Humans provide a direct threat to this genus because their beauty attracts artists and collectors from all over the globe who wish to capture and display them.

[5] The genus name Morpho comes from an Ancient Greek epithet μορφώ, roughly "the shapely one", for Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.

Specifically, the microscopic scales covering the morpho's wings reflect incident light repeatedly at successive layers, leading to interference effects that depend on both wavelength and angle of incidence/observance.

[8] Thus, the colors appear to vary with viewing angle, but they are surprisingly uniform, perhaps due to the tetrahedral (diamond-like) structural arrangement of the scales or diffraction from overlying cell layers.

The Christmas tree-like pattern helps to reduce the directionality of the reflectance by creating an impedance matching for blue wavelengths.

The lamellate structure of their wing scales has been studied as a model in the development of biomimetic fabrics, dye-free paints, and anticounterfeit technology used in currency.

An unusual species, fundamentally white in coloration, but which exhibits a stunning pearlescent purple and teal iridescence when viewed at certain angles, is the rare M. sulkowskyi.

Indeed, M. cypris is notable in that specimens mounted in entomological collections exhibit color differences across the wings if they are not 'set' perfectly flat.

In some species (for instance M.adonis, M. eugenia, M. aega, M. cypris, and M. rhetenor), only the males are iridescent blue; the females are disruptively colored brown and yellow.

In other species (for instance M. anaxibia, M. godarti, M. didius, M. amathonte, and M. deidamia), the females are partially iridescent, but less blue than the males.

Morphos have a very distinctive, slow, bouncy flight pattern due to the wing area being enormous relative to the body size.

Its hairs are irritating to human skin, and when disturbed it secretes a fluid that smells like rancid butter from eversible glands on the thorax.

Significant numbers of live specimens are exported as pupae from several Neotropical countries for exhibition in butterfly houses.

Many morphos have switched to dicots on several occasions during their evolutionary history, but basal species have retained the monocot diets.

Famous collections include those of the London jeweler Dru Drury and the Dutch merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, the Paris diplomat Georges Rousseau-Decelle, the financier Walter Rothschild, the Romanov Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia and the, English and German respectively, businessmen James John Joicey and Curt Eisner.