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In the science of the very small,

some ingenious inventors are inspiring materials

with wondrous properties.

Sensitive to climate change.

They can act as a sentinel for our interaction with the planet.

Brilliant color without paint.

What we see here is a close-up.

We see that the blue comes from the background scales.

Protection from hazardous chemicals and bacteria.

The word "contaminated" on the glove

will turn from blue to red

when you touch a surface that is contaminated.

Even an unsinkable metal.

As our ocean level

continue to go up,

in the future,

a lot of city will have to be built on top of the ocean.

All thanks to the millions of years of evolution

packed into the remarkable world of butterflies and moths.

There's many problems that humans haven't solved

that butterflies and moths already have.

"Butterfly Blueprints," right now, on "NOVA."

Butterflies and moths.

Graceful and beautiful.

Their delicate wings seem barely suitable for flight.

In spring and summer, they appear in our skies,

flitting

and floating.

Their dazzling colors and patterns

are among the most amazing in the animal kingdom.

Some estimates put the number of species

around 160,000,

and they thrive in nearly

every nook and cranny of our planet.

If you go to the northern latitudes,

you'll find butterflies.

If you go to the desert, you'll find butterflies.

If you go to the rainforest,

you'll find butterflies and moths.

Their variety and beauty

are testimony to the power of evolution,

as are their countless hidden features--

some visible only with the most powerful microscopes.

Today, scientists around the world

are studying these natural treasures.

Gorgeous.

Discovering secrets that can be adapted

and applied to make our world more sustainable.

They're so beautiful,

but we can learn a lot by studying them.

As champions of evolution,

they've been at it for tens of millions of years.

Butterflies emerged around the same time as

flowering plants.

Throughout their long history,

they have diversified and developed

amazing adaptations, like

powerful poisons, silk thread,

stationary flight, transparent materials,

temperature regulation,

astonishing colors and patterns,

and defenses against bacterial infections.

They have so much to teach us.

But today, many species are in danger of

extinction, threatened by a warming world.

And if we can find ways to save them,

it's becoming clear that we'll also be helping ourselves.

In North America, an iconic species

is particularly vulnerable to climate change

and habitat loss.

Delbert André Green II,

a researcher at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,

studies the complex life cycle of the monarch butterfly.

One of the questions that I get asked most often is,

why should we expend so much resources

into this one particular species,

this one butterfly?

What makes it so special?

What really makes monarchs special is,

they can act as a sentinel

for our interaction with the planet.

Their migration covers an entire continent.

That migration begins each fall

when millions of monarchs take off from Canada

and the Northern United States and head for Mexico,

where they remain until the following spring.

It's a 3,000-mile test of endurance

that lasts up to two months.

If we look at

this population size by counting the number of monarchs

that make it to Mexico,

that number has been declining pretty consistently

over the past two decades.

And that's, we still consider worrisome.

Delbert believes the decline

can be used to gauge the level of environmental change

that the butterflies encounter on their journey.

If there aren't enough nectaring flowers

along the migration route,

then monarchs won't be able to power

the entire flight.

That's also going to be impacted by climate

and by how we change the landscape

through our own development or agricultural practices.

In Mexico,

monarchs that survive the journey gather together,

forming spectacular wreaths of living color.

Snuggled close together,

they fall into a kind of hibernation called diapause.

As their metabolism slows, they suspend activity,

storing their energy until the spring returns.

But during this time, they are still vulnerable.

Diapause conditions have to be

almost perfect in order for them

to be able to survive the winter.

If temperatures are changing at the overwintering site,

then that's going to lead to

kind of this disturbance in, potentially, diapause timing.

During their diapause,

monarchs endure a very sensitive and crucial time.

Diapause allows them to

slowly burn through their fat stores.

So if it ends too early, they're going to start

burning through their fat stores more quickly,

and they're going to be more susceptible to infection,

which will potentially increase mortality

at the overwintering sites

before spring arrives,

and the temperatures become warm enough

such that they can mate

and start to fly back northwards.

