Experiments Show Hummingbirds See Colors You’ve Never Imagined
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Experiments show hummingbirds see colors you've never dreamed of:
The V" in ROYGBIV" stands for violet, sure, but that's not actually the same thing as purple. There is no purple wavelength of light-it requires a mixture of both red and blue wavelengths. That makes it a nonspectral color"-in fact, it's the only non spectral color humans see. It requires our brains to interpret signals from both red-sensitive and blue-sensitive cones in our eyes and to see that as a separate color.
[...] Working in Colorado over several summers, the researchers set up a pair of feeders for their experiments-one containing that delicious sugar water and one just containing boring old water. On top of each was a special LED light containing UV, blue, red, and green LEDs behind a diffuser, allowing the researchers to light up the feeder in a variety of nonspectral colors.
[...] The tests showed that the birds could see every nonspectral color that the researchers threw at them. Color pairs that were closer together in hue resulted in more mistaken visits but still beat the 50/50 odds of the control experiments.
Journal Reference:
Mary Caswell Stoddard, Harold N. Eyster, Benedict G. Hogan, et al. Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919377117)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.