Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology

摘要

Fancy feathers have adorned hats and the garb of royalty for centuries. But some of their most alluring colors, including the peacock's iridescent blue and the mallard's green neck, have puzzled biologists because they are not produced by pigments. Many are created by reflective subsurface patterns, says Richard Prum, an ornithologist at the University of Kansas (KU), Lawrence. But this is "a mechanism that we hadn't really thought about" in detail, notes Thomas Cronin, a vision ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Now Prum has done so―and has an idea of how it works.