By monitoring monarch populations,

scientists can gain insight into how a warming climate

can disrupt ecosystems,

threatening not only monarchs, but other species, as well.

Butterflies are giving scientists like Delbert

a window into our changing climate.

But that's only the beginning of what studies

of these remarkable creatures are revealing--

particularly about the structure of materials

at the nanoscopic scale.

Researchers have been inspired by

incredible nanoscopic structures

in the wings and bodies of butterflies,

enabling the creation of innovative technologies

that may one day save lives

and even help combat climate change.

Butterflies and moths have many aspects of their morphology,

of their physiology, that we could use

for bio-inspired design, for sure.

I mean, there's many things,

many problems that humans haven't solved

that butterflies and moths already have.

The use of butterfly and moth features dates back

at least 5,000 years,

when the species known as Bombyx mori

was first domesticated in China

for its ability to produce

a phenomenally resilient and versatile material--

silk.

Because of the importance of silk

to the Chinese imperial court,

the means of producing it was a heavily guarded secret,

and its violators were punished, even by death.

Today, of course, the secret is out.

The whole process starts with the hatching

of a miniscule egg

and the birth of a caterpillar that measures

less than an eighth of an inch.

From its earliest days, the Bombyx caterpillar

devours an enormous quantity

of mulberry leaves, plant matter

that it will eventually convert into silk thread.

After about a month of feeding,

the Bombyx caterpillar will find a branch to climb,

where it will begin metamorphosis

into its adult form.

For the next few days, it will tirelessly repeat

the same figure-eight movement,

while secreting a viscous filament, the silk,

eventually spinning up to a mile

of the thread into a protective cocoon.

Scientists have found that the thread is mainly comprised

of just two proteins.

Today, a whole new chapter

is opening in the story of silk.

Researchers at the Tufts Silklab in Boston

have isolated one of the proteins,

called fibroin,

and have created an innovative material.

So, we end up with a solution

that is the suspension of the fibroin molecules in water.

Once we have the solution,

this is our magical starting material to do,

to do many, many things.

And so, and so the key is that you have these proteins

that are floating in water,

and you remove water as the solvent

and you have two proteins come together

in many, many different formats.

Then you get different outcomes of materials.

To the scientists,

silk is an incredibly versatile,

environmentally friendly material.

What begins as a colorless liquid--

this gel-like solution--

can be either flexible and soluble

or as tough as Kevlar.

Luciana d'Amone is exploring medical applications.

Fibroin has an advantage

over synthetic materials like plastics

because it's compatible with the human body.

Oh, so this is the...

D' net.

...net, so these are very nice.

Yeah, but as soon as I

stretch them, they are, are breaking down.

This is going to be nice

for, like, a Band-Aid-type application

or a reconfigurable, so these are very, very pretty.

Yeah, the idea would be to

mix the drug together with a solution

and then control the release

of the drug on a higher surface area,

just stretching the net.Yeah.

The attributes,

the functional attributes that silk has

that, that give value to some of the applications of the silk,

is the fact that silk can be implanted

without an inflammatory response in the human body.

That it can, it can be eaten, it can be consumed.

In the lab, they are finding that the fibroin material

can be made to be rigid and tough

or flexible, like a film, making it an ideal material

as an implant in reconstructive surgery.

If you take this material and you know that you can

mechanically shape it

with the tools that you commonly use

in a mechanic's shop, then what you can do is,

you can generate small screws.

The screws made of fibroin

are similar to the metal screws currently used

to reconstruct bones.

They can also deliver human growth factor compounds

to help bones knit together.

So these are the worlds that come together:

the mechanical properties and the medical properties,

in a material that integrates with, with living tissue.

In liquid form, the fibroin in silk

is also being combined with chemicals that react

in the presence of

bacteriological or viral threats.

The result is an ink that can change color

when exposed to dangerous substances

in the environment.

