Old-fashioned striped barbershop poles turn in place on a vertical axis, but humans typically perceive the stripes moving upward rather than turning with the pole. It’s a well-known visual illusion arising from processing biases in human vision. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, a similar effect could explain how butterflies often evade predatory birds: Their flight patterns and wing patterns combine to make it hard for predators to accurately gauge speed and direction.
As a result, birds and other predators will often simply miss.” Butterfly wings have long fascinated scientists, ever since the first documentation of the growth of said wings back in 1938. By 2021, researchers at MIT had captured on video the unique structural growth of butterfly wings—continuously, as a butterfly develops inside its chrysalis—for the very first time. Butterfly wings are an example of structural color in nature: the bright iridescent colors don’t come from pigment molecules but from what physicists call photonic crystals.
The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum. The purpose of the patterns on butterfly wings has also inspired debates about how their striking coloration is linked to their evolution and behavior, from sexual signaling and thermoregulation to camouflage.
Hancock et al. wanted to explore a paradox: butterfly wings sport visually striking patterns that make them stand out, yet there are very few predators capable of catching them mid-flight. This is in stark contrast to more plainly colored moths, for example, which are the preferred prey of many airborne predators. The team suspected the wing patterns could serve as an anti-predator defense via a form of camouflage called “motion dazzle.”
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