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?
In: 63
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.
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