Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseAn 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.
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Welcome to Creature Future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your our host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, we're talking about all the beautiful colors and 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 age old question is there a berry that's so incredibly blue it's just gonna 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 Whitson 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 cuterer 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 paint brush. And in fact, there are some incredible ways that colors present themselves in 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 and 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 we're 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. That 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, and you.
Say that's simplistic, but actually, aren't there several fascinating levels of signs there? I mean, as the physicist here, it amazes me to think about, like the microscopic process that happens when your eye sees red. I remember as a kid thinking about, like, what is red about that light? Is the light itself? Red is happening in my head? That makes me feel red? To somebody else se 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 it is rejecting the red wavelength. That is, the one color that is not bare 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 ampling 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, And 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, it's there aren't distinct colors, right, There aren't just a certain number of distinct colors. There is likely sort of infinite gradient of colorations. But we can only maybe distinct wish 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 hasn't wasn't inspired by something I saw, 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 brains. 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, 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 Rubegoldberg device at work there every time you see any kind of color.
And it's so helpful, right. I 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.
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 is it's still an extremely complex, fascinating process that happens with those so, so yes, they are essentially they are substances produced by cells that will absorb wavelengths, and that the wavelengths that they do not absorb, they reflect back out and those hit our eye and we see that color. But there's an 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 kind of 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 the 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 I think the pink Floyd logo with that, it's pink Floyd.
Right, you're gonna ask the physicist for your pop science. Sorry, you're gonna ask the physicists for your pop culture references.
So you know that prism will scatter light, and that is exactly right. They basically have these tiny 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 where that is.
It's this beautiful butterfly that has this iridescent, bright bright blue coloration on its wings and 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 in 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 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 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 there are 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 Do 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 a 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 on 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 a melanin produced by our melanocytes, and so melanocytes are a type of cell that produce the color and our skin and our hair and our eyes. But not all animal actually use melanocytes. They use chromatophores. So chromatophores are the pigment producing cells of things like cephalopods, so those are octopus, squid, cuttlefish. Chromatophors are also present in reptiles, fish, amphibians, and more. And Chrematophores 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 dynamics. 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. There they actually a very popular little aquarium fish. They're also called blue danios, but they are 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 wort's that shimmery, shiny, bright blue and that is a result of both pigmentation and structural coloration that like amplifies that blue. And like I was mentioning earlier, there are those rainbow iridescent hues of the sunbeam snake that they actually use Gwanning 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 chrematophores, in addition to both being able to produce structure and pigmentation, can alter their shape and alter what a pigment they are producing in order to rapidly change color, which you see in things like octopus, octopuses and cuttlefish, and you can also see it in things like chameleons. So yeah, it is. It's 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 craters use it for the same purpose. I have a sort of simplistic understanding that sometimes birds uses 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 creaters spend this energy to make these amazing little structures.
There is a huge variety of purpose for these colors, 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 chromatophors, 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 a conservation of heat energy making, because they are quote unquote cold blooded, just meaning that they use their environment for thermal regulation 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, yeah, not even realizing how incredibly, how incredibly amazing they look.
Wow.
Yeah, exactly. And of course there are other types of structural coloration 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 these chunky scales that use diffraction grading to produce colors. 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 it I'm actually gonna 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 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 ten times, then there's 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. It's going to be 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 this 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 an entire blueberry pie one time, and 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 there 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 it 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 shimmery, just like humans. Essentially, these birds just love these berries because they're pretty and they want 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, where a plant outwits an animal.
The day that happens to me, I'm going to resign my job here as a physic professor outsmarted by a plant, unless it's a slime mold. I hear those are pretty smart. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, you'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used Mintmobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So ditch your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plant. Additional taxi s, fees and restrictions apply. Seement Mobile for details.
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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 light's 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 you're red is my red, and you're blue is my blue. And so to me, it seems like philosophically impossible to me in 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. 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. Uh. And if but if you're unpracticed, 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, whole on a second, maybe everybody else out there has an even more amazing world, and like the way I'm experiencing it 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, in 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 occupy 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 U shaped pupil. And this wide pupil actually scatters light as 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. Are 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 result 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.
Really good question, I mean, personally, I find octopuses 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 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 in due 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 octopus as 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 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 of intelligence finds us curious rather than like disgusting and swishable, 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 these are There are a lot of animals and we're discovering more and more almost every day who can see UV lights. 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 eat at 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 neighbors 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 ten 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 advertiseing 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 right, how do we know? But how do we know what bees can see, like if people dissected b eyeballs to understand what they're sensitive to, or put little recorders in b brains.
It's both the it's both that we can see the structure of the b 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 an experimental settings, they'll respond to UV light patterns that we create 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 thing 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 you v 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, it 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 kiwied. 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. And so this is 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 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. It sounds like extra good. I want to be an ultra violet physicist, I know.
I just love. 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 the whole story about the camera, 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 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 you know, 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 like 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 emitting 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'd be all these intense lights flashing around all the time. I wonder if there are animals out there that can't observe that. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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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. 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 cause 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 away their 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 sure it's 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 twenty fifteen.
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 nanimeters, 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 in 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. They 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 a living organism with some UV light and they fluores 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 creators, 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, exact corpses with lasers and see what happens.
I collect roadkill and bring it back to my laboratory. Yeah, it's it is really interesting. And so we're essentially turning these silkworms into biofluorescent animals, except that we are, they're sort of artificially biofluorescent. 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 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 could leave 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 these.
Quantum doct 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 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 gonna be that's not gonna be great.
Ask your doctor before eating cadmium.
But I do. I again, I feel somewhat like these 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 dippin' dots, and so quantum dots sound like a more advanced version of Dippin' dots where maybe 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 like that.
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, old fashioned, old fashioned dinner and new fangled and new fangled work.
Times, 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 gonna play a game of guess Who's squawking the Mystery animal sound game. So every week I play a mystery animal sound and you the listener, and you the guests, 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 gonna guess some sort of rodent, maybe 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 life 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, 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. 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 chin, 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've just answered two deep philosophical questions there, not just the angel question of what does the fox say? But also how does the fox stink? Yes, pretty badly.
Smells pretty bad. I mean they have a good sense of smell, but a bad sense of taste because of how badly smell. So onto this week's mystery animal sound and the hint is is it a helicopter, a jackhammer, a lawnmower, 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 Featured next Wednesday. If you out there think you know who is squawking, you can write to me a Creature Feature pot at gmail dot com. I'm also on Twitter at Creature Feet Pod. That's f E eighteen, not FEE ten. 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 dot Danielandhorge dot 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 dot so Jorge and becomes a biologist named Keith.
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 these 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 iHeartRadio ap Apple podcasts or Hey, guess what where have you listen 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.
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