Butterfly Scales

Butterflies are some of Nature's most beautiful creations. The many different colours, hues, shades and patterns are works of art in themselves. My personal favourite found locally is the Peacock butterfly with it's reds, blues and whites and the distinctive eye shaped pattern on each wing.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a dead specimen yet. I hate to kill anything so my photo models come from the window sills in the conservatory and recently I found some good specimens while demolishing and old garden shed. A spider had thoughtfully left several pairs of wings behind in it's web.

These pictures show parts of the wing of a Tortoiseshell butterfly at 100 and 200x. Each wing consists of  thousands of scales in an overlapping arrangement reminding me a bit of roof tiles. They can be different shapes and sizes depending on their function but most I've seen are paddle shaped as in these pictures.

There  are generally two types of scale: Structural and Pigmentary. The latter are so called because they contain melanins and other chemical pigments  derived from foodstuffs during the larval stage of the butterfly. They provide the basic colours like red, yellow and black. The former contain rib like structures with many gaps which diffract the light to produce many different colours, hues and iridescences. Most butterfly wings are a mixture of the two types.

Even though the wings are fairly flat structures at magnifications of 100x and above several images are still needed to create the one focused image because of the microscope's small depth of field. The images on this page were combined from between 16 and 28 images each with CombineZP software. An inexpensive LED photo light was used for illumination.

Part of the wing pattern of a Tortoiseshell Butterly 100x magnification. You can see two types of scales here placed alternately along the rows. The pigmentary scales are less transparent and have more serrated  edges than the structural scales between them.

The above image shows the boundary of one of the black spots on the wing of a Small White butterfly x200.