What do the “hairs” of a feather really look like? (BioE80 Spr2015)

May 25, 2015 • 12:10 AM UTC

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When I first saw a feather as a child, I remember thinking that birds have hair on their feathers, just like humans! My elementary school science teacher was quick to correct me. She told me that birds do not have hair on their feathers, but instead have unique micro-structures called barbs that are quite different from the micro-structure of hair. Now, 12 years later, equipped with a Foldscope, I was ready to revisit the question I asked as a child. What do the “hairs” of a feather really look like?
Below is a sample feather taken from Wikipedia.

Feather of a little bird – Wikipedia In our exploration, we found a feather similar to the ones above (not pictured). We took the feather and examined the micro-structure of the “hairs” under the Foldscope. When we zoom in on one of the “hairs”, we see that each hair looks like an individual feather in itself!

It turns out, when you look more closely, the “hairs” of a feather have their own hairs that branch outwards similar to the structure of the entire feather, but on a much smaller scale.

With a little bit of online research, we can see that the “hairs” of a feather (which are actually called barbs) have “hairs” of their own, which are called barbules. The barbules are the tiny, light-colored strands that branch out of the thicker, dark-colored barbs in the pictures above.

Parts of a feather – Arizona State University Without a microscope, the barbules are close to impossible to see. To the human eye it looks as if each barb is a single strand, just like human hair, but this is not the case as we can see from our exploration!
Authors: Emily Marx and Saunders Hayes

What do the “hairs” of a feather really look like? (BioE80 Spr2015)

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