Nature's 'master painters': Study reveals how damselflies break optical barriers to create saturated colors

Nature's 'master painters': Study reveals how damselflies break optical barriers to create saturated colors Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Lead Editor Scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have uncovered for the first time the "ingenious" biological strategies that allow blue-tailed damselflies to produce strikingly vivid, angle-independent colors. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a new blueprint for creating sustainable, highly saturated photonic materials that could replace toxic synthetic pigments in industries ranging from cosmetics to textiles. Structural colors in nature are often produced by photonic glasses—randomly arranged nanospheres that scatter light. While efficient, these systems typically suffer from poor color saturation because slight variations in particle size, or polydispersity, wash out the resulting hue. The damselfly's secret: Structural dispersion The research team, led by Prof. Benjamin A. Palmer and Ph.D. student Tali Lemcoff from BGU's Department of Chemistry, discovered that blue-tailed damselflies (Ischnura elegans) overcome these physical limitations using two elegant evolutionary solutions: - Self-correcting particles: To keep the color sharp, damselflies ensure that as spheres get larger, their density, or refractive index, drops. This "structural dispersion" means that, regardless of their size, every sphere reflects the exact same shade of blue or green. - Built-in color filters: The damselflies "load" their spheres with a yellow pigment. This pigment acts like a filter, absorbing messy, unwanted light while making the main color appear much deeper and more saturated. "Nature has found an elegant way to produce perfect colors using imperfect parts," Lemcoff says. "These strategies could show us how to build high-quality optical materials in the future using sustainable, organic ingredients instead of the synthetic chemicals we rely on today." The interdisciplinary team included researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Lund University, Aalto University and the University of Bristol. Publication details Tali Lemcoff et al, Damselflies overcome color saturation barriers of photonic glasses via pigment loading and refractive index modulation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2527433123 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Provided by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev