Scientists' additional knowledge about how cuttlefish camoflouge themselves will help military members during war times a Harvard press release reported.
"Nature solved the riddle of adaptive camouflage a long time ago," Kevin Parker, Tarr family professor of bio-engineering and applied physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) said in a statement. "Now, the challenge is to reverse-engineer this system in a cost-efficient, synthetic system that is amenable to mass manufacturing," Parker said in the statement. Parker is also a core faculty member at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering the press release reported.
The discovery might also be used for paint, cosmetics, and consumer electronic supplies. The fish or the chameleon of the sea quickly adjusts its skin color and design the press release reported.
"Chromatophores were previously considered to be pigmentary organs that acted simply as selective color filters," Leila Deravi, a research associate in bioengineering at the school said in a statement. "But our results suggest that they play a more complex role; they contain luminescent protein nanostructures that enable the cuttlefish to make quick and elaborate changes in its skin pigmentation," Deravi said in the statement.
The chromatophores, or cells with color pigments enlarge when the cuttlefish begins to change its color the press release reported.
"The cuttlefish uses an ingenious approach to materials composition and structure, one that we have never employed in our engineered displays," Evelyn Hu co-author of the report said in a statement.
"It is extremely challenging for us to replicate the mechanisms that the cuttlefish uses. For example, we cannot yet engineer materials that have the elasticity to expand 500 times in surface area," Hu said in the statement. "And were we able to do that, the richness of color of the expanded and unexpanded material would be dramatically different," Hu said in the statement. "Think of stretching and shrinking a balloon. The cuttlefish may have found a way to compensate for this change in richness of color by being an 'active' light emitter (fluorescent), not simply modulating light through passive reflection," Hu said in the statement.
Hu is also a professor of applied physics and electrical Engineering at SEAS. Enthusiasts can find the work in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
