colors, like an entirely hidden secret world that we never really knew about until

researchers started investigating it. So first, we will go over how color exists in living organisms. So this is in animals, in plants, even fungi. There are a few ways that color, occurs. So when you think of color in the natural kingdom, Daniel, what do you think of? Like, what is sort of the first thing that comes to mind? I think of the incredible colors of flowers and the incredible colors of insects and birds. And I wonder why they're there and whether those animals see them the same way we do. You know, I wonder why we live in a world that we find beautiful, if we could have evolved in a world that we found like boring and drab, or if we just sort of naturally react to any world we discover with amazement and satisfaction.

Yeah, this is what's so interesting to me, because I think one tempting thing to think is that humans are the only animals capable of appreciating beauty and color in the world that were the only ones who, you know, really enjoy the sight of a, flower, but as we'll talk about, that may not really be true. One of the things that we may share with many other animals is their dependence on color, their appreciation for it, and how that beauty of the world serves a very important function for organism survival. So there are two main types of color in the animal kingdom. Pigments and structural coloration. So pigments, pigmentation is pretty straightforward and probably what you think of when

you think of something that has some color to it. So pigments are substances produced by cells that will absorb certain wavelengths of light. The light that is not absorbed is reflected back to your eyes. So that's how you see something that is pigmented, how you see that color. So pigments can be found in nearly every organism from flowers to birds to fish to mammals to fungi. It's everywhere in the animal kingdom. And that is typically what gives things their color. You say that simplistic, but actually, aren't there several fascinating levels of science there? I mean, as the physicist here, it amazes me to think about like the microscopic process that happens when your eyes sees red.

I remember as a kid thinking about like, what is red about that light? Is the light itself red? Is it happening in my head that makes me feel red? Does somebody else see red the same way? There's a whole lot of really fascinating questions there. Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting, too, to think about how something that is a certain color, like something that is red, it's actually that is rejecting the red wavelength.

That is the one color that. is not there is red because that red is reflecting back at you and that's why you see it as red but it's actually absorbing the other wavelengths of light so like in a strange kind of way the only color that it isn't isn't part of it is the color that you see yeah and I think for a long time people didn't know how vision worked they didn't understand whether light was being bounced off of things and hitting your eye and for a long time people were wondering if your eyeball actually shot out rays, which then bounced off something like sampling it and came back to your eye.

You know, back before we understood how light worked, people had to think about all sorts of crazy ideas. But I think it's really cool to think about the actual photons. Like if a photon hits your eye and you see it as blue or another one hits your eye and you see it as red, you know, what's the actual difference in the photons? As you said, it's the wavelength. It's how fast they wiggle. They all travel the same speed, but they have different speeds at which they wiggle.

so they have different wavelengths. But you know, there's an infinite spectrum of wavelengths, like a photon can have any wavelength of light. That just changes how much energy it has. But how you see it, whether it's blue or red or green, that just is how your brain is interpreting it inside your head. Yeah, that's really interesting to me because there really is, when you think about it,

there aren't distinct colors, right? There aren't just a certain number of distinct colors. there is likely sort of an infinite gradient of colorations, but we can only maybe distinguish a small fraction of those colors that we see because of the limitations of our eyeballs, which even though I'm saying limitations, our eyeballs are one of the most incredibly complex organ in our bodies, and it's really interesting.

It is really fascinating, and I remember as a kid wondering if colors are just in my head, if my mind is sort of painting red inside my mind's eye when that photon hits, could my mind come up with a new color? Could I invent some new color that wasn't inspired by something I saw? It wasn't like, you know, the color of a bee's butt or something. But I never managed to do it. Maybe I'm just not creative enough. I tried to do that too. I tried to think of a new color and I never really could. But we will, you know, later, I'm so excited to talk about this because we will talk about some people who may actually be able to see color that doesn't really exist for

other people. And yes, in short, basically all of our experience, right, from touch to taste to color, is happening inside of our brain. So it is an interpretation of these photons that wiggle at a certain wavelength and then they hit the back of our eye and then they hit these photoreceptor cells and will sort of, if you think about it, it kind of like tickle certain cells, like certain wavelengths are able to create sort of a domino effect for certain cells. And then that will be sent to the brain via a bundle of nerves. And then that is what creates the color. And it's just, it's like the most intricate Rub Goldberg device at work there every time you see any kind of color. And it's so helpful, right? Imagine if you

couldn't see color in the world, there'd be so much information out there about the universe that you would just be missing. Yeah. And as you said earlier, there's lots of different wavelengths of light that we don't see, which means there's a huge amount of information about the universe that's out there that we are just blind to. That's exactly right. And, yeah, as we'll talk about really soon, there are animals that can actually tap into

that secret universe of colors that we can only kind of conceive of. Yeah, so even though pigments are relatively straightforward, as we've talked about, It's still an extremely complex, fascinating process that happens with those. So, yes, they are essentially their substances produced by cells that will absorb wavelengths, and the wavelengths that they do not absorb, they reflect back out, and those hit our eye, and we see that color. But there's a second type of coloration in the animal world, in the natural world, called structural coloration.