All of the inks that are here on the tapestry react,

react to the environment,

react to the environment around it.

And so when you, when there is a change

in the environment around it,

they will change color accordingly.

This fabric is of particular interest

for making protective gear

for workers operating where they might be exposed

to dangerous substances.

So these types of inks are very interesting

to turn objects into, into sensing objects.

If you print a word with these inks

onto the surface of personal protection equipment,

so, like, a glove here,

that word will, will sense the environment around it.

In this case,

the word "contaminated" on the glove

will turn from blue to red

when you touch a surface that is contaminated.

The caterpillar that produces silk

is only one stage in the butterfly's

unique life cycle.

In all, it moves through four distinct phases:

egg,

caterpillar,

chrysalis,

and adult.

The butterfly extracts itself from its chrysalis,

dazed and fragile...

...unfolding its wings and its body

with a cloth-like rustling.

When it emerges from its chrysalis,

the adult has been completely transformed

into one of the most delicate and graceful creatures

in nature.

And, of course,

the vivid and iridescent colors and patterns

of butterfly wings are their most striking feature--

nowhere seen more brilliantly

than in the male of the morpho species

of the tropical rainforest.

In flight, its wings

seem to give off blue flashes that are hard to miss,

even in the densest forest.

Serge Berthier, a research physicist

at the Paris Institute of Nanosciences,

talks about the wings' unique properties.

Each species presents a slightly different blue

and has a slightly different wing beat,

and then variations of colors that we see here:

a phenomenon of iridescence

where the color varies in flight.

It's part of the code of communication

between males and females.

It's an impressive adaptation

to the problem of finding a mate in the forest,

but it comes with a problem.

What is so visible to the female butterfly

is also noticeable to hungry birds.

BERTHIER The male has to find a way to parry this,

that is, being very visible while not getting caught

by the first predator that comes along.

The genius of this butterfly, like many others,

is that it does not fly straight.

As it flits through the forest blinking blue,

it follows an unpredictable zig-zag path,

making it hard to track.

BERTHIER So, you have a dotted line

zig-zagging like that, which makes it almost impossible

for a bird to calculate its trajectory

and snap it up in flight.

It's the morpho's iridescent blue

that intrigues Serge and the other researchers the most.

They want to understand

how nature produces a color that looks so... unnatural.

What we see here is a close-up of this wing.

We see that the blue

comes from the background scales.

And there are scales here that clog the joints on top of them.

These are covering scales, and they are transparent--

you can see through them.

The morpho uses

a very peculiar way to generate color.

It is a structural color,

which is intrinsically different from a pigment color.

This is in contrast to regular pigment.

Pigment are like granules of pigment

that are inside of the cells that give something

a yellow or a red or a, or a green color.

The pigment color results from

the partial reflection of daylight.

When a pigment reflects a red color, for instance,

it means it has absorbed all the other colors.

But then there's this other type of coloration

that's actually not caused by a pigment.

The structures that produce the color of the morpho

are visible under the microscope.

The wings show a regular pattern of raised surfaces,

each one just one ten-millionth of a meter in size.

It's the size of these structures

that produces the wings' iridescence.

It's caused by little bumps, or, or...

Rugosities, they call them,

or little deviations in the smoothness

of the insect's skin.

And when light bounces off of that,

our eyes perceive it as being a metallic,

or shiny, or iridescent color.

The blue of the morpho's wing is not due to pigmentation,

but is generated by the structure of the wing itself.

When light strikes the wing at certain angles,

its nanoscale feature selects only

the blue frequencies, which are reflected,

resulting in an iridescent, metallic appearance.

The surprising new insight into structural color

has inspired researchers

to control light and produce color

without chemicals or paint

in all sorts of other materials.

At the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester

in the United States,

Chunlei Guo has succeeded in creating such structures.

Inspired by this morpho butterfly,

so we actually can also imprint some of these

tiny micro, nanostructures onto a material surface

and give them very unique properties.

