It may look like a plastic bead your kid keeps trying to put in his mouth, but this bright blue Pollia fruit actually grows in central African forests and is, a new study found, the shiniest known living thing on earth. Each fruit is smaller than a blueberry, but the skin has a unique iridescent structure that creates this crazy color by refracting the light it bounces back at your eye, much like butterfly wings. And unlike the pigment-based blue in a blueberry's skin, this kind of structure-based color doesn't fade--the Pollia fruit that the study is based on was actually collected in Ghana in 1974, but remains as bright as the day it was plucked.
Sadly for us, the fruit doesn't taste like much. Discover Magazine says that "they're practically a dry seed-filled husk," and the researchers hypothesize that the Pollia shines so bright to compete with another blue berry that grows nearby. The neighbor berry actually does taste good, so birds might mistake the brightly-advertised blue of the Pollia for a juicy snack, only to end up stuck carrying a bunch of shiny seeds. As Discover notes, "it's an evolutionary triumph of style over substance."
[via Discover Magazine]