Specimens were placed on a board and a probe moved over the wings
A way to identify individual butterflies from the same species has been designed by scientists in Hungary, who say that the technique could be used to analyse delicate museum samples without destroying them.
László Biró at the Research Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science and colleagues have developed an instrument that allows reflectance spectroscopy to be carried out on specimens without physically damaging them.
Want to know more? Read Harriet Brewerton’s news article at Chemistry World or access the full paper for FREE:
Color based discrimination of chitin–air nanocomposites in butterfly scales and their role in conspecific recognition
Gábor Piszter, Krisztián Kertész, Zofia Vértesy, Zsolt Bálint and László Péter Biró
Anal. Methods, 2011
DOI: 10.1039/c0ay00410c
