Dr Annie Jessop, a post-doctoral fellow from Murdoch University’s School of Mathematics, Statistics, Chemistry and Physics led the revealing new research.

She said that butterflies and many other insects use tiny structures to create colours rather than pigments, but there were mysteries surrounding them.

“Butterflies, and many other insects use nanostructures to generate colour, a phenomenon known as structural colour,” Dr Jessop said.

“While we have lots of knowledge about how colour is produced from these structures, we have much less knowledge about how these structures develop in biological systems.

“Our study set out to develop a method that would allow scientists to measure the colour that these structures produce throughout development.

“This would then allow us to infer certain structural details at different time points, like the size of the structures.

“Our research successfully demonstrated that the method proposed, hyperspectral microscopy, has the appropriate spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution to do this and could reveal the development of optical nanostructures in living biological systems.”

Hyperspectral microscopy is a microscopy technique that provides spectral data for each image pixel and that can record in many hundreds of colour channels, depending on setup.

This differs from conventional light microscopy that only records in three colour channels (red, blue, and green) and from multispectral imaging that records in three to fifteen colour channels.

“The microscope can measure the colours the structures produce over time, helping us to understand for the first time, how these tiny structures develop in living butterflies,” Dr Jessop said.

Full details of the study Elucidating nanostructural organisation and photonic properties of butterfly wing scales using hyperspectral microscopy are available in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.