Can mantis shrimp actually see MORE colours than what we think exist or can they just pick up on different colours/colour differences more easily than us?
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Neither. Mantis shrimp have more photoreceptors but actually see fewer colors than we do. This is because they don’t do “color mixing” like we do.
Our receptors detect three colors (more or less) but can then mix those colors in various proportions to form a very wide gamut of possible colors. Mantis shrimp can detect something like seventeen different colors with different photoreceptors but they don’t mix them, so those are the only colors they can detect.
Both, but to really understand that you need to think about what “color” really is. Color is not a physical, objective thing. Light has a certain frequency but that isn’t what color is, color is a *sensation*. You can see the same color with a specific frequency of light and with a combination of several different frequencies and intensities (think how a screen produces colors only using red, green, and blue lights). Color is how your brain interprets sensation and this influences what it means to say a creature can see “more colors”. Picking up on the differences between stimulus is one way to actually see more colors.
Humans sense color based on the varying stimulation of three different kinds of light-sensing cells, each most sensitive to a different frequency of light. Mantis shrimp have 12 different kinds of light-sensing cells which means they have the ability to distinguish between many more different colors within the same frequencies of light that humans can see. But their visual range also extends beyond that which humans can see into ultraviolet light, as well as being able to distinguish the polarization of light which humans cannot.
Colors do not really exist. Light with different frequencies exists and the interpretation of them as colors is something our brain does. It is not just that we inteprtie diffrent wavelengths but the combination of wavelength as colors.
Our eyes have 3 types of cones with different sensitivities at different frequencies and one type of rod that is primary for low-light vision. So our color interpretation is from 4 signals https://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/huvision.htm
We can fool the eye but emitting just red green and blue light that tries to stimulate one cone each and fool them. That is how a display work, yellow is created by sending out red and green light that stimulates the two relevant cones just like yellow light do
We are not sure how other animals interpret light as colors, you can really be sure another human’s integrity colors the same way as you do. Human interpretation is likely similar to other humans but it might not be exactly the same.
So how a Mantis shrimp interpret the information from the eye is unknown to use. The do have more receptors for the same visible range that we do so you will have an advantage in telling colors apart. But they also see into the ultraviolet range and can detect light polarization. So how they perceive the environment from that data is not something we really know. You can test what light is can see and what wavelength difference it can tell apart but that do not say anything of how it experiences the information.
>Mantis shrimp don’t see colour like we do. Although the crustaceans have many more types of light-detecting cell than humans, their ability to discriminate between colours is limited, says a report published today in Science1.
>Researchers found that the mantis shrimp’s colour vision relies on a simple, efficient and previously unknown mechanism that operates at the level of individual photoreceptors. The results upend scientists’ suspicions that the shrimp, with 12 different types of colour photoreceptors, could see hues that humans, with just 3, could not, says study co-author Justin Marshall, a marine neuroscientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578
Mantis can see some colours that we can’t, but its colourvision is terrible. Mantis shrimps 16 colourreceptors are there to compensate for their lack of brainpower.
A humans brain can measure the response of how much our three* different types of cones are triggered, and then give us a colour based on that.**
Overall it means that of the real colours (the colours of the rainbow) we can tell the difference between 150 hues (or about a difference in the length of lightwaves of about 2 nanometers).
A mantis shrimp doesn’t have the brain to measure these different levels of response. It has 12 different colour receptors that sees the same spectrum of light that a human sees and in that spectrum it can perceive…12 colours (which is an average sensitivity of 25 nanometers).
Mantis shrimp vision do have some features that a human doesn’t. Like many water creatures it can detect the polarization of light (meaning that they can tell if light is reflected or not) and like many water creatures its vision extends further into the UV spectrum (this is not a flaw in human eyes, it’s an evolutionary adaptation. Human eyes have a built in UV filter, and this means that our photoreceptors are better at seeing colours in different light conditions. Including light strong enough to blind a mantis shrimp).
The mantis shrimps simple wiring also means that its visual reflexes (how fast it acts based on what it sees) are very very fast. So a very tiny brain (very energy efficient) and fast reflexes are probably the real advantage of its very complex eyes, and not any sort of evolutionary adaptation to see the world in a riot of colours.
*In a normal human. Some humans have a 4th type colourreceptor and are more possibly more sensitive to different hues of blue.
**Including colours that don’t really exist. For example magenta is the brains way of saying “My Red and Blue cones are triggered, but not the green ones”, but there is no wavelength that corresponds to magenta.
Imagine a color you can’t even imagine. Now do that nine more times. That is how the Mantis Shrimp doo…
[Link](https://youtu.be/F5FEj9U-CJM)
You’re thinking of this way way way in a wrong way. Each color is just wavelengths of light that we describe. It’s a question of photoreceptors being sensitive to different wavelengths of light. This is why cameras can see stripes on animals that we see as solid colors because we’re just not sensitive to those particular wavelenghts but the camera was and once it’s shifted the light to something we can see as an output then we can see it. Mantis Shrimp have simple receptors that work on wavelenghts that some do not match our own. They don’t see ‘more colors’ that we know of, but they do see DIFFERENT wavelengths of light than what our receptors are. Mind you our receptors are also MUCH more sophisticated than a lot of other animals. We can see a very broad range with rather minimal differences in the photoreceptors that we use. A lot of other animals have more specialized receptors that react to lower ranges but many include things we just can’t see.
We can’t actually test is they see in ‘color’ like we do either. We know what light stimulates the cells, but now how their brain interprets the signal that flashes up. It’s very likely that we see a much more ‘high color’ image with our increased brain capacity and how much of it is stimulated by our eyes being exposed to different rages of light.
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