So these are microscopic structures that instead of absorbing light, they will bend, refract, or reflect light, causing certain wavelengths to separate and hit the eye. So they scatter light rather than absorbing certain wavelengths. This is super cool also because it's physics at work again, right? If you're familiar with a prism, then you know that when white light hits it, white light being a mixture of many different colors, that the different parts of that white light bend at different angles because of their different frequencies. This is something like that

Newton demonstrated hundreds of years ago. So it's pretty awesome that the natural world is like scattering tiny prisms all over surfaces to change its color. That's amazing. How do they do that sort of microscopically? Are they actually like little prisms? Yeah, yeah, they are. I mean, think the pink Floyd logo with that. It's pink Floyd, right? You're going to ask the physicist for your pop science. Sorry, you're going to ask the physicist for your pop culture references. So, you know, that prism will scatter light. And that is exactly right.

They basically have these tiny prisms. So these are common in things like bird feathers or butterfly scales on their wings. So have you ever seen like a morpho butterfly? I have no idea what that is. It's this beautiful butterfly that has this iridescent, bright, bright blue coloration on its wings. And it's such a bright blue, it looks like it's shimmering. And it makes me think that these butterflies are maybe where people got the idea of things like fairies or magic, because it looks absurdly magical.

So I'm a little confused about how these structural things work. Like, doesn't the color of it then depend on the angle of it? Like, is that why it's shimmering because if it turns a little bit, the prisms are shooting red light into your eye instead of yellow light or blue light? Is that how it works? Yeah, that's right. So some of these structures are such that they will result in something like a predominantly blue wavelength because they are structured that they basically amplify the blue wavelength through these tiny prisms. but there are some of these prisms that will result in an entire rainbow and that color will shift depending on the angle of your eye, the angle at which you look at this organism. So there are actually snakes that have these iridescent colors in their scales that they look like a rainbow because they are essentially these tiny prisms that are scattering light and you'll

see the entire gradient through their scales and it's quite beautiful. You can actually see that somewhat even with the common crow where their feathers, these microstructures on their feathers will basically scatter the light such that you can see all of these different hues beyond just the black of their feathers. You can see these other hues of light. if you view them at a certain angle. That's right. Crows are awesome. They don't get enough love, I think, from bird enthusiasts

and from the population in general. They're super smart and they're not just black exactly. They're like shimmering black. But what's the sort of history of that? Like have these different mechanisms for color, pigmentation and structural? Did they split off evolutionarily at some point? Are they totally different ways to get color?

Are they related to each other? I would say that they are somewhat interwoven. because you can have an animal that has both pigmentation and structural coloration. So I think they basically work together. So while some animals may not have structural coloration too much or maybe rely mostly on structural coloration instead of pigmentation, you'll have many animals that will actually have both. A lot of birds, a lot of reptiles will have both structural coloration

as well as pigmentation. In humans, in humans, we mostly rely on pigmentation in terms of the coloration for our skin and for our eyes and hair. But yeah, in a lot of other animals, you'll have this really cool confluence of both of these. And I would say that they probably, I think that they would probably evolve in the pretty interleaved way

because of, there are some really interesting ways you can see this. So in terms of the production of pigmentation, in humans, it is melanin produced by our melanocytes. And so melanocytes are a type of cell that produce the color in our skin, in our hair, in our eyes. But not all animals actually use melanocytes. they use chromatophores. So chromatophores are the pigment-producing cells of things like cephalopods. So those are octopus, squid, cuttlefish. Cromatophores are also present in reptiles, fish, amphibians, and more. And chromatophores have some really interesting properties, and that is that they can use both pigment and structural coloration, and in some of these animals, they can actually be dynamic.

So most chromatophores just simply produce a pigment and create color that way, but some chromatophores will use structural coloration to produce hues by scattering light that creates a very, very vibrant version of this color that would otherwise not be produced just by pigmentation. So this can be seen in things like the bright blue stripes of a zebra fish. They're actually a very popular little aquarium fish. They're also called blue Danios, but they're these little, just little slips of fish, and then they have these blue stripes, and those blue are these bright, bright blue. It's hard to describe it without seeing them in person, but it's similar to the morpho butterfly where it's that shimmery, shiny, bright blue. And that is

a result of both pigmentation and structural coloration that amplifies that blue. And like I was mentioning earlier, there are those rainbow iridescent hues of the sunbeam snake that they actually use guanin crystals in their cell structure to scatter light, which is kind of amazing. It's this snake that has these beautiful crystals that will amplify light and scatter it so that you see these rainbow hues. And chromatophores, in addition to both being able to produce structural and pigmentation, can alter their shape and alter what pigment they are producing in order to rapidly change color, which you see in things like octopuses and cuttlefish. And you can also

see it in things like chameleons. So, yeah, it is, it's, you can, you can, see this incredible example of how pigmentation and structural coloration can work together to create mind-blowing colors in the natural world. And do all these different critters use it for the same purpose? I have a sort of simplistic understanding that sometimes birds use this for like sexual selection or flowers use it to attract bees, for example. Are the structural elements always used in the same way as the pigments or is there a huge variety in why these critters spend this energy to make these amazing little structures. There is a huge variety of purpose for these colors. So you're right. Like in birds, often the

coloration of birds comes down to looking pretty for the opposite sex, for the male birds trying to look very pretty for the females. There are a few species where it's more equal where both the females and males are trying to look their prettiest. But in a lot of animals, coloration can have many different uses. So, and chromatophores, because of how dynamic they are, actually really illustrate this beautifully. So in octopuses or cuttlefish, you actually see that dynamic color shifting of their chromatophores being used for things like camouflage or even like disruptive coloration to evade predators.