Using an infrared laser with very short bursts of light,

they are able to sculpt nano-sized structures,

measured in billionths of a meter, into metals.

This incredible method of

creating various colors on surfaces

has not only allowed the researchers

to reproduce the color of the butterfly's wings,

it also enables them

to create a highly light-absorbing material

that could be called absolute black.

Colored metal actually will selectively absorb

a certain range of color, but reflect other colors

so that it give you a certain colored appearance.

So we create this technology, so the black metal

actually will indistinguishly absorb

all colors of, of the spectrum,

therefore it's, appear pitch-black.

These discoveries

have the potential to revolutionize solar power.

Chunlei's team found that applying these nanostructures

to a solar panel

improved its efficiency by 130%.

The nanostructures

allow the panel to absorb

almost the entire light spectrum,

minimizing loss of energy due to reflection.

As well as transforming solar power,

inspiration from butterfly wings

could lead to other innovations.

Well, I mean, butterfly and moth wings

serve multiple purposes, right?

Primarily, they're for flight.

But then, the coloration and patterns that are on the wings

are a signaling.

Sometimes it's signaling to each other,

males signaling to other males,

or males signaling to females

that's the same species.

Sometimes the signal is actually for a predator.

In nature, color plays a vital role

in both reproduction and survival.

Through either pigment or structural color,

butterfly wings

often create complex patterns

that entomologists suspect are meant to

send signals not to mates,

but to predators.

And in some cases,

present uncanny copies of similar colors and patterns

found in other living things.

Often, the butterflies and moths that you see are orange

or orange, yellow, and black.

It's a signal that

these moths or butterflies are distasteful,

and presumably birds only have to learn

one big kind of color pattern.

Orange, black, yellow: avoid.

In the plant and animal world,

orange, yellow, and black

are sometimes associated with poison.

And some butterflies seem to rely on those colors

to discourage birds from eating them.

And these two look really similar.

These are the monarch and the viceroy.

The monarch and the viceroy are easy to distinguish

because the viceroy has this additional

kind of line of dark color by the base of its wings.

This is a distasteful monarch butterfly

that birds learn to avoid.

And the viceroy mimics the monarch's coloration

presumably so that it also can be protected

and it doesn't get eaten by birds like, like blue jays.

Butterflies use a variety of defense mechanisms.

Although some boldly wear the signs of toxicity,

others prefer to pass unseen.

They melt into the surrounding colors

of their natural environment.

For example, the Greta oto,

also known as a glasswing butterfly,

relies on a double defense:

displaying some warning colors while most of the wing

is almost totally transparent--

a most unusual adaptation.

The wings' surfaces have scarcely any reflectivity.

Even glass and other human-made materials

reflect some light.

But not this butterfly wing,

which makes it extremely interesting to scientists.

Researchers at the

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany

are studying the unusual properties

of transparent-type wings like the Greta oto's.

HENDRIK HOÖLSCHER What we see on top

are these nanostructures here, nano pillars,

which have random heights.

And also the distance between the nano pillars

is a little bit random.

So they're not regularly arranged.

And this randomness is important

for the anti-reflective properties of the butterfly.

This is where the secret of the high transparency lies:

the random distribution and size of

these conical nanometric pillars

create an anti-reflective layer,

allowing light rays, even the most grazing,

to pass through the wing

without being dispersed or reflected.

This anti-reflective property

is interesting for different types of applications,

like smartphones, for instance.

In the summer, when the sun is shining,

it's hard to read and it would be nice

to have an anti-reflective screen.

And also for solar cells.

It would be interesting to have less reflection

and have more collection of the solar energy.

These researchers create a plastic film on which

they print nanostructures in imitation of those

in the crystalline-type wing.

Their goal is to create

anti-reflective materials that are highly transparent.

The nanostructures of the wings

offer other properties,

such as the ability to repel water,

known as hydrophobicity.

Staying dry is a matter of life and death for butterflies.

