In nature, the ability to change color can be key to survival. Vision is a very important sense in much of the animal kingdom, and many animals have come up with unique ways to use this sense to ...

Animals are living color. Wasps buzz with painted warnings. Birds shimmer their iridescent desires. Fish hide from predators with body colors that dapple like light across a rippling pond. And all ...

Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it. Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet ...

A few years ago, Professor Liz Tibbetts stumbled upon something surprising. She noticed that wasps had striking facial features—including fake eyelines and distinctive marks. At the time, people ...

Zebras, a children’s tale goes, became striped after “standing half in the shade and half out of it.” While the author, Rudyard Kipling, wasn’t a biologist, his story may hold some truth: research ...