So they can use it both to be able to hunt to sneak up. on their prey or to evade predators and use these kind of distracting colors. Sometimes they'll even have these pulsating colors that is thought to have sort of this disruptive effect at confusing predators about the direction that the octopus or cuttlefish is going so that they can escape. But in things like the sunbeam snake that has that beautiful rainbow hue, it's actually not exactly known why they have it because they don't seem to really rely on site that much. They're mostly nocturnal. And so one of the ideas is that that is just sort of a byproduct of the structure of their scales,

which may have some other use like conservation of heat energy making, because they are, they are quote unquote, cold-blooded, just meaning that they use their environment for thermoregulation to make sure that they maintain a good homeostasis of their body temperature. And so being able to have a structure on your skin, the structures on their scales that may help them mediate how much light, how much of the heat from light is sort of reaching their bodies or not, that may be beneficial to them. That's still actually being studied, though. It's not quite known why they are these beautiful colors. But there's a good chance that it has nothing to do with how pretty it looks and they may not even really see these colors, but that it has, it's just a

byproduct of the structure of their scales that has some other benefit for them. Wow. So they could be like accidentally glamorous, not even realizing how incredibly, how incredibly amazing they look. Wow. Yeah, exactly. And of course, there are other types of structural that we see, that don't even use chromatophores like I was describing. So that's the case for butterfly scales where it's just basically these chunky scales that use diffraction grading to produce color. So when light hits them, they diffract the light through these microscopic slits like a physics experiment.

That's amazing. That's like a whole other way to use light to look different. It's incredible. Yeah, so essentially like the light goes through these tiny slits and then it comes out as this, I'm actually going to struggle more to explain this than I imagine you might be able to explain it. But like how, so how does, it's kind of similar to like the slit experiment, right? The double slit experiment. What happens when light goes through a really narrow passage is essentially that passage becomes like a little source, sort of like light is emitted from a little. slit itself. Then if you have lots of little slits near each other, and you have all these

different sources, so now if your eyeball is a certain distance away from all of those slits, then some of those add up and some of those cancel out. And so you get these interference effects. Like the number of wavelengths, the light has to travel from one slit and from another slit might be an equal number of wavelengths, in which case they add up, or they could be off by a half wavelength, which means that one is wiggling up the same time. The other one is wiggling down, and so they cancel out. So you can get these amazing interference patterns from these diffraction gratings, and it's dependent also on the wavelength.

So you'll see interference in red, and other places you'll see non-interference in blue. And so it's another way, it's sort of like a prism in that it's bending the light and creating effects that depend on the wavelength. Yeah, I love that. That is so cool that essentially if you want to look at a teeny tiny physics, experiment, you can look on the wings of most butterflies. So when you're talking about interference, there can also be constructive interference, right, where two wavelengths are adding up. Yeah, absolutely. If the wavelengths are an integer number apart, like if it's

wiggled nine times and another photon is wiggled 10 times, then they're sort of in the same place in their wave, and so they add up. It's just like waves in the ocean. You know, if two waves hit you at the same time and they're both like pushing up, then you're going to get two pushes up. really dramatic. So absolutely you can have constructive interference as well as destructive if they're pushing in different directions. Well, constructive interference is the reason behind the brightest blue found in any living tissue in the world, which is produced by the marble berry, which is a plant, which we don't often talk about plants on this show, but when we do, they are absolutely incredible. And the marble berry is a blindingly blue berry. Now, you can

look this up online and I'll certainly have a picture of it in the show notes but a photograph is not going to do it justice because it's not going to capture that blue light like your eyeballs can and it won't also translate the way that these shimmer because it's structural coloration it does depend on the angle so you'll have this like purply blue shimmery so bright it might actually hurt your eyes a little bit. So this is a leafy flowering plant from southern Africa. Its berries are shockingly blue due to the mirror-like cell structure on their surface and crystalline structure underneath of spiraling cellulose. And what it does is it allows for a huge amount of light to be narrowed and reflected and it amplifies the blue wavelengths especially and it hits

your eye just with this flood of super, super blue in this constructive interference. Well, I don't know if I believe that these things are the bluest things in nature. Pretty sure that after I had an entire blueberry pie one time that my insides were the bluest thing in nature based on, you know, what came out later. But I'm wondering, are these berries blue just in the skin or is their flesh also blue? Because blueberries are mostly blue in the skin. When you bite inside, they're sort of like faintly transparent. Are these guys just in the skin or blue all the way through?