Mist and rain would quickly ground them

if they weren't waterproof.

BERTHIER A butterfly must not get wet.

If the wings were wet and they touched each other,

they would stick together, and the butterfly would die.

So a butterfly wing is super-hydrophobic.

That is, the wing doesn't get wet-- water forms beads.

And then the beads roll off, cleaning the wing of

all of the dust and dirt it picks up along the way.

Thanks to its nanometric structures,

the morpho's wing doesn't just rid itself of water drops,

it breaks them down into a multitude of smaller drops

that flow more easily off the surface.

In his Rochester lab,

Chunlei Guo is exploring possible engineering

applications for this extremely hydrophobic material.

In one of his experiments, he starts by laser-etching

a metallic surface with a nanoscale pattern

inspired by the morpho wing.

He's hoping to create the same water-repelling effect.

When he drops water on the surface he has created,

it is totally repelled.

The experiment is a success.

Water drops are not only repelled,

they bounce back.

With this material,

Chunlei's team seems to have created an unsinkable metal.

And what we did was, we actually utilized in,

build a metallic assembly

with a super-hydrophobic surface,

so that the hydrophobic surface, they are facing each other.

And if you put this metallic assembly inside water,

and because the inside of the assembly is super-hydrophobic,

so that it will push the water out and will prevent the water

squeezing into the metallic assembly,

and the air trapped inside will keep

the metallic assembly afloat.

Fabricating a ship's hull

using this design would have an obvious benefit.

But Chunlei believes it could also help us adapt

to climate change.

And as our ocean level continue to

go up in the future, a lot of city will have to be

built on top of the ocean.

And if we can deploy this unsinkable metal

for construction of the floating city, then the city

will never sink.

Who could have imagined that one day a ship--

or even a whole city--

might rest on a butterfly's wing?

In California,

researchers work on combining transparency

and the opposite of hydrophobicity--

extreme water absorption.

What's at stake is not rising water, but glaucoma,

a group of eye conditions that can cause blindness.

Radwanul Hasan Siddique

at Caltech is working to create a tiny implant that would work

inside the eye to help detect this devastating condition.

So, in our lab, we make an optical implant

for continuously measure the eye pressure

for glaucoma progression measurement.

Glaucoma is a condition that damages the optic nerve,

most often caused by rising internal pressure in the eye.

Today, an implant could provide easy access

and constant monitoring for a patient at risk.

But of course, anything inside the eye needs to be transparent,

especially an artificial implant.

Glass has around eight to ten percent reflection.

And that reflection basically, you can see a glare, right?

So if you see in the windows or glass at some angle,

you can see glare because of the reflection of the light.

But this glasswing butterfly,

although it's glass-like, but it doesn't have any reflection,

or almost no reflection.

For Radwanul, an implant in the eye

cannot be water-repellent like the butterfly wing.

He needs to engineer something different.

The implant is going to be in the inside of your eye

in the aqueous humor, which is a fluid.

So if it's, repels water, then it's hard to implant,

and it won't survive there.

So in our case, we need basically an opposite property,

which is super-hydrophilic.

To make his implant,

Radwanul blends two chemical compounds at very high speed.

Their combination creates nanostructures like those of

the glasswing butterfly out of a hydrophilic material

that patients' eyes can tolerate.

These randomly distributed dome-shaped nanostructures

conserve the transparent properties of their model.

Because the gaps between them are so narrow,

bacteria cannot get a grip on the surface,

reducing the risk of infection.

Once we introduce a nanostructure like the

glasswing-inspired nanostructures on the implant,

it shows better performance, has a better optical readout,

and also, it doesn't show any anti-fouling,

any fouling properties, so...

Which means no tissue are encapsulating,

no, no bacteria are sitting, and we may take a measurement

over a year inside a rabbit eye

without seeing any kind of fouling.

Not all butterfly wings are visually arresting.

The nanostructures in wings

are not only involved in color, transparency,

or tricking predators.

