Interesting here is: Actually, for most blue butterflies, it’s not even a pigment-it’s just a trick of the light. Since blue is so rare in the biological world (hardly any plants or animals can produce real blue chemicals), they evolved structural colors. Their wings have these microscopic ridges that reflect blue light while canceling out other colors.

It’s basically the same reason the sky looks blue, just built into a wing. If you were to look at the wings from a different angle or get them wet, the blue often disappears because you're messing with that physical structure

Another great example of "structural" blue that can be created artificially by heating steel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjiIPohUyw

Not just butterflies, birds too! But what selection pressure drove the evolution of these structural colors? Presumably signaling, the opposite of muted, camouflaging colors.

Also, as many might know, blue eyes are the result of a lack of pigment (eumelanin). The iris is translucent, but Rayleigh scattering preferentially backscatters blue photons. Green eyes have some pigment, making them a mix of brown and blue.

I wonder if the interference-based-blue of the morpho butterfly evolved because it's difficult to make blue pigment for some reason having to do the chemistry of our biosphere, or if it's an evolutionary response to humans who may have captured the blue ones and ground them up for pigment (much like we did with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple snails).

I'm not aware of any record of us having done so, but it's absolutely the kind of thing we would do, and there's much more pre-history than history when it might've happened.

It's also the trick employed by Iridigm, which Qualcomm acquired in late 2004 (i was there then).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_disp...