That's a really good question. My sense was that it is mostly in the skin because what is interesting about these is that blue coloration is not an honest indicator of them being delicious, nutritious berries. They do not have any nutritional value. They're not, strictly speaking, edible. they don't, I don't think they would make you sick really, but they don't taste good. They're not really good for you. But birds love them.

And the reason they love them is a bird is going to be very easily wooed by something pretty and colorful. The birds will try to eat them or even decorate their nests with them because they are just so, so blue, so shiny, so shimmery, just like humans. Essentially, these birds just love these berries because they're pretty and they want to have them. And so the berries don't have to waste resources making themselves nutritious. They're just so shiny and pretty that birds will distribute them.

They will disperse them and try to eat them despite them not being nutritional at all. They'll put them in their nests. And this plant then sneakily finds a way to have itself distributed just through sheer beauty and no actual intrinsic value. Oh, man, I feel bad for the birds. I feel bad for the birds. They're getting, like, conned by a dumb berry. It happens more often than you would think

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to finally solve the unsolvable. the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we've talked about some of the incredible ways that you can see color in the natural world. You have pigments which can produce amazing colors like the color of our eyes, of our hair and our skin is through pigmentation. But there's also structural coloration,

which can happen in a variety of ways where basically it is a structure that is manipulating the lights wavelength so that it can scatter, it can amplify it, it can cancel it out, and that can result in everything from the bluest blue you've ever seen to a shimmery rainbow.

One thing is interesting is that as beautiful as the world is to our eyes, it looks radically different to other animals. And other animals will experience the world in such different ways that it may even be hard for us to imagine exactly what is going on because, of course, we cannot read the mind of an animal. We can only look at their eye and look at their brain and kind of try to piece together what maybe their experience is.

We can't even understand what another human is experiencing. when they look at the world, and they have basically the same biology, right? I don't know that your red is my red and your blue is my blue. And so to me it seems like philosophically impossible to imagine what an octopus or a rat or a fly might be experiencing about the world. Yeah, this is what is so mind-blowing for me is that, yeah, I can't even trust that you, Daniel, sees the same world that I see. Like, we already know that a lot of people definitely don't see color in the same way that others do

because there are varying degrees of color blindness. And it is also hard for me to imagine that everyone's experience of color is going to be exactly the same because, of course, all of our eyes are going to be different and our brains are going to be different. So, yeah, it is really interesting. And there are experiments, psychological experiments that show that people can differ in, like, how many colors they can distinguish between. And I think it mostly comes down to practice. So, like, you can actually practice and become better at distinguishing between different colors. And if, but if you're unpractice, something that is a different color from another thing may look like the same color to you.

I guess that's because a lot of it's happening sort of in software. in your brain. And so you can improve that by practicing. I love the way the world looks. You know, I love the purples and the reds and the blues and all the greens. And I feel bad if people aren't like experiencing the same incredible world that I'm enjoying. And then I realize, hold on a second, maybe everybody else out there has an even more amazing world. And like the way I'm experiencing is like, you know, a thin shadow of the true beauty of the world. And then I feel frustrated because we're like all trapped inside our brains that are painting these worlds for us. Yeah. I mean, one interesting example of how we may not recognize, like we may think that our way of seeing

the world is the best because we get to see all these pretty colors, but even when there's an animal that may not have the same kinds of structures that we do in our eyes and our brain, they may still have a really interesting way of perceiving the world. We just don't know. And a great example of this is the octopus. So octopuses, of course, we talked about earlier for having those incredible chromatophores that not only produce pigment but can actually change their shape and can change what kinds of pigments they produce

in order to create this rapid change in color and they can use that for things like camouflage. There's even been, there was a guy who kept an octopus in his living room and he got to watch this octopus as it was sleeping and as it was sleeping it would kind of flicker and its colors would change, possibly indicating that it was dreaming. And so the octopuses have these wildly amazing, colorful lives,

and yet they don't have color-detecting cones, those little photoreceptors that are on our retinas. They only have one type of photoreceptor cell. And so the thought was, these poor octopuses, they are so colorful, and yet they can't perceive color, because they don't have cones like humans do. So they might be producing color on their skins but not observing it in each other?

I always thought that maybe Octopi were using that as a way to communicate like a visual, colorful language. Well, octopuses are really interesting because as intelligent as they are and as spectacular as they are, they're not that social. They have very limited social interactions. And when they are social, they do seem to. have some changes in their coloration, but not much is known how they use that for communication because they are very shy, even with each other, and so their social lives are very limited and we don't observe them too often. That doesn't mean that they don't use that coloration

to communicate, but it's just such a rare event. We have researchers struggle to actually understand what language they are speaking with this coloration. But while it may be that they can't see color because they don't have cones, they may yet be able to see color because they have a very strange wide pupil. And you've probably seen that. It's this like sort of wobbly wide you-shaped pupil. And this wide pupil actually scatters light as it. it enters the eye, which means that it would hit the back of the eye, the retina, at different focal points. So there is a theory that potentially these octopuses are able to see color based on the difference

of blur and what it sees. So if it's hitting the eye at these different focal lengths, for us we would see that as sort of a blurriness. Like, you know, if you have something really close, like a hand really close to your face and you look at it, it's blurry. It doesn't look quite right. Or things sort of in the corner of your eyes are sort of blurred. They're not fully defined.

