From the iridescent blue wings of the Eumaeus atala butterfly to the painted lady’s signature fiery orange, it’s no secret butterflies have some pretty captivating flappers. For a long time, it seemed as if the insects achieved such radiance through sets of lifeless cells. But now, new research suggests a butterfly’s wings actually contain a network of living cells that serve a key purpose: to carefully regulate wing temperature. This network can contain something called a “wing heart,” which beats a few dozen times per minute to control blood flow.

To better understand such complex structures within butterfly wings, researchers from Columbia and Harvard developed a new infrared imaging technique.

The team removed the wing scales of more than 50 butterfly species to get a closer look at the interior neurons lurking underneath. Their custom thermal camera then recorded the wing’s cooling process, highlighting where heat dissipated from certain areas.

Ultimately, as they showcase in their study published last week in Nature, they produced colorful maps of temperature distributions among butterfly wings.

“This has been difficult to do until now because of the thinness and delicacy of butterfly wings,” says study author Naomi E. Pierce, an entomologist at Harvard University. Their noninvasive thermal camera was key in observing fragile wing structures without disturbing them.

The heat maps illuminate the narrow temperature range that butterflies require to soar at their best. They rely on the sun as their primary heat source—but a butterfly’s wings can quickly overheat in the sun, while cold environments can slow blood blow and hinder their movement.

To recreate the insect’s natural environment, researchers simulated sunlight by shining a lamp from above; they found that the butterfly wing’s living cells sense the sun’s direction and intensity, and counter with certain behaviors to maintain an ideal temperature. For example, some species may correspondingly close their wings or tilt away from the sun.

“They’re very much able to sense heat on their wings,” says Adriana Briscoe, an evolutionary biologist at University of California, Irvine who wasn’t involved with the study. “It’s super cool to show that [butterflies] both sense the heat and respond behaviourally, looking in detail at the physiological basis of it.”

Briscoe recently published a different study that also examined butterfly thermoregulation, though her team focused on behavior within real-life habitats. A warming world will challenge butterflies as they adapt to their local environments, Briscoe says.

In the future, the Columbia and Harvard teams hope that a butterfly’s heat regulation techniques could inform the development of heat-resistant aircrafts. This could be particularly useful since high temperatures have already grounded commercial flights.

“This is an inspiration for designing the wings of flying machines,” study author Nanfang Yu, an applied physicist at Columbia University, said in a press release. “Perhaps wing design should not be solely based on considerations of flight dynamics.”

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After much anticipation, we now know exactly how millipedes have sex. With the help of imaging techniques that take advantage of glowing millipede tissues, researchers have illuminated this arthropod’s intricate mating process. This finding marks the conclusion of a nearly 80-year quest to uncover the millipede’s genital structure.

After a pair of millipedes started getting it on, researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago scanned both individuals and one male-female pair in an electron microscope. They also captured dozens of photos at slightly varying angles on a digital camera. By layering them digitally, they were able to clarify tiny genital details. They photographed the millipedes in both natural and ultraviolet lights, since their genitals glow under UV lighting. In a press release, the Field Museum compared the resulting photos to “a rave, albeit one made up of microscopic millipede genitalia.”

Over at UC Davis, collaborating scientists placed individual millipedes into test tubes and ran micro-CT scans, which captured and layered a series of X-ray images to visualize the bugs in 3D without the need for any dissection. The team published their findings in the journal Arthropod Structure & Development.

By examining the 3D renderings, the researchers noted that male and female millipedes likely mate in a “lock-and-key” formation. Researchers learned that the male’s gonopods—the specialized pair of legs used to insert sperm into the female—first become covered in blue-ish ejaculate. Then, he places a tiny, fleshy part of the gonopods into the female’s vulvae. At this point, the two millipedes “lock” together.

Post-coitus, the female vulvae may seal themselves closed with a gooey secretion that traps the sperm inside. When she lays her eggs, they’re coated with the stored sperm, which completes the fertilization process.

The team specifically studied the Pseudopolydesmus genus, made up of half-inch-long brown millipedes native to North America. There are more than 13,000 known millipede species total, and they each mate in unique ways. But Pseudopolydesmus caught scientists’ attention because they appear especially eager to have sex.

“One of the problems with millipedes is that they do a lot of things while they are dug into the ground, and if you take them out, you will disturb them and they’ll stop what they’re doing,” study author Petra Sierwald said in a press release. “[Pseudopolydesmus] will even mate in the lab in the Petri dish under the light.”

The millipede’s multitude of legs typically obscure the complexity of their mating process. The CT-scanning provided a clear view of the female’s vulvae glands and provided a better understanding of millipede sex mechanics.

Their discovery could eventually aid scientists in understanding the relationship between different millipede species, along with their broader evolution. Right now, for example, we don’t have the slightest idea of what most millipedes’ vulvae look like. Further research could assist in determining their current state of biodiversity, according to a complementary 2019 study.

And as Sierwald noted in the press release, the leggy, promiscuous arthropods could also “tell us about the geologic history of North America. As mountain ranges and rivers formed, groups of millipedes would get cut off from each other and develop into new species.”

Today, the leggy arthropods face challenges from climate change. As the world warms, millipedes will expand north, Sierwald says, just as they did post-Pleistocene as glaciers receded and forests spread. But a more imminent threat comes from deforestation and soil erosion, which devastates leaf litter that millipedes munch on. Conversely, disappearing millipedes could cause an excess of rotten leaves in deciduous forests. On the whole, there’s still a lot to learn about our many-legged friends—and understanding the graphic intricacies of their copulation process is a key step forward.

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Pictures capture everything that a short glance can’t, including nature’s swift pace and the commotion of our daily lives. Smithsonian magazine’s 17th annual photo contest gives photographers all over the world a chance to show off their once-in-a-lifetime snaps. See all 60 finalists and vote for your favorite Readers’ Choice photo here by March 30. Check out some of our favorites below.

Blooming

Train Through the Mountains

Black Swan

Shields Strikes Back

Hot Kiss

Aerial Combat

A Fish Seller Displays His Goods

Rhino Ranger

Larung Gar Buddhist Academy

Portrait of Endurance Athlete Anders Hofman

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