The Magic of Butterfly Scales - Part 1 - Smarter Every Day 104

Hey, it's me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So have you ever seen something in your life that was so incredibly beautiful that you just did not understand how it could exist in this physical world with you? And the more you get close to it, the more you study it, the more you understand that the depths of its beauty seem to never end. There's layer upon layer upon layer of beauty.

Now, I know you might have a hard time understanding this because you've never met my wife, but I'll show you something that gave me a similar reaction. When I was in the Amazon rainforest, I saw butterflies in ways I had never seen them before. So when I got back home, I started to research them and found that they were of the order of Lepidoptera, which is ancient Greek for scaled wing.

Now, what do butterflies have to do with scales? Like fish scales. If you've ever caught a butterfly by the wings then afterwards looked at your finger, you'll notice this shimmery dust. Those are scales, and they're really, really tiny. Now, I know a lot of you are smarter than me, and you knew that butterfly wings had scales, but I didn't. And so I started researching it, and I found this: the most beautiful image I have ever seen on the internet.

This is a microscopic image of a moth in Madagascar called a sunset moth. It's amazing. Look at this. I mean, these scales are an organic structure. They were created by a caterpillar that dissolved himself in a pupa. Think about that. So, you know me. The next step was to call Dr. Linden Gledhill and ask him to teach me the black art of taking photos of butterfly scales.

We bought a microscope from the 80s, and Linden used the internet to teach my wife, who has a degree in biology, how to use the microscope. After that, I coupled a camera to it, and then I bought some butterflies from the internet. I'll leave the links below.

So the scales of the sunset moth are the color of the rainbow, but the one spot that I want to get is right there where there's blues and purples, and they meet the yellows and the greens. That's what I'm after. So once we explore a little bit, we can find the purples right here, but we have a problem. If you'll notice, not all the scales are in focus at any one time. What we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to take multiple photos along that depth of field and add them all up so we get one focused image.

OK, I'm gonna show you exactly how this works. I've got this over my face so I don't breathe on the butterfly wing and move it while I'm taking the images. You can see I've got the microscope setup with a remote trigger. I've got a diffuser on my main objective there, and I've got two lights going through that diffuser. You can see on my clock there it's 10:06, and we're about to start, and you can see how long this takes. Here we go.

[music]

OK, so what time is it? It is 10:16, so it took me about 10 minutes to do that. So I took all those images, and now I'm gonna use Photoshop to align the images, and then I'm gonna stack them together so I have a much deeper depth of field. This is the fun part. This is where we get to see all this time that we put in yield something very, very beautiful.

[music]

So we started this journey together learning about layers of beauty, right? And think about it. The fact that there are scales on butterfly wings, and that they are beautiful is beautiful within itself. But it's not that that I want you to see. It's the layering of the beautiful. Think about it. This caterpillar, before he went inside the pupa, he took with him a body that he dissolved, and he used that organic matter to rearrange it somehow with a software load that he took into the pupa with him to create a beautiful wing with a color structure laid out in a specific pattern.

I mean, how did that software load know to make this scale one color and this scale another color? It boggles the mind, and it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. In fact, it's the second most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

What do you think is so beautiful about butterfly scales?

• That they change colors, and all of them are not the same color.
• Oh, they're not? So what do you have here?
• A sign that has my name on it.
• That's pretty, isn't it?

There was a guy back in 1960, his name was Kjell Sandved. He was a Norwegian photographer, and he came over to the US, and he searched for perfect butterfly wings that would give him all the alphanumeric characters. So he created a library of all these images. You can see he's got multiple E's, multiple Y's.

He created this library and you can go and make your own name. I'll leave a link in the video description. OK, I stumbled upon something pretty cool, so this'll be the last thing I show you. See, here are all my butterflies, and I took one of the hind wings of this goliath birdwing, and I placed it under my microscope there.

So we're gonna go up here, and we're gonna turn the video on in the scope, you can see it's black there. And then I'm gonna turn the light on. Watch what happens. It's orange. Now, that's interesting because the butterfly wing itself is green. What's happening?

Now check this out. It gets even weirder. If I take this top-down light and turn it on, look at that. I'll turn that back light off. Green. So if I have light transmitted from the bottom of the wing, I get this orange color; however, if it's reflected from the top of the wing, I get a different color solution altogether. What's happening there?

So if I've earned your subscription, please consider checking out the next video, which is me going to a biological imaging lab at Georgia State University. Good grief, they gave me goggles that look like this. Clearly, we're gonna do some awesome science in that video.

I hope you enjoyed that, and I want to share something with you. While I was making this video, I read this book, The Fault in Our Stars by my friend John Green. Now, while I was flying, I used broken butterflies as a bookmark, which ended up being a metaphor for how the book works.

There's two people in it, Augustus and Hazel Grace, and they're broken people with broken bodies, and they're trying to experience a broken world. And they do so together by unlocking the layers of beauty in the world around them. Anyway, I think you'll enjoy it, and if you want it for free, you can download it at audible.com/smarter. The Fault in Our Stars, go check out John Green's book. I think you'll like it.

Anyway, I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Just because it's cool, I want to see the scales actually on my fingerprint. It's pretty awesome. So I took a lot of photos, obviously. If you want to download them and use them as a desktop background or something like that, I'll put them up on the Smarter Every Day Facebook page.

There's a lot of stuff there you can check out. Thanks.

What are you doing, some schoolwork?

• We are.
• Where are those earrings I bought you?
• They're in my closet. I look awful. I feel awful. I don't feel good.
• Can you put 'em on real quick? You know what it is?
• Nuh uh.
• It's a sunset moth. You know why I got you those?
• Why?
• Cause you're doing a video on it.
• No, you'll find out.

[Captions by Andrew Jackson] captionsbyandrew.wordpress.com Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.