That is just raw information, right? That we're seeing that as blurry. And it's our brain's interpretation of that information. But it's absolutely possible that the octopus is using the difference in blur as a result of the different wavelengths of the colors, hitting the eye at different focal points, and interpreting that as color. Wow, that's sort of incredible.

What do you think is sort of the forefront or the goal of this research? Do we need to dig into the octopus brain to understand how it's taking this information and entangling it and experiencing it? Is it ever really going to be possible to do science about what in the end is sort of a subjective experience?

That's a really good question. I mean, personally, I find octopus is one of the most fascinating animals in the world because they have evolved completely, almost completely independently from humans and mammals and most other animals in the world. And yet, they have two eyes and a brain, and they seem to have a certain amount of intelligence that we can kind of understand. They seem to have a playfulness, a curiosity. And so they're the closest thing we have to an alien that we can interact with. And while I don't know whether researchers could ever really be able to fully understand

what their subjective experiences, studying these octopuses and understanding as much as we can about their experience, I think maybe the closest thing we could get to studying intelligent alien life and a clue to like what life might look like on other planets because their evolutionary journey was so wildly different from our own in such a different environment. And of course, they're a fun playground for science fiction authors. I've read many awesome science fiction books imagining intelligent octopi or their equivalent from alien worlds. It's really fun to think about it and do experience.

But it's funny that you call them basically like aliens. I mean, maybe they would think of themselves as, you know, Earthlings and we're the aliens, right? It's all relative. I mean, if you've seen, there's that document, my octopus teacher, and in a way it really does seem like they see us as a curious alien because this diver who would very, very carefully and slowly interact with this octopus, the octopus seemed to take a real curiosity in him. And there are a lot of instances of octopuses being curious about humans, or at least seeming to display curiosity rather than simply fear, which I find so interesting. I mean, they are really, really mysterious and interesting animals.

And the last time we were related to an octopus was when everything was basically a tiny nematode-like worm with just the bare essentials to be able to. to function, which I just, I find that so interesting and also kind of encouraging because it makes me think that, you know, given enough evolutionary pressures, it is possible to repeatedly create organisms that have a curiosity around the world and are really interesting and maybe are capable of being observers of their environment just like humans are. It is amazing that they evolved their intelligence sort of separately, and it is hopeful that if independently evolved intelligence finds us curious rather than like disgusting and squishable, that maybe aliens when they arrive will also find us worth talking to. I, for one, would love to hug like a big octopus alien.

That would just, that would be wonderful. So octopuses are not the only animals that may have a very different subjective experience. when it comes to color. There are a lot of animals that can see UV light, so ultraviolet light, and so how they perceive the world is going to be very different from us. And there are a lot of animals, and we're discovering more and more almost every day who can see UV light. So butterflies, bees, birds, bats, and other pollinators can see UV light for pretty obvious reasons

because flowers have UV light patterns on their petals, and they use these like landing strips for the pollinators to come, like a big Edat Joe's sign, neon sign telling these pollinators, come on, come here, get your nectar. And while you're at it, why don't you pick up some pollen and transfer it to my neighbor so we can get some cross-pollination going? I'm glad to see that kind of interaction facilitated in the natural world. And some flowers, remember we talked about structural coloration, those like little miniature prisms or slits that will bend light in certain ways.

Some flowers will use structural coloration to create a blue and UV halo that is typically not visible to humans, but stands out like a hologram to bees telling them that like a flower is only 10 wing beats away. So these flowers have cracked holographic advertisement before humans have because I was promised when I was a kid sort of a cyberpunk future where you would have these holograms advertising soda to you but that didn't happen. But these flowers have managed to do that. But we can't see it. Only bees and other UV light detecting animals can see those kinds of beautiful displays.

Wow. And bees also basically get jet packs also. So they're living in the future. and we're stuck here in the present. That's really true. But how do we know what bees can see? Like, have people dissected bee eyeballs to understand what they're sensitive to or put little recorders in bee brains?

It's both that we can see the structure of the bee eyeball, so we know UV light can pass through, but also behavioral experiments. So seeing that bees will go towards UV light when no other coloration or light is present that we can see that they can see these light patterns and they respond to it. So in experimental settings, they'll respond to UV light patterns that we recreate artificially. So we can test both their behavior and the structure of their eyeball to show that it is physically possible for them to see UV light. You can figure it out by both

combining the behavioral studies with the anatomical properties of their eyes. What it's like to be a bee. But what's so interesting is it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint that bees and birds and even bats can see UV light because they're pollinators. But research is showing that more and more animals can see UV light than we may have previously thought. So there's some evidence that based on the structure, of many mammalian lenses, so that clear structure just sitting right on top of your eye

that helps shape the light as it goes into your eye. UV light is able to make it past that lens and hit the retina, and so it is likely that their rods and cones are able to detect UV light. In humans, in most humans, that lens will actually absorb the UV light. And so because it absorbs that UV light, it never actually manages to hit our photoreceptor cells, and so we don't detect it. But it has also been reported that people who were either born without a lens or have had their lens removed for medical reasons, like for cataract surgery, can actually see UV light. What? How's that possible? Really? Yeah, yeah. So there are a variety of surgeries that are done on the eye to correct for

