ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2019
Pterin-pigmented nanospheres create the colours of the polymorphic damselfly Ischnura elegans.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Damselflies overcome color saturation barriers of photonic glasses via pigment loading and refractive index modulation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Uric Acid Monohydrate Nanocrystals: An Adaptable Platform for Nitrogen and Salt Management in Reptiles.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Opsin gene expression plasticity and spectral sensitivity in male damselflies could mediate female colour morph detection.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Pigment granule architecture varies across yellow, red, and brown chromatophores in squid Doryteuthis pealeii.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Structural color in the bacterial domain: The ecogenomics of a 2-dimensional optical phenotype.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The genomics and evolution of inter-sexual mimicry and female-limited polymorphisms in damselflies.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Lizards exploit the changing optics of developing chromatophore cells to switch defensive colors during ontogeny.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Revealing the Wonder of Natural Photonics by Nonlinear Optics.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Molecular mechanisms underlying metamorphosis in the most-ancestral winged insect.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The genome sequence of the blue-tailed damselfly,Wellcome open research · 2022Article
- Pterin-based pigmentation in animals.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Cuticular modified air sacs underlie white coloration in the olive fruit fly, Bactrocera oleae.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Tests of search image and learning in the wild: Insights from sexual conflict in damselflies.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Structural Diversity with Varying Disorder Enables the Multicolored Display in the Longhorn Beetle Sulawesiella rafaelae.iScience · 2020Article
- Humidity-dependent colour change in the green forester moth,Biology letters · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animal colours commonly act as signals for mates or predators. In many damselfly species, both sexes go through a developmental colour change as adults, and females often show colour polymorphism, which may have a function in mate choice, avoidance of mating harassment and camouflage. In the blue-tailed damselfly, Ischnura elegans, young males are bright green and turn blue as they reach maturity. Females are red ( rufescens) or violet ( violacea) as immatures and, when mature, either mimic the blue colour of the males ( androchrome), or acquire an inconspicuous olive-green ( infuscans) or olive-brown ( obsoleta). The genetic basis of these differences is still unknown. Here, we quantify the colour development of all morphs of I. elegans and investigate colour formation by combining anatomical data and reflectance spectra with optical finite-difference time-domain simulations. While the coloration primarily arises from a disordered assembly of nanospheres in the epidermis, morph-dependent changes result from adjustments in the composition of pterin pigments within the nanospheres, and from associated shifts in optical density. Other pigments fine-tune hue and brilliance by absorbing stray light. These mechanisms produce an impressive palette of colours and offer guidance for genetic studies on the evolution of colour polymorphism and visual communication.
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