There are more than 140,000 species of butterflies and moths in the world, fluttering on every continent except Antarctica. Their wings contain countless patterns and colors, providing critical tools for camouflage, finding mates and scaring off predators.

A Bay Area professor is trying to learn more about how those colors develop and evolve – by going very, very small.

Nipam Patel, a professor in the Molecular & Cell Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, studies the thousands of tiny cells, known as scales, on butterflies’ wings.

From a distance, the rows and rows of scales look like vivid patterns that decorate a butterfly's wings. But up close, each scale is like a dab of paint in a Pointillist painting or a tile in a mosaic; they represent an individual unit of color.

"Each scale is...a single cell, and as far as cells go, they are huge, much larger than the typical cells in our bodies," says Patel, who also works in Berkeley’s Integrative Biology Department. "A human blood cell is about 10 microns in size -- a pretty typical size for a cell in our bodies. A butterfly scale is...a huge one, about 50 microns across and 200-250 microns long."

Some butterfly scales are colored by pigments. But others rely on something called “structural color” -– the production of color by nano-sized elaborate shapes that reflect and bend light. Structural color is why we perceive the Morpho butterfly, a dazzling type of blue butterfly found in South America, Mexico and Central America, as bright blue, along with peacock feathers, iridescent beetles and blue eyes.