issues, things like cataracts. And so once that lens is removed, it's actually replaced with an artificial lens, again, so that you can focus that light. Because without the lens, the things would be too blurry. It helps focus the eye to the back of your retina. But that artificial lens actually doesn't necessarily absorb UV light. It can pass through and hit the retina because it's letting UV light through, it allows people to both focus on an object and also see UV light. And so people with their lens removed and replaced will report UV light as looking like this kind of white violet hue, like a really oddly bright violet. And it's one of those things where I can try to imagine what that's going to look like, but you can't really,

even with a human being who can report to you, this is what I see, you can still only kind of like imagine what that's like. You can't ever actually experience it. Because they're trying to describe one color in terms of other colors. Right. That seems fundamentally impossible. Like, how could you describe red in terms of blue and green? It's not like some combination of them. It's like describing something totally different. Sort of like, you know, eating a new fruit and then describing it like, oh, it's a little bit like an apple mixed with a kiwi.

It's never going to really capture it, right? Exactly. And it's, so it is probably really tricky for people who see this to be able to describe it just as it's hard for us to, those of us who cannot see UV light, cannot really imagine what it's like. So this is a fun one. Now, I'm not an art historian, but there is a historical theory

that Claude Monet's paintings became much more blue and violet later in life because he had cataract surgery and his left islands was removed, which allowed him to see UV light. And so it's possible that he was not just painting these bright, bright blues and bright violets because he liked these colors, but because he was actually seeing more and more of these colors or this UV color that we can only imagine how

it looked like and trying to represent it in his paintings. Wow, he wasn't just a genius. He was an ultraviolet genius. That sounds like extra good. I want to be an ultraviolet physicist. I know. I just, I love how researchers can, As we make scientific discoveries today, it can impact how we see our history. Like, we can see this whole new context for someone famous like Claude Monet in his life and what he may have gone through. It is amazing how we can understand more about what happened in history, given our theories now. Like, I don't know if you know that whole story about the camera obscura and how it influenced painting and understanding of, like, depth and how to paint depth in painting. It's really fascinating to sort of unravel that.

that we might understand more than the folks actually at that time did about what they were doing. Yeah, it is so interesting. It's like piecing this puzzle together backwards as a human society. And another interesting way that this UV research can help us understand the world is it may help us understand our impact on animals. So power lines typically look pretty boring to us. maybe unless they explode and like a transformer explodes. And then you do get to see an interesting and very dangerous light show. But to animals that can see UV light, power lines are horrifying looking all the time.

So the UV light that power lines emit look like a violet blazing corona. And there is the thought that this might actually frighten migratory birds who see this, don't know what the heck is going on. And so go out of their way to avoid these power lines. And so there are so many man-made things that we may see as a somewhat innocuous thing, but then to an animal, it is this terrifying, strange alien intrusion

in their normal lives. That is really amazing. Wow, these birds are basically seeing special effects. And we, of course, are always, em radiation in lots of frequencies that we can't see. You know, radio, for example, and cell communications, these are all electromagnetic radiation. They're basically just photons of different wavelengths that we can't see.

So if you could see radio waves, if you could see microwaves, if you could see the frequencies for cell phones, then the world would look crazy to you around big cities. It would be all these intense lights flashing around all the time. I wonder if there are animals out there that can't observe. of that. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers.

The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani I'm Noah

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So we've talked about how you can even have color in the natural world through pigmentation, through structural coloration, through these incredible little microscopic structures that bend and manipulate light. And we've talked about how other animals. will have these different ways of viewing the world, animals who can see UV light, and it just looks like an entirely different, amazing world than what we humans have unless humans have some modification done to their eye where the lens is removed, in which case maybe humans can see UV light.

But now we're going to talk about how humans can modify animals to make them exhibit amazing colors and amazing UV glow using things called quantum dots. So researchers who are always, I think, trying to win award for most science fiction-like experiment fed silkworms quantum dots which caused them to glow red under UV light. and these quantum dots are nanoscale crystals and are subject to quantum effects and the size of the particle can determine which wavelength of light it will emit. And at this point, I'm going to hand things over to you, Daniel, because I am sure you can give a much better explanation of quantum dots than I could hope to do unless I just open up Wikipedia and start reading it. Well, first of all, I want to advise your listeners not to eat a spoonful of quantum dots. Really not a great idea.

And I feel bad for those poor worms, you know, subjected to that experiment. But I hope they got some awesome superpowers. Quantum dots really are awesome. They're sort of like an engineered atom. You know, you were talking earlier about pigments and why some of them are blue and some of them are red. And microscopically, that's because the atoms that make up those pigments have quantized energy levels. The electrons that are whizzing around the nuclei, they can't just have any arbitrary energy. There's like a ladder of allowed energies.

