Bicyclus anyana in its low-key natural look. Photo by Gilles San Martin, via Wikimedia Commons
Via NPR: a paper published online this week ahead of print at PNAS reports the results of an artificial selection experiment that changed butterflies’ wings from brown to blue.
We used artificial selection on a laboratory model butterfly, [Bicyclus] anynana, to evolve violet scales from UV brown scales and compared the mechanism of violet color production with that of two other Bicyclus species, Bicyclus sambulos and Bicyclus medontias, which have evolved violet/blue scales independently via natural selection.
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