EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: Tuning Iridescence - Butterfly Wing Light and Coloration Analysis

This project would provide a fellowship to an Associate Professor and training for a postdoctoral researcher at Auburn University. The brilliant colors of butterfly wings are a lead inspiration for understanding how naturally occurring structures manipulate light and the colors are perceived. Many butterflies have iridescent colors on their wings, which appear to change coloration as they flap their wings.

Such iridescence appears to largely be a result of nanostructures on the surface of individual wing scales. However, how these nanostructures vary across butterfly wings and species remains relatively unexplored. This project leverages the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History collections to better understand how iridescent colors vary on butterfly wings.

Using a combination of approaches involving high-resolution imaging and structural modeling, the project aims to identify specific scale structural variations associated with changes in ultraviolet and iridescent coloration. Data produced through the project will be made available through a joint database effort with the Smithsonian Institute and Auburn University Natural History Museum, and a workshop will be organized to train researchers to employ similar experimental approaches to study the diversity of structural coloration found in nature.

The goal of this project is to develop a better understanding of how living structures modulate light to impact their coloration. This project synergizes phenotypic and modeling approaches with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History collections to directly address gaps in our understanding of how butterfly scale architectures impact coloration through a series of species research aims.

The first aim will fill a phylogenetic gap in the modeling of scale structure reflectance by identifying scale structures associated with UV and iridescent variation across Pierid butterflies. The second aim will produce digital imaging and reflectance spectra across Smithsonian collection specimens that span 100 million years of butterfly diversification.

The third aim focuses on species pairs from each butterfly family that vary in UV or iridescence, to conduct high-resolution imaging and modeling in determining if homologous scale structures are involved in lineage-specific fine-tuning of structural coloration. This project will foster a new collaboration between the Smithsonian Institute and the Auburn University Natural History Museum and provide the research team with new modeling skills to better understand how structures throughout the scale impact color reflectance.

To broaden the impact of the project, the research team will develop an educational module targeted at middle-school students that builds directly from the proposed scale structure research, promote data accessibility by developing a web-accessible database of butterfly structural coloration data, and lead a training workshop for the phenotyping and modeling approaches to empower a broader community of biologists interested in simulating reflectance spectra of living objects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.