Mantis shrimps have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom and have the most complex front-end for any visual system ever discovered. Compared with the three types of photoreceptor cell that humans possess in their eyes, the eyes of a mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptor cells. Furthermore, some of these stomatopods can tune the sensitivity of their long-wavelength colour vision to adapt to their environment. (Wiki)
The wavelength of Magenta doesn’t actually exist. It’s our red and blue photoreceptors activating without the green ones. It blows my mind how many non-existent colors mantis shrimp can see.
TIL this was refuted. Instead it was determined that shrimps lack the brainpower to properly process which us why they have more photoreceptor cells. They actually see less color overall.
So, I came back to this thread after seeing another on mantis shrimp colour drama further down: apparently their extra photoreceptor variety doesn’t (might not?) increase their colour vision range because their brains can’t merge the signals like ours do.
It’s not about to see better, but seeing a wider range of colors and even polarized light. It’s like having a sniper scope with night vision, just what these critters need to capture their prey. They do not need a clear vision more than one meter. just the distance to knock out the prey with the fastest fists in the west or in the case of the Pistol shrimp, which can close its pincer with such violence to produce a plasma bubble with the effect of a small caliber revolver (the aquariums with these need reinforced glass)
As far as I understand it, they cannot blend the different light components nearly as well as humans do (e.g. seeing red and green at the same time and deduce that is yellow).
Mantis shrimps have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom and have the most complex front-end for any visual system ever discovered. Compared with the three types of photoreceptor cell that humans possess in their eyes, the eyes of a mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptor cells. Furthermore, some of these stomatopods can tune the sensitivity of their long-wavelength colour vision to adapt to their environment. (Wiki)
https://viewtube.io/watch?v=Qts264cpvfs
The wavelength of Magenta doesn’t actually exist. It’s our red and blue photoreceptors activating without the green ones. It blows my mind how many non-existent colors mantis shrimp can see.
TIL this was refuted. Instead it was determined that shrimps lack the brainpower to properly process which us why they have more photoreceptor cells. They actually see less color overall.
So, I came back to this thread after seeing another on mantis shrimp colour drama further down: apparently their extra photoreceptor variety doesn’t (might not?) increase their colour vision range because their brains can’t merge the signals like ours do.
It’s not about to see better, but seeing a wider range of colors and even polarized light. It’s like having a sniper scope with night vision, just what these critters need to capture their prey. They do not need a clear vision more than one meter. just the distance to knock out the prey with the fastest fists in the west or in the case of the Pistol shrimp, which can close its pincer with such violence to produce a plasma bubble with the effect of a small caliber revolver (the aquariums with these need reinforced glass)
While they do have many kinds of photoreceptors, and can therefore see a large range of colours, they have very limited colour resolution: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578
As far as I understand it, they cannot blend the different light components nearly as well as humans do (e.g. seeing red and green at the same time and deduce that is yellow).