And when the electron goes down one step, it gives off that much energy in terms of a photon. So the spacing of that ladder determines the photons that an atom can emit, and that's why some emit blue and some emit red. That's really awesome, but it would be cool to like engineer your own to say, oh, I want this specific set of ladder so I get these colors. Or I want this ladder so I get those colors. It's pretty hard to do with atoms because they're kind of finicky and tiny and annoying and you need like magnetic fields and lasers and weird vacuum chambers to manipulate them. So people have figured out a way to sort of engineer different energy levels using quantum dots, which as you say are basically tiny little crystals of semiconductors. Semiconductors sit right between an insulator that doesn't conduct electricity and a conductor or like a metal where electrons just flow free. And so electrons sort of flow free. And if you make them small enough, then they get weird quantum effects.

Quantum effects usually come from confinement, from requiring an electron to be like bound to an atom or stuck in a little hole somewhere. And so they can like put ingredients in this solution and heat them up and then have them form these tiny little microcrystals that can do sort of amazing things. And there's potentially really incredible like science fiction like applications for these things, you know, incredible displays or. solar cells or super tiny electronics, you know, printing like with a laser printer, printing like with a laser printer, electronic circuits made out of quantum dots. It's going to be pretty awesome. That all sounds cool, but what if we feed these to a bunch of larvae? Well, I suggest that you get the larvae to sign off first, you know, sign the way they're

rights so they don't sue you when they start to glow weird colors. I've never seen a larvae try to hold a pencil, but I'm I'm sure it's pretty adorable and awkward. And you might have seen quantum dots in real life because they're already in televisions. Like quantum dot televisions have been around since 2015. Wow. I mean, my TV is pretty cheap, so I kind of doubt it. But that is really, really cool.

So when these quantum dots, so the ones that are fed to these silkworms are like six nanometers, which I guess is the magic size for the red emitting quantum dots, They're hit with UV light, and this will cause them to glow red. Now, why do you need that UV light to see that red glow? So just like with any sort of material, you can absorb at some frequencies and emit at some frequencies, and some materials like to emit in different frequencies than they absorb. So they take an energy, and then they sort of like downshift it to a lower wavelength and then emit. So I don't know the details here, but I'm imagining that's what's happening,

that they sort of, but I'm imagining that's what's happening, this sort of wavelength downshifting. So you send in UV photons which are very high energy and then it bounces around inside the material for a little while and then emits as a red photon. Yeah, and that would actually be the same or similar mechanism as biofluorescence where you can hit an living organism with some UV light and they fluoresce under that UV light,

which is different from bioluminescence. Because the bioluminescence, it's actually a light created by a chemical reaction that produces light, whereas with biofluorescence, they're actually taking in UV light and re-emitting it at a different sort of energy level, which it sounds like that's sort of what's happening with these quantum dots. And now I'm terrified that your listeners are going to take laser pointers and shoot them at all sorts of critters, hoping that they'll glow crazy colors. Please don't do that, people. Don't do that. But also that is what researchers are doing. they're collecting like roadkill of variety of animals and just whenever they find a specimen, they like try to see if it glows under UV light because they keep discovering all these

different animals, especially marsupials for some strange reason, actually glow under UV light and we don't know why. And so it is, that is, you joke, but there are researchers doing exactly that. like they'll find a dead specimen and just sort of see if it glows. Wow, what a job. What a job. I'm zap corpses with lasers and see what happens. I collect roadkill and bring it back to my laboratory.

Yeah, it is really interesting. And so we're essentially turning these silkworms into biofluorescent animals, except that they're sort of artificially biofluorescence. So by being fed these quantum dots that glow red under UV light, not only did the silkworms glow red, but so did their silk, their cocoons, and the adult moth bodies after metamorphosis. So they really are what they eat.

Like they eat quantum dots, and so their whole world becomes quantum dots, and they retain that. And because the silk is probably is made out of, you know, the food that they eat and expressed and turned into silk, of course the silk then is going to also glow red, and so will their cocoons. And after they go through metamorphosis, their adult bodies glowed red, and even their eggs were fluorescent, but it finally ended with the second generations of silkworms

born. They no longer glowed. So it only lasted for the initial silkworms, worm's lifespan. But the fact that it was able to produce all of these effects be retained in its silk and its cocoon after metamorphosis, it is pretty interesting. It's a very pervasive way to just by feeding this animal without actually tampering with its genetics directly, turning it into a biofluorescent animal. That's pretty awesome. And it makes quantum silk out of which you can weave like quantum shirts. That sounds pretty cool. You know, people put quantum on everything these days, but in this case, it might actually be justified. Now, you mentioned that you typically don't want to eat these quantum dots. Now, why is that?

Oh, man, these quantum dots are made out of crazy stuff. You know, the kind of materials you need to make semiconductors can be like weird, heavy metals, you know, germanium and all sorts of craziest stuff. You definitely do not want to be consuming these things. Yeah, I think that in this case for these silkworms, I believe I read they like derived it from some material that was similar to the mulberry leaves that they would eat naturally. So I don't think it was hurting these silkworms. But yeah, don't like go down to your nearest hardware store, pick up some quantum dots and just chug them because that's not going to be great. Ask your doctor before eating cadmium, please. But I do, I, again, I feel somewhat like these invertebrates are getting to live a cyberpunk future, whereas we are not. Because I was thinking as a kid, you know, you'd get dip in dots.