Some of them serve to provide direct metabolic benefits

for survival.

Like all insects, butterflies and moths

are cold-blooded.

No butterfly can take off

without a minimum of sunlight to heat its body.

Dark-winged butterflies absorb the heat of the sun

more readily and seem to have an advantage over those

with lighter-colored wings.

It might seem that a white-winged butterfly,

like the cabbage white butterfly,

would be operating at a huge disadvantage.

And yet, in the early morning,

even on cloudy days, it is one of the first arrivals

to gather nectar in flower fields.

How does it manage it?

At the Paris Institute of Nanosciences,

Serge Berthier is interested in this phenomenon.

BERTHIER So the white butterflies

cannot directly absorb light

through the wings because they're white,

and reflect all the energy.

What they do when they need to warm up is use their wings

as concentrators before taking off.

They place themselves facing the sun,

then open and close their wings like this.

As it's very reflective,

it sends a lot of light, and concentrates the light

on its back, the thorax, where the wings'

abductor muscles are located.

So when the wings concentrate the light,

the thorax will absorb all this energy.

The reflective white coloration acts as a mirror

to concentrate heat onto the animal's body.

In the tiniest details,

Serge Berthier can verify the way heat is sent to the thorax.

As with all scales, we see a network of striations,

but what's particular to the cabbage white butterfly

is that there is a network of counter-striations,

in this direction.

And small compartments are formed inside.

The cabbage white's scales

contain tightly packed ovoid-shaped granules,

like eggs in a carton.

They reflect the sun's rays, but not in all directions.

They focus the light and heat like a magnifying glass.

The butterfly then angles its wings in a way that sends

the heat down to its back.

This is how the butterfly warms up.

The butterfly just has to open and close its wings

to regulate its temperature.

In fact, it's the master of its own temperature.

Finding new ways to concentrate sunlight is important

for humans, too, in the search for cheap and efficient

replacements for fossil fuels.

In her lab at the University of Exeter,

Katie Shanks is adapting the cabbage white's

reflective nanostructures to solar panels,

working to increase their output while reducing their size.

So by looking at the wings of the cabbage white butterfly,

we can actually reduce the weight

a very significant amount.

So in initial studies, we've been able to improve

the power-to-weight ratio by 17 times,

which is, is a massive amount.

And what I'm specifically looking at is using those

very lightweight nanostructured wings to make our own

very compact advanced solar panel

built into any materials.

Today, by combining the properties of the glasswing

and cabbage white wings,

researchers are hoping to develop a new generation

of solar panels.

So the glasswing butterfly would be for the surface,

the entrance aperture.

And the cabbage white butterfly

would be for the side walls,

just before the solar cells.

And overall, that means we get this kind of

increased power output from all the solar cells,

but not using as much PV material.

And you can also make it

a lot smaller and lightweight, as well.

I mean, all of the butterflies and lots of other things

in nature have had to do this, you know,

as, as they've developed, they've evolved,

and they've tweaked themselves to suit their surroundings.

And I think we're now realizing we have to do the same

in terms of tweaking our, you know, energy demands

and our uses and our materials that we use to kind of make sure

we are also sustainable and surviving,

just as the butterflies are.

It's remarkable that butterfly wings can offer protection

from predators and rain,

and also capture the sun's rays to warm up.

But that's not the end of their impressive biology.

Their delicate antennae serve as highly sensitive

chemical-detecting noses.

They have those little pits that are inside of,

are along the length of the antennae.

And those sensory pits are basically capable of,

of detecting kind of chemical compounds,

and basically olfaction, or, or smelling.

The antennae of the male Bombyx are loaded with a multitude

of microscopic sensing organs,

known as sensilla, that vibrate at very high frequency.

They can home in on the one kind of pheromone molecule

they are looking for, among all the other ones

in suspension in the atmosphere.

In fact, some researchers believe that the silk moths

have some of the most highly developed senses of smell

in the living world.

