structural color
11. Structures create colorful feathers: common kingfisher
"The bright colours of the common kingfisher A. [Alcedo] atthis are created by two types of feather barb: one filled with pigment granules and the other with quasi-ordered channel-type keratinous sponges. A broad-band background reflection is adde...
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12. Wood self-assembles: trees
A better understanding of how the cell wall of wood forms will someday help wood scientists assemble wood-like composites without using trees. The current hypothesis is that the cell wall of wood does not require biochemistry to form, but self-ass...
13. Layers create multihued appearance: beetle
"Gymnopleurus virens beetles have shells that change from red in the centre to green around the edges or from green to blue…the shells are made of thousands of ultrathin layers, with each successive layer slightly twisted in relation to the...
14. Skin maintains structural rigidity: human
"A novel technique to generate three-dimensional Euclidean weavings, composed of close-packed, periodic arrays of one-dimensional fibres, is described. Some of these weavings are shown to dilate by simple shape changes of the constituent fibres (s...
15. Scale creates broadband diffuse silver reflectivity: Argyrophorus argenteus
"The butterfly Argyrophorus argenteus...appears to have overcome the design challenge associated with creating an efficient broadband reflection using very limited reflector thickness." (Vukusic 2009:S194)"It is the quasi-random variation in colou...
16. Humidity changes exoskeleton color: Hercules beetle
"The Hercules beetle, Dynastes Hercules [sic] L., can change the colour of its elytra—horny fore-wings—from black to greenish yellow and back again to black all within a few minutes. It does this in a way previously unknown among ...
17. Spicules are rigid structural materials: sponges
"There are yet other rigid materials, what Wainwright et al. (1976) refer to as 'stony materials' and Vincent (1990) calls 'biological ceramics.' These are distinguished by being very heavily mineralized, with more mineral (some inorganic salt) th...
18. Coral color gives clues.
“Coral colors depend not only on their species, but also on their environmental conditions. Furthermore, the intensities (shades) of the colors vary among and within colonies. A coral will obtain a darker brown color at low-light intensities or ...
19. Morphotex structural colored fibers
Morpho butterflies remain a vibrant blue throughout their lives, without ever needing a coat of paint to spruce up a dull finish. The scales on their wings are made of many layers of proteins that refract light in different ways, and the color we ...
20. Wing scales diffract and scatter light: Morpho butterflies
"Brilliant iridescent colouring in male butterflies enables long-range conspecific communication and it has long been accepted that microstructures, rather than pigments, are responsible for this coloration. Few studies, however, explicitly relate...
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