Hummingbird eyes can detect UV, allowing them to see the world in colors that humans can't even imag

[Judi Lynn]

A fourth color cone type in the hummingbird's eyes allows the birds to see in extra colors tinted in ultraviolet.

by Tibi Puiu June 15, 2020



The male broad-tailed hummingbird can see combinations of colors like ultraviolet plus green or ultraviolet plus red. In fact, the bird’s throat, which looks like magenta to us, is likely perceived as ultraviolet plus purple by birds.


Compared to many birds, such as the delightful hummingbird (Colibri), humans are color-blind, says Mary Caswell Stoddard. The Princeton University professor, along with colleagues, showed that hummingbirds are able to discriminate various ultraviolet (UV) color combinations, allowing the birds to see the world in additional colors that humans can’t even comprehend.

A hidden world of ultraviolet
Humans essentially see the world in a combination of three colors: red, green, and blue. Each primary color is detected and decoded by corresponding specialized cones in the eye.

The hummingbird, however, has a fourth color cone, which extends its color-vision range into the ultraviolet. But, how exactly does this additional color cone morph the bird’s vision?

In their new study, Stoddard and colleagues left their labs at Stanford and traveled to Gothic, Colorado, for fieldwork in the alpine meadows each summer over the course of three years.

More:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/hummingbird-see-non-spectral-colors-05235/

[at140]

1. That hummingbird looks exactly like the one

who feeds regularly in my backyard feeder...almost exact coloring.

[Cicada]

2. CDa29, a British woman, also sees 99 million extra colors

Her vision matches that of the four cone humming bird. https://futurism.com/uk-woman-extra-cone-cell-her-eyes-can-see-more-colors

[Clash City Rocker]

3. Butterflies have five color cones, but that's not the record

This is a mantis shrimp.



Some mantis shrimps have as many as sixteen color cones. They can see far into the infrared and the ultraviolet. Some of them also have a claw that can punch through crab shells. They are pretty badass animals.

[Bayard]

4. Speaking of hummers,

We have not seen a single one this year. Not on the feeders (finally just stopped filling them), or in the garden.

Really weird.

[mopinko]

5. lots of bird see uv.

used to breed budgies. you put a uv light on them when you want them to mate.

[hunter]

6. Human color vision is a kludge compared to birds -- not much better than dogs and other mammals.

Our burrowing mammal ancestors had only two color receptors, one for violet/blue, one for green/yellow.

In our primate ancestors there was a duplication of the genes for green/yellow receptors and then a mutation that shifted the sensitivity of one duplicate slightly to the red side of the spectrum. This minor improvement in color perception was a useful trait for animals that lived in trees and ate fruit.

You can see this split in this normalised responsivity spectra of human cone cells:



Birds have four color receptors, evenly spaced on the spectrum, and their brains are highly adapted to process this information. Their color perception is unimaginably superior to ours -- much greater than the difference we see between a black and white television picture and a color television picture.



When a parrot looks at a color television picture it looks nothing like the real world to them. Most colors are missing and other colors are just wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy