Deconstructed beetles: green composite materials with potential for passive cooling due to high near-infrared reflectivity - Data and Code

This data allowed us to describe the optical properties and underlying structures that produce very high near-infrared reflectance in three species of green scarab beetles Xylonichus eucalypti, Anoplognathus prasinus and Paraschizognathus olivaceus. Although the chiral structures in scarabs have been well described in previous literature, we have limited knowledge of the natural mechanisms to manipulate near-infrared light (NIR; 700 – 1700 nm). In addition, previous studies in light manipulation by the beetle elytra have been focused mainly on the cuticle. Thus, our aim was to explore if other elements in the elytra can contribute to their characteristic visible and NIR reflectance. This dataset contains different types of data including reflectance and transmittance spectra, morphological data of the shape and dimension of the nanostructures that reflect light in the beetle elytron, and results of computational models simulating different scenarios to understand how these structures interact with light. Thus, we are attaching a readme file inside the folder "Data" explaining the data collection and usage for each file. Our Highlights: - The studied beetle species have similar high NIR reflectance and green appearance. - The elytra of these species contains bilayered composite materials, where a structural component reflects light and an overlaying thin layer filters only the reflectance in the visible spectrum. We showed that the transmittance of the outermost component of the composite materials is similar in the three species. - We characterized the shape of the nanostructures that produce broadband reflectance in Xylonichus eucalypti. - We compared different simulated scenarios where the nanostructures varied in separation and size and were illuminated with different polarizations and angle of incidence.