Males are thus able to detect a female

from over six miles away,

an extraordinary feat which scientists working on

the detection of explosives or toxic gases

would love to harness.

Valérie Keller and her team are part of a program

for protecting civilian populations.

You can see on the antennas that the sensilla's structure

is kind of like tiny sticks.

We drew inspiration from them.

In fact, we are trying to do bio-inspiration by making

a synthesis in the lab that enables us

to duplicate this architecture you see in nature.

Mechanically duplicating

the anatomical genius of the Bombyx is not an easy task.

Valérie Keller's team is creating a forest of sensilla

via a chemical reaction on a titanium base.

The result is a forest-like arrangement

of titanium dioxide nanotubes.

If a chemical molecule in the air

attaches to the nanotubes,

its weight changes the vibration frequency of the forest,

slowing them down in a way that can set off an alarm.

TNT, sarin gas, and other toxic chemicals

all have their own weights.

Nanotubes are programmed to react to those signals

to trigger alarms.

At the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis,

Denis Spitzer foresees a big future for these detectors.

We can come up with stationary detectors, but then we can go on

basing them on the butterfly, that is,

we can start to make the detectors fly,

and the idea came to us to implant these detectors

on drones, so that the military

or civil security people can detect dangerous compounds.

It could be war toxins,

or sarin gas, or other extremely dangerous compounds.

Because when the person feels

the first symptoms of gas like that, it is already too late.

Drone surveillance of large urban areas

could save major populations from terrorist gas attacks.

The amazing evolutionary tricks of butterflies and moths

are not limited to their wings, or their antennae.

Unlike many insects, they don't have what might be

recognized as a mouth.

Most of the butterflies and moths that we, we think of

have a sucking mouth part, like a proboscis,

that is kind of coiled up, that kind of is like a straw.

And it kind of extends outwards

with this cranial sucking pump, and it sucks up

nectar from flowers.

Many butterflies live only for a few weeks.

But one, called Heliconius, stands out,

with a lifespan closer to six months.

This relatively long-lived butterfly fascinates

Adriana Briscoe and Larry Gilbert.

One of the ways we think they can live so long

is because they have changed their diet.

They live a long time because they have developed this ability

to harvest pollen.

While most butterflies feed mainly on nectar,

Heliconius adds pollen to its diet.

The pollen sticks to the entire length of its proboscis.

The pollen might keep the butterfly healthy,

but Adriana has found a possible medical application

derived from the way Heliconius digests the nutrient.

She's collaborating with chemist Rachel Martin.

This is the part of the proboscis

where fluids can go in...Mm-hmm.

...and they can also go out.

I was really fascinated to find out that

it acts like a sponge.

I was kind of always picturing this being

like a giant drinking straw.Oh, yeah, no.

You can see that there are these ridges

shown in green,

and those are perfect grooves for pollen to get stuck in.

When the butterflies

probe the flower,

and the pollen grains start to get stuck in those grooves,

the butterflies then release saliva from the tip

of their proboscis,

and that starts to glue things together.

It makes sense that the butterfly would have enzymes

that are really optimized

for getting into those little nooks and crannies,

and digesting the protein,

because pollen is about 20% protein, so it's a...

That's a lot.It is a lot.

The Heliconius's long life might be explained in part

by this intake of high-protein pollen,

which it actually digests on the outside of its proboscis

thanks to a very particular type of enzyme.

That enzyme is known as cocoonase,

because it was originally discovered in silk moths.

Silk moths have one version of this enzyme which they use

to digest their silk cocoons

so they can escape.

If that enzyme is not functioning,

they die in their cocoons.

By extracting this cocoonase enzyme to reproduce

its dissolving properties on a large scale,

Adriana hopes to alleviate

potentially serious medical conditions like blood clots.

Blood clots are very common in the United States.

It turns out you can take cocoonase, and in a test tube,

you can mix it up with a blood clot

and it'll break it down into its component parts.

Like the silk protein fibroin,

the cocoonase protein is also compatible with human biology.

