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RE: Colour Challenge: Butterflies
It's prismatic, right? like a dichroic electrolytic colour effect on iridium foil? I love prismatic effects. In butterflies and similar, these are actually microscopic little hairs made of a specific protein that provides the visual properties.
For the non-dutchies, the proper way to pronounce the duch name is:
Veer Shine Flinder. The word Weer means weather or power/force, and schein means 'showing or making obvious'. Pardon my bad spelling.
It is. No dyes in butterflies 8-). Well, not many, anyway.
BTW "weer" in this case is short for "weerom" meaning "return" or "back", "schijn" means "shine" or "emit light" here, but can also mean "seem" or "appear". "Weerschijn" is an old Dutch word for "reflection".
It's a miracle we Dutch understand each other 8-).
ah! So my 'translation' wasn't too far off.
Yes, it's not a dye, it's tiny little prismatic hairs made of something that bends the indigo light strongest in one direction.
Dichroic iridium (there is other metals that can be electrolysed to yield this effect also, I believe) is not a 'dye', the electrolytic effect causes tiny prisms to form that reflect one colour in one polarity and another in the other. Its similar but different, in principle, to how holography works, as well as the many materials both natural and manmade that produce the 'fairy rainbows' effect.
Unfortunately, this is also why butterflies keep their colours when they're dead, so many are still being killed for decoration rather than research.
Fortunately butterfly chasers are hardly the biggest threat to butterflies. More dangerous is neonicotinoid pesticides (and pesticides and shit like glyphosate) in general, and though there is dispute about this, I believe that beehive collapse is being caused by the proliferation of mobile phone towers, whose EMF output is squelching the schumann resonance that regulates their biochemical processes, which depend on it for correct timing. Living things have sometimes up to hundreds of different clocks for each organ and some even for distinct processes, and when these biochemical synthesis processes happen out of order, they can cause infertility, cancer, and all kinds of issues like this. Thus bee colony collapse. And the epidemic of impotence, infertility, cancer, heart disease, and most everything that kills people these days. Then the chemicals contribute further to already weakened immune, circadian and endocrine function.