Suspicious dynastes hercules blue type

[Joon]

Hello, I am new to this forum. My name is Richard. I'm from Florida. I started collecting prioninae and dynastinae few months ago.

A month ago, I read an interesting topic posted in insectnet. It was about dynastes hercules blue type. Usually Japanese dealers sell blue type hercules at higher price.

I was curious about it. So I decided to test it out. I left my A2 yellow dynastes hercules lichyi out to the sun for one month. And the color changed.

The first picture was taken on December 28th.

[Joon]

second photo taken on January 9th

[Joon]

Finally, taken on January 18th

[lucanidae25]

UV light will destroy all the yellow pigments and leaving only the blue behind. Which is very unusual in nature, normally the blue pigments get destroyed frist.

[Joon]

Isn't sunlight part of the nature?

I think it will destroy their yellow pigments first even in nature.

[lucanidae25]

In nature normally the blue pigments will be destroyed by the UV frist before the red and yellow. It's very hard to find any living thing to fade to a blue.

[simosg]

Very interesting experiment Richard!

I don't know much about the lifecycle of hercules, but as they live in the wood I guess they will not have the time to stay one month in the sun in their life as in your experiment. So this could be the reason why blue ones are very rare in nature.

lucanidae25: I think this experiment shows that the blue pigments don't get destroyed for first, at least at hercules. Probably that's a speciality of hercules? Of course an experiment with only one specimen could not provide a proof.

Hannes

[lucanidae25]

I've already done this same experiment 2 years ago with the same result but I used a lamp with white light for more than 2 months. It turned out to be the same colour blue.

I've seen live really blue bred dynastes hercules in Japan but it was borned with out the yellow pigments but they're as rare as albino.

[Joon]

Thank you Hannes

Any insects will not survive if they stay one month in the sun. But dead insects could have left out to the sun for long time. In nature, there is a "rare" chance of being exposed to the sun for long time XD.

lucanidae25: Japanese seller told me that they expose UV light to the fresh dynastes hercules that have just emerged from pupae. That's how they get the live blue hercules beetle.

[simosg]

It comes to my mind, that this effect can also be seen at the males of Ornithoptera, there are one or two threads around about this.

Hannes

[Joon]

simosg
Yeah I heard about the blue Ornithoptera. I think it was a Japanese who did that on purpose.

[johnnyboy]

Blue Dynastes hercules do occur naturally. I have one that was wild caught in Ecuador, in the 1980's, a collector friend of mine was there when it was caught. I paid the same amount for it as I would have for the normal brown type, the Ecuadorean who caught it reckoned the blue form wasn't that rare.

As as been said, the situation is probably as for Blue Ornithoptera forms, they do occur naturally but are also produced artificially in a lot of cases.

I also have a black D. hercules that started off brown but slowly darkened as grease from the body seeped into the wing case cuticle.

I also have two olive green D. hercules, one was from a very old museum display and had no data but looks to be a nominate form.

Johnny