The color blue is a very common favorite color for humans, but is not often seen in plants and animals. According to scientists from the University of Adelaide in AustraliaThis is partly because a true blue color or pigment does not really occur in nature. Organisms that appear blue must absorb very small amounts of energy, while blue reflects high-energy light. Because the entry of the molecules that can absorb this energy is a complex process, the color blue is less common than other colors in the natural world.
Less common does not mean complete absence, as plants and animals can perform various 'tricks' to appear blue. Here are some cool blue flora and fauna and how they exhibit this unique appearance.
Electric Blue Tarantula
In 2023, a team of scientists in Thailand discovered Chilobrachys natanicharum Also known as the electric blue tarantula. The spiders live in a variety of habitats, including trees and mangrove hollows or burrows on the ground.
The wild color of this arachnid comes from the unique structure of their hair, not from the presence of blue pigment. Their hair is equipped with nanostructures that manipulate the light that shines on it, simulating their signature blue look. These hairs can also show a more violet hue depending on the amount of light present, creating an iridescent effect.
This species used to be found on the commercial tarantula market, but this was one of the first scientific studies describing its natural habitat or unique features.
A lapis lobster
Blue lobsters look more like sweet cotton candy than the red shell of a juicy and buttery delicacy we usually see. According to the New England Aquariumonly about 1 in 2 million lobsters are blue.
In Be able toa fisherman in the south of England found an azure lobster in one of his traps. Rather than risk the lobster ending up on a dinner plate, the specimen was donated to a local aquarium. Blue lobsters have also been spotted in Marble head, Massachusetts And France.
[Related: ‘Barbie’ reminds us that pink is a power color for everyone.]
Andrew Hebda, former curator of zoology at the Museum of Natural History, compares the lobster to a painting.
“You make some watercolor paint and you take a little blue, you take a little yellow, you take a little red and you take a little green and poof, mix them all together and what do you have? Mud. That's what your normal lobster is,' Hebda told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “What's happened here is that it seems like we don't have those other three pigments. You're looking at a genetic mutation that has suppressed those colors.”
The Frank Sinatra of crickets
In May, a family outside Chicago noticed something unusual amid this year's already rare double-brooding “cicadapocalypse.” Instead of the distinctive, bright red eyeballs that most cicadas have, this female had Magic cassin wore a pair of blue eyes. This special eye color is the result of a genetic mutation one in a million.
Like their pinker cousins, blue-eyed cicadas are short-lived. They are already dead and are added to The Field Museum's behind-the-scenes insect collections. This “library of life on Earth” allows scientists to study various specimens. Because blue-eyed cicadas are very rare, a team at the Field will attempt to sequence its DNA to learn more about the genes that give it its distinctive eyes.
Big blue bees
Despite looking a bit like an illustration from a Dr. Seuss book, blue carpenter bees (Xylocopa caerulea) live in Southeast Asia, India and southern China. They are almost an inch long, which makes them look particularly hefty, but they are not particularly aggressive. Unlike other bees, they prefer to live alone and not in crowded hives.
Bees come in a rainbow of colors beyond yellow, including vegetable, purple, whiteAnd blackbut the sky blue color of these bees makes them popular among insect collectors.
What about flowers and leaves?
Less than 1 in 10 plant species are blue and even blueberries themselves are not technically blue. Plants get this color on their flowers by mixing naturally occurring pigments. Anthocyanins, or red pigments, are the most common pigments that plants use. Their appearance can be changed by varying the acidity. Combined with reflected light, these changes create the bright and cheerful flowers like hydrangeas, bluebells, and morning glories.
Only a handful of plants live on the tropical rainforest floors have blue leaves. The primary reason for a lack of blue leaves is the physics of light. Pigments appear to be the same color as the light they reflect. Since the most common plant pigment is green chlorophyll, plants appear green because chlorophyll reflects green light instead of absorbing it. Blue light has more energy than any other colored light on the visible spectrum. Blue leaves mean that the plant is reflecting high energy light and using lower quality light that limits growth.
It's not entirely clear why plants develop these growth-stunting problems to turn so blue, but a unique color can help them attract pollinators such as bees.
