Eli5: How do scientists determine the vision of a specific animal?
In: Biology
The biggest way is just to observe what they do and do not react to. You can do this in the wild and experimentally in the lab to narrow things down even further. For instance, we can observe that a lot of flowers have ultra violet markings that we cannot see. And we can observe that these markings do seem to have an effect on insects and which flowers they choose to visit. So we can then confirm this by making similar ultraviolet markings on things that are not flowers in the lab and see whether or not that also attracts the same insects. If the behavior continues it is reasonable to conclude that it is because the insects are seeing the ultraviolet light. If they do not react to it then it might have been something else like smell that was driving them. And after that either way we do more tests to get more data and make more accurate conclusions.
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