Blue Morpho

• GeneralIts blue is not a pigment: it comes from the microstructure of its scales, which bends the light.
• That mechanism is being investigated as a way to make textiles, inks and sensors that do not lose their colour over time.
• When it lands it closes its wings and vanishes: the brown, eyespotted underside makes it indistinguishable from a dead leaf, so that in flight it looks like a blue flash that snaps out.
• The blue is not a pigment: it comes from millions of microscopic scales arranged in layers that interfere with light, a structural colour that has inspired optical filters and anti-reflective coatings.
• In flight it alternates the brilliant blue of the upperside with the dull, eyespotted brown of the underside, and seems to appear and disappear.
• It does not visit flowers: it drinks the juice of rotting fruit, sap, fungi, wet mud and the fluids of decomposing animals, and the tip of its proboscis is brush-shaped for exactly that.
• The whole cycle, from egg to adult, takes about 115 days, and the adult lives barely two weeks.
• The caterpillars are occasional cannibals.

Habitat & environment

Clearings and edges of tropical rainforest

Sources consulted: Encyclopedia of Life; Rainforest Alliance; DeVries (1987); Young (1975)