SEVEN COLOURS
Sir David takes us across the world from the rainforests of Costa Rica to the snowy Scottish mountains to show us how animals use colour to attract mates and repel rivals or how animals use colour to lie and hide. We’ll learn many colourful facts in the series. Here are seven of our favourites…
Violet: The Costas hummingbird, normally well camouflaged in its desert habitat, looks like a drab little thing. Until the male flashes his bright violet throat feathers to potential mates and shows it off “just for her” with a special dance to help it to catch the light.
Indigo: Australia’s blue-moon butterfly looks, to the human eye, brown with blue and white spots. But using the ultraviolet range the butterfly females can see, the cameras reveal he has brilliant purple-blue patches on his wings. The more intense they are, the better health it signals to the female.
Blue: The blue-striped blenny mimics the colours of a cleaner fish to lure in unsuspecting prey on the Great Barrier Reef. When the bigger fish come in for a cleaning, the blenny darts out and snaps a bite out of them before vanishing.
Green: The male magnificent bird-of-paradise skillfully uses the neon green mouth and dazzling, iridescent green chest to entrance females, and he’ll clear anything green out of his display area so that his chest feather flash stand out better.
Yellow: A yellow Australian crab spider already looks well camouflaged against a yellow daisy. Aside from revealing how the spider changes the colour of its skin depending which flower it’s hiding in, the series reveals what our eyes don’t see: the spider reflects a bright UV light to lure insect pollinators into landing right on them when the insects visit their flowery targets.
Orange: The Bengal tiger looks like a patch of drab, jungle green to deer, who can’t see red or orange. The darker stripes just look like streaks of shadow from grasses or branches.
Red: The strawberry poison dart frog’s bright red body signals many things, from its status as one of the most poisonous creatures in the rainforest, to its health and strength. But they’re not always red; in fact, they’re the most brightly and varicoloured frogs in the world.