And so quantum dots sound like a more advanced version of dipend dots where maybe you could have glowing ice cream of the future. And I wanted holograms, but only bees and silkworm get these futuristic. fun treatments. I don't know. I'm imagining quantum ice cream. Quantum ice cream dots is like a bowl full of glowing worms or something. It doesn't sound that appealing to me. I'm pretty happy with old-fashioned ice cream. I don't think we need to upgrade it to quantum ice cream. That doesn't sound like the words of a particle physicist to me. You know, it's all about work-life balance. You know, an old-fashioned dinner and new-fangled and new-fangled work time. Splitting particles at work and having a banana split at home.

There you go, exactly. So before we go, I know this whole episode has been about a feast for the eyes, but now we are going to have a little dessert for the ears because we're going to play a game of guess who's squawkin, the mystery animal sound game. So every week I play a mystery animal sound and you the listener and you the guest, try to guess who is making that sound and sometimes the answer is surprising. So the hint last week was this isn't a cat, it's not a dog, and despite that smell, it's not a skunk.

So, Daniel, can you guess who is making that sound? Well, they didn't sound very happy. So I'm going to guess some sort of rodent may be a squirrel being force-fed quantum dots by a researcher that's not very caring about their feelings. You know, there are actually certain flying squirrels that will glow under UV light just naturally. they weren't force-fed any quantum dots. But no, you are incorrect. This is not a rodent. It is actually a fox.

This is one of the many sounds that a fox makes. This fox in particular is sort of sleepy, sort of relaxed, and issuing a gentle little call just to kind of say hello to one of its fox friends that is nearby. Oh, it's a cozy snuggling fox? It's a cozy little fox, yes. Oh, I'm glad it's a happy sound. Maybe it's cozy because it just ate one of those quantum glowing squirrels.

I don't know. But, yes, it is a relaxed sound from a fox. Foxes have a wide variety of calls to express themselves from mating calls to alarm calls to fighting cackles or play laughter. and even these pearl-like sounds they can make when they're comfortable, or these little like murmurs that are sort of like, hey, I'm over here, how are you doing, kind of sounds as far as I can tell. Now, I don't speak fluent fox,

so something may have gotten lost in translation. As adorable as foxes are and the sounds they make, they are terrible pets. And unless you are prepared for an undomesticated, incredibly stinky, hyperactive beast. They are extremely smelly, which often surprises people because, you know, we think of a skunk. Now that makes a bad smell, but foxes are really smelly and not eat. They won't even just kind of like spray you in self-defense. They are smelly almost all the time because they have a number of scent glands, both on their tails or

near their anus, on their feet, and under their chins. And these scent glands will excrete a musk, which is basically a calling card for the foxes, like leaving a little business card in the form of a real stinky smell. And their feces and urine is also riddled with this musk. So their urine in particular is extremely foul smelling. I would never recommend a fox as a pet. typically pet foxes are only tamed, which means that they are not, they have not been genetically modified to be more calm in our presence. They have just been raised since they were a pup to basically tolerate humans. But yes, I just, I think the stinkiness alone should be enough to ward people off from owning foxes as pets. Wow, well, you just, wow, well, you just

answered two deep philosophical questions there, not just the age-old question of what does the fox say, but also how does the fox stink? Yes. Pretty badly sounds. Smells pretty bad. I mean, they have a good sense of smell, but a bad sense of taste because of how bad they smell. So on to this week's mystery animal sound, and the hint is, is it a helicopter, a jackhammer,

a lawnmour or something from Greek mythology. Daniel, who do you think is squawking there? It sounds to me like fluttering of wings. Is it like maybe a super close-up microphone to a bee's wings? That's an interesting guess. Well, you will find out if you're correct on next week's episode of Creature Feature next Wednesday. If you out there think you know who was squawkin, you can write to me at creaturefeeturepod at gmail.com.

I'm also on Twitter at creature feet pod. That's F.E.A.T. Not FEEE.T. That is something very different. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a wonderful mixture of both biology and physics, resulting in a beautiful rainbow of amazing animals. Where can people find you? Oh, you can find me at our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, on Twitter at Daniel and Jorge, or online at www.orgia.com. Come on over and talk about the physics of the universe with us. And I am sometimes on the show when Jorge has to step out, or as some people theorize, we're simply the same person.

Feed enough quantum dots of Jorge and becomes a biologist named Katie. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating and review, I would be so very grateful. And I read all the reviews, even the reviews saying like, hey, I want to eat quantum dots. And then I would say, hey, don't do that if I could respond to the reviews. But I still appreciate them. And thank you to the Space Cossacks for their super awesome song, Exolumina. Creature features a production of IHeartRadio.

For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or hey, guess what? Where have you listened to your favorite shows? I don't judge you. I do judge you if you eat quantum dots, but I won't judge you for where you listen to your podcast. See you next Wednesday. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast,

Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it all! I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming?

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You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.