WATCH: How Do Chameleons Change Color?

Screenshot photo from YouTube

Are you familiar with a Chameleon? Chameleon is a small slow-moving Old World Lizard with a prehensile tail, long extendable tongue, eyes that rotate independently and a highly developed ability to change its colors. Chameleon is one of the most famous creatures on the animal kingdom because of their camouflage abilities that they can use to protect themselves from other animals. But do you know that chameleons’ natural color is green and they naturally blend themselves into their surrounding? When a male chameleon is getting excited with a female chameleon it changes the color of their skin to a brighter color of orange, yellow and red to stand out. In a chameleon’s skin, they have cells that contain color pigments, some are yellow, some are red and others are dark melanin pigment. Chameleons can spread the melanin pigments into their bodies along the fingery extensions of the cell and turns light again by condensing the pigment back to its spot. But Biologist and Physicist at the University of Geneva show that this is incorrect. The mere fact that chameleons didn’t have green pigment, these colors was only created by two distinct mechanisms, pigmet color and structural color. But how about Veritasium? This video explains it all.

Source: Veritasium YouTube Channel