No Bull: W Fence Lizards Flee When They See Red - via Herp Digest

Scientific American Evolution Blog by Christopher Intagliata , August 9, 2017 

Western fence lizards are more spooked by red and gray shirts than they are by blue ones—perhaps because the males have blue bellies themselves. 

You wouldn't think studying lizards is a particularly dangerous profession. Until, that is, sheriffs approach you with their guns drawn. "We get the cops called on us sometimes.”

Bree Putman, a behavioral ecologist at U.C.L.A. and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Her colleague at the museum, Greg Pauly, really did end up on the wrong side of a gun once, and here's why:

"A lot of times we're doing work at night in people's neighborhoods and we're using flashlights to look for geckos on the sides of people's houses. And so sometimes people will think we're criminals or burglars or something.”

The museum's solution was neon orange shirts with the museum logo. "And we call these shirts the ‘don't shoot me’ shirts." But the bright orange left Putman with a concern: that the color would spook the very animals they were trying to study.

So she devised an experiment. "I basically designed a study to show to the museum staff that these shirts were not going to be good for research, and that's what I found.”

In her trials, Putman wore tank tops of various colors—red, gray, light blue, dark blue—and then attempted to approach and capture western fence lizards in public and private parkland in L.A. And she found that when wearing dark blue, she could get twice as close to the lizards, compared to when she wore red. And she was about twice as likely to catch a lizard too, while wearing dark or light blue, compared to red or gray. The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE. [Breanna J. Putman et al., Fear no colors? Observer clothing color influences lizard escape behavior]

Putman thinks that the lizards may be more tolerant of blue hues, because they most closely resemble the blue patches males have on their bellies—a sexual signal. Other studies have shown that birds with orange and red plumage are similarly less creeped out by orange and red shirts. She's not ready to issue a dress code to hikers just yet, but: You know for a scientist or biologist working with wild animals, you want to make sure either that you're wearing the same outfit every time you're going to do animal behavior. Or you want to randomize what you wear.”

As for those museum shirts, "I actually wear the orange shirt. I don't wear a blue shirt." Because studying wildlife in urban areas, you never know when you might encounter that other species: gun-toting Homo sapiens.

The color of people's clothing affects lizard escape behavior

Lizards with blue patches tolerate closer approaches when people wear dark blue T-shirts

Date: August 9, 2017

Source: PLOS

Summary: The color of T-shirts people wear affects escape behavior in western fence lizards, according to a new study.

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Ladybird colors reveal their toxicity

Date:

June 5, 2015

Source:

University of Exeter

Summary:

For one of Britain's best-loved and colorful group of insects, ladybirds, the brightness of their color reveals the extent of their toxicity to predators, according to new research. Although red ladybirds with black spots are most familiar, ladybirds are a diverse group of species and come in many different colors and patterns, from yellow and orange to even camouflaged browns.

Continued ...

Deciphering Butterflies' Designer Colors: Findings Could Inspire New Hue-Changing Materials

July 17, 2013 — Butterfly wings can do remarkable things with light, and humans are still trying to learn from them. Physicists have now uncovered how subtle differences in the tiny crystals of butterfly wings create stunningly varied patterns of color even among closely related species. The discovery, reported today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optical Materials Express, could lead to new coatings for manufactured materials that could change color by design, if researchers can figure out how to replicate the wings' light-manipulating properties.

"It was very exciting to see how nature can create a nanostructure that's not easy to replicate by humans," says Kok Wai Cheah, a physicist at Hong Kong Baptist University. He and his colleagues are the first to investigate the color-creating mechanisms in multiple butterfly species within a single genus.

The three tropical butterflies the researchers studied all display iridescence, a property of materials that change color depending on the viewing angle, but they do so with different colors. Papilio ulysses, the Ulysses butterfly or blue mountain swallowtail, appears bluish green when seen from above. Its cousin Papilio peranthus, by contrast, looks yellowish green from above, and a third relative,Papilio blumei, the green swallowtail, is more of a deep green. All three shift toward deep blue when viewed from a sharp angle.

Read on

Lobstermen finding more odd colors in the catch

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — When a 100-pound shipment of lobsters arrived at Bill Sarro's seafood shop and restaurant last month, it contained a surprise — six orange crustaceans that have been said to be a 1-in-10-million oddity.

"My butcher was unloading them and said, 'Oh, my gosh, boss, they sent us cooked dead lobsters,'" said Sarro, owner of Fresh Catch Seafood in Mansfield, Mass. "He then picked one up and it crawled up his arm."

Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown.

But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters — one color on one side, another on the other — have jumped. It's now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.

It's anybody's guess why more oddities are popping up in lobster traps, said Michael Tlusty, research director at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

It could be simply because advances in technology — cellphone cameras and social media — make it easier to spread the word about bizarre lobster sightings.

It's also likely more weird lobsters are being caught because the overall harvest has soared. In Maine, the catch has grown fourfold in the past 20 years, to nearly 105 million pounds last year. If the yield has quadrupled, it would make sense to have four times as many unconventional lobsters being caught as well.

Although lobster is the No. 1 commercial fishery in the Northeast, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the bottom-dwelling creatures, he said.

"Are we seeing more because the Twitter sphere is active and people get excited about colorful lobsters?" Tlusty said. "Is it because we're actually seeing an upswing in them? Is it just that we're catching more lobsters so we have the opportunity to see more?

"Right now you can make a lot of explanations, but the actual data to find them out just isn't there."

Lobsters come in a variety of colors because of genetic variations.

It's been written that the odds of catching a blue lobster are 1-in-2 million, while orange comes in at 1-in-10 million. Yellow and orange-and-black calico lobsters have been pegged at 1-in-30 million, split-colored varieties at 1-in-50 million, and white — the rarest of all — at 1-in-100 million.

But those are merely guesses, and nobody knows for sure.

What is known is that colored lobsters have shown up in greater frequency in certain areas over the years.

The waters off Cutler in eastern Maine were once a hotbed for blue ones, after 1,500 larvae-sized blue lobsters were released in 1990 to use as a tracking tool to determine their survival rates, said Bob Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine's Lobster Institute.

The waters off Montauk, N.Y., once had a lot of blue lobsters as well, he said, after researchers released large numbers of blue lobsters there. The bright-orange lobsters that were in Sarro's shipment are believed to have come from the same waters in Canada.

Aside from their color, the lobsters are apparently normal in all other ways, Bayer said. They all turn red when they're cooked, except for the white ones since they don't have any pigment, and diners wouldn't notice a difference.

"There's no difference in taste," he said.

Scientists say it's possible the lobster population as a whole has a greater percentage of misfits than it did in years past.

The off-colored lobsters are more susceptible to predators because they stick out more on the ocean bottom, rather than blending in like normal ones, said Diane Cowan, executive director of The Lobster Conservancy in Friendship, Maine.

"But with the predator population down, notably cod, there might be greater survival rates among these color morphs that are visually easier to pick out," she said.

Lobstermen have brought Cowan countless colorful lobsters over the years. The prettiest one, she said, was pink and purple.

http://news.yahoo.com/lobstermen-finding-more-odd-colors-catch-174919469.html?_esi=1