Only 1 in 10 plant has the colour blue and far fewer in the animal kingdom, most of them are due to the effect of light on their body and not due to their physical appearance. why is it so rare if flying predator can easily hide themselves?.
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Higher wavelengths of light contain more energy than lower wavelengths of light. So blue and violet light contains more energy than red, orange, yellow, and green light.
When light interacts with chemicals, those chemicals are structurally altered based on how much energy is in the light they interact with.
Red, orange, yellow and green light tends not to have enough energy to destroy the chemical compounds that it interacts with, and lots of chemical can scatter these colors of light without being degraded. Thus there are many persistent chemicals in nature that appear red, orange, yellow and green, and these chemicals can used as pigments by organisms.
But blue and violet light are more likely to destroy the chemicals that scatter them, because they contain more energy. Thus not many chemicals that scatter blue and violet can be used as effective pigments, because they are not durable and it costly to keep producing more and more.
Most organism that have blue colorations have to use a different means to scatter blue light. Instead of using chemicals as pigments, animals like birds and butterflies use nano-scale structures in their feathers or wing-scales that have the effect of diffracting and selectively scattering blue light. But these structures are complex, and so only evolve under very strong selection pressure and only under just the right pre-existing genetic conditions.
Simply put, most plants and animals are made from carbon and other nonmetallic elements. Those elements don’t have many chemical bonds that reflect just blue light because of the energy associated with blue light and the chemical bonds in organic chemistry. We’ve been able to incorporate transition metals into our dyes and those elements do produce blue light but are not widely incorporated in organic dyes.
I feel like maybe it could partially be because blue is a rather noticeable color. Among browns, blacks, greys, and other dull shades, a blue flower or a blue insect is going to stick out to other creatures.
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