There’s blue, green, red, purple, etc. birds but most other animals are just brown/black/white. Why is that?
And follow-up question: Would it be possible to genetically modify an animal’s fur to make it a different color?
edit: To the one guy who commented here: Mate, I think you’re shadowbanned. I can’t see your comment.
In: Biology
What do you mean by “other animals”? Insects have just as many colours as birds. So do fish, amphibians, reptiles, octopus, shrimp….
Actually the only major group of animals that doesn’t really have a whole rainbow of colours are *mammals*. No blue cows. (although blue shows up very rarely in some mammal groups like mandrills). In the early days of mammal evolution colour probably wasn’t very important, they probably did not use elaborate visual displays and so they didn’t need any colour the way a peacock needs colour.
Basically the only colour pigment mammals make is **melanin** which ranges from yellow to brown to black. Our blue eyes do not use a blue pigment but rather blue eyes is created by molecular structure scattering effect, and brown eyes is brown melanin pigment
Could we edit the genes of a mammal to have other colours? maybe. We CAN edit the genes of a mammal, they put glow in the dark jellyfish genes in a cat (true story). Colour pigments are hard though, coloured fur would need to alter not just adding pigment but likely changing the actual molecular structure of the fur. would probably take a lot more work.
I think a big part of color variation is due to camouflage for survival. Most animals that are ground-bound have to blend in better with the color palette of the earth (browns, greys, whites, tans) while birds have the luxury of flying. Plus, male birds have evolved to be so bright in color because it attracts females more.
Lots of animals do, especially when you take in consideration the fact that some other animals see a larger range of colours than us. We only see the colours we have to to differentiate between fruits, because primates evolved colour vision as fruit eaters.
Like all flying Squirrel species are a bright bubblegum pink and have slight bio-florescence but you can only see it if you can see in the Ultra-violet. And I know this sounds like a piss take, but I promise you if you google it, you’ll find it’s very real.
Birds in particular have bright colours because it’s an important part of their social and mating behavior. They’er much more colourful than you’d think to. They also see into the UV spectrum, and it means that even the females who to us look brown for camouflage are bright UV colours to each other.
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