The butterfly works like LED technology

When scientists invented the light-emitting tools, they did not know that butterflies used this technology 30 million years ago.

Fluorescent patches on the wings of African terns behave similarly to light-emitting diodes (LEDs)

This LED technology is now used in electronic devices and monitors.

A study by the University of Exeter, UK, was published in the journal Science.

In 2001, Alexei Erchak and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented a way to make LEDs more efficient.

And Pete Vukusic and Ian Hooper of the University of Exeter have demonstrated that tailed butterflies use the same method to signal each other.

Swallowtail butterflies live in eastern and central Africa. This butterfly has dark wings with bright blue patches.

The wings of the tundra butterfly serve as two-dimensional crystals filled with pigment and structured in such a way that they can produce highly concentrated fluorescence.

The colored patches on the butterfly wings absorb ultraviolet light, then replay, using fluorescence, into blue light rays.