There’s blue, green, red, purple, etc. birds but most other animals are just brown/black/white. Why is that?
And follow-up question: Would it be possible to genetically modify an animal’s fur to make it a different color?
edit: To the one guy who commented here: Mate, I think you’re shadowbanned. I can’t see your comment.
In: Biology
What do you mean by “other animals”? Insects have just as many colours as birds. So do fish, amphibians, reptiles, octopus, shrimp….
Actually the only major group of animals that doesn’t really have a whole rainbow of colours are *mammals*. No blue cows. (although blue shows up very rarely in some mammal groups like mandrills). In the early days of mammal evolution colour probably wasn’t very important, they probably did not use elaborate visual displays and so they didn’t need any colour the way a peacock needs colour.
Basically the only colour pigment mammals make is **melanin** which ranges from yellow to brown to black. Our blue eyes do not use a blue pigment but rather blue eyes is created by molecular structure scattering effect, and brown eyes is brown melanin pigment
Could we edit the genes of a mammal to have other colours? maybe. We CAN edit the genes of a mammal, they put glow in the dark jellyfish genes in a cat (true story). Colour pigments are hard though, coloured fur would need to alter not just adding pigment but likely changing the actual molecular structure of the fur. would probably take a lot more work.
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