How Glasswing Butterflies Grow their Invisible Wings | Science

In a small tent in the middle of Panama’s rainforest, Aaron Pomerantz assembled a makeshift field lab, filled with microscopes, chemical reagents, and delicate lab equipment. At times, it was so hot that Pomerantz, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, struggled to keep his own sweat from contaminating his delicate lepidopteran samples. He was looking for something nearly invisible—transparent butterflies known as glasswings.

The rare butterflies “are like ghosts in the rainforest,” says Nipam Patel, Pomerantz’s Ph.D. adviser. Now, Pomerantz and Patel have done more than just find the butterflies—they’ve also solved an enduring mystery: how their wings are transparent in the first place. ...

Patel, who normally studies arthropod evolution, has a lifelong interest in glasswings—and a collection of tens of thousands that he has assembled since the age of 8. To understand what makes the critters so stealthy, Patel, now director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, asked a group of graduate students to take microscopic images of the wings of a dozen or so species of transparent butterflies. Read more of the article here ...

Source: How glasswing butterflies grow their invisible wings | Science | AAAS