Gilded Butterflies and the Secrets of their Scales (DVD)

Description:

Starting from the material they have collected on film over the past 40 years John and Pat Banks here present the first-ever account of the fascinating and amazing world of butterfly colours. The importance of colours, their roles, and the means by which each of them is produced, are described and illustrated in turn, with film from field, forest and savannah, and images from the optical and scanning microscopes of many museums. This is no dry presentation of scientific data or museum specimens but an unfolding drama based on first hand experience and leading us step by step, comprehensively from transparency and anti-reflection though all the colours of the spectrum to a climax with green and blue. Contributors and collaborators from many countries and museums have been generous with material from their image collections to make the film an up to the minute account of this novel field of modern science.

Approx. 50 minutes.