From a report in Science News:
Rhainer Guillermo Ferreira was so jolted by a scanning electron microscope image showing what looked like skinny, branching tracheal tubes in a morpho wing that he called in another entomologist for a second opinion. Guillermo Ferreira, then at Kiel University in Germany, showed the image to a colleague who also was “shocked,” he remembers. A third entomologist was called in. Shock all around...Here's a scanning EM of the wing:
In the tough inner layers, male Z. lanei wings form nanoscale spheres sandwiched between blankets of black pigment–filled nanolayers. This setup can enhance reflections of blue light and muddle other wavelengths.
The article is here.
Soooo - the male Zenithoptera dragonflies are flying with - their lungs? THAT would be insane. It would make ripping the wings off of insects doubly cruel.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't really suggest that the lungs are in the wings - just respiratory passages that can transmit oxygen to wing tissues that were previously considered metabolically inactive.
DeleteI read the SN article as saying that the tubular structures in the wings are the cause of the bright blue colors, and not that the wings are lungs or are living tissue? Could those tubes be structural elements that make the wings strong?
ReplyDeleteI understood the article to say that the findings suggest that the tubes carry oxygen (air) to the nanospheres that are responsible for the blue color - although I would have thought that it was a "structural color," rather than anything requiring metabolic support.
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