Suzanne Williams
speaker
225 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Suzanne Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Most colors that we see in shells are coming from pigments.
But then you can also get color coming from structural color.
And structural color is due to small repeating nanostructures that interfere with light.
So some light gets transmitted and some wavelengths get reflected, but they also get amplified.
So these colors can be really vibrant and really colorful.
And you can also get iridescent color so that this changes with the angle of viewing.
And one of the best examples of this is actually blue bird feathers.
There are no blue bird feather pigments.
All blue bird feather color is due to structural color.
So if you could grind a feather up, a blue feather up as small as you can, enough to destroy these nanostructures, you will never get blue dust because those nanostructures aren't colored.
Well, yes, it's amazing.
The mollusks are so colourful and so diverse, but colour can serve different functions.
It can serve visual roles and non-visual roles.
So Liz has listed one non-visual role for iridescence that is mechanical strengthening.
The same is true for some pigments.
So there are some very fragile jingle shells, bivalves, that have carotenoid pigments, and they increase the strength and elasticity of shells.
And color can also help with temperature control and thermoregulation.
So there's a flat periwinkle and the yellow morphs survive higher temperatures better than dark morphs.
The pigments have also been implicated in things like wound healing, antimicrobial protection, protection from ultraviolet radiation.
There's a lot of non-visual roles it can serve.
Showing 41–60 of 225 · page 3 of 12
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