News 2023
New paper published in Proceedings B on insect colour patterns
This paper was led by Dr Shengyu Wang, who completed part of the work on the paper during a research visit to UCC
In this study, the authors conducted thermal maturation experiments on modern insects, in order to study how their colour patterns are degraded by the effects of heating. They found that during progressive heating, colour patterns are initially lost as cuticles turn black, but then reappear at higher temperatures as melanin-rich cuticle regions persist but melanin-poor cuticle preferentially degrades.
The authors also found that the temperature thresholds for these changes are different for insect species with cuticles of different thickness. Therefore, when studying fossil insect biotas, the absence of colour patterns in certain species may be an artefact of fossilisation.
The paper can be accessed here:
Wang, S., McNamara, M.E., Wang, B., Hui, H., Jiang, B., 2023. The origins of colour patterns in fossil insects revealed by maturation experiments. Proceedings B, 290, 20231333. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.1333