And the longevity Heliconius

may glean from pollen shows how tightly the evolution

of butterflies depends on the plants they feed on.

Plants and butterflies have mutual evolution.

From egg to chrysalis,

many butterfly species are born, grow up, and metamorphose

on individual plant species with which they are associated.

You sometimes have a species of butterfly or moth

that is the only thing that can pollinate

a particular, a particular species of, of flower.

And so, these really tight interactions mean that

if we lose one of those members of this partnership,

then you often end up losing both species.

The fates of butterflies and plants are forever linked,

to such a degree that we cannot hope to preserve

butterflies without preserving their ecosystems.

Today's climate change may have very unfortunate consequences.

Spring has come to Mexico,

signaling to the monarchs the time to return.

But these butterflies, who migrated south in the fall,

now have to fly back north.

How will they know which way to fly?

Christine Merlin keeps a small group of monarchs for study.

Just want a cooperative one.

You know, cooperate with me.

That one is actually in the process of laying an egg.

She wants to explore and understand which specific genes

trigger the migration and guide them on their way.

This one just did.

Okay, this one is getting ready.

Christine believes that changes in the environment

trigger a response

in the migratory genes of the monarchs,

a process known as epigenetics.

I'm not as good as my student.

So with each butterfly's egg, she analyzes a range of genes

to discover which are involved with the timing

of the monarchs' navigation and which

with the direction they follow.

One of the best example of epigenetic changes

that occur in, in monarch migration

is that of the recalibration of their sun-compass orientation

from southward in the fall to northwards in, in the spring.

And...

We do believe that epigenetic changes

are responsible for this switch in flight orientation.

Migrating monarchs also use

magnetic fields to guide their flight orientation.

To find genes that allow monarchs to sense

the magnetic field, Christine uses a Faraday cage

that blocks the outside electromagnetic influences.

There, she generates her own magnetic field

to test the reaction of the monarchs' behavior.

We use a magnetic coil

to test the response of monarch butterfly

to the reversal of the inclination.

And when butterfly sense and respond to this reversal,

they start flapping their wings really strongly,

they have an active flight.

And once we reverse the magnetic field back to normal,

then the behavioral responses extinguishes itself.

The evidence is in: monarchs are genetically programmed

to align with the magnetic field, and we can see them

flap their wings when they sense it.

When the seasons change, causing a change of temperature,

a change of the angle of the sun,

as well as a change

in the daily sunshine duration,

the butterflies' genes

trigger a signal to migrate.

When in Canada and the U.S.,

the onset of fall signals departure.

"Colder-- go south!"

When in Mexico, spring tells them, "Go north!"

Given the extent that monarchs depend on temperature,

it's not surprising that climate change

worries researchers like Delbert,

who monitors monarch populations

in part to understand the risks we all face.

In that way,

by studying monarchs' biology very closely,

it indirectly tells us

our own impacts on their environment that they cover.

So we want to watch what's happening to them,

watch how they're being impacted, such that we know then

how other species may potentially being impacted,

because they're being impacted by those same climate change.

Well, butterflies and moths are really a big part

of the whole ecosystem.

So, if we were to lose a certain species,

or groups of species, like butterflies and moths,

we'd lose pollinators, for sure,

but we'd also lose an important diet for birds.

We'd lose an important diet

for other insects, like dragonflies.

We'd lose important diet items even for people.

Because there are people that like to eat these, these

as food items.

So, it's a kind of a cascading effect.

It's not just that you would lose this one insect.

You would actually lose many members of the community

to which it belongs.

And that's, I think, the thing

that we're, we're working against.

Butterflies and moths

are inspiring scientists and engineers

to create remarkable inventions.

From the nanoscopic structures on their wings

that create color and transparency

to their ability to repel water and fight infection,

they offer lessons about what's possible

at the very smallest scale.

But they also present us with a warning

about what's at stake if we fail

as stewards of this endlessly inventive natural environment.