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The way mantis shrimp see is nonetheless super cool and interesting. They likely have no conception of 2D color at all, and can only sense the 12 different colors in general. Furthermore, only the midband of their eyes see color, when the eyes are moving and scanning for prey, they don’t see color at all, which probably helps offload mental load for their small brains. Once they do see something, they then stop moving their eyes to determine the color of what they’re looking at.
Also, mantis shrimp have 6 more photoreceptors in addition to the 12 colored ones, to detect polarized light. They likely see them the same way that they see color, so they probably don’t consider them anything different than wavelength which is what we interpret as color.
Ed Yong’s An Immense World has a section on this and I’d highly recommend it. The ways animals sense and perceive the world are often so different for ours and it’s so fascinating.
For anyone wondering why they would need to see polarized light: I actually looked into this a few months ago!
Other animals that are trying to blend in with the environment often use countershading appear less conspicuous. The problem with this is that this method can’t replicate the polarization of the light behind them, making them stand out if you can see that sort of thing. ((Sunlight in the ocean is always polarized based on the direction of the sun (look up fresnel equations for s and p polarized light))). Even transparent creatures will interrupt the polarization in some way, so this is a very useful skill to have.
So are any animals actually capable of seeing the invisible spectrums of light? Because humans technically can see them, since we make tools that allow us to. Suck on that, other animals. 😤
Like infrared and ultraviolet? Yeah, there are animals that see those.
And all the other stuff we yse to see celestial objects and communicate long distance. Our phones are able to see colours we can’t!
I’ve been thinking about how a species with a metal horn could evolve to use it as a radio and even a hive mind.
Imagine aliens attacking us but getting fucked because their hive mind works on the same frequency of radio or wifi.
I’m pretty sure if it worked on any frequency in the charged electromagnetic spectrum, they would get completely screwed long before they made it to earth.
As a qualified amateur operator, the radio spectrum is noisy.
Imagine airdropping a meme directly into the brain of an alien
In my head as they evolve and learn how it works they customize their antenna to fit their needs. But yeah, that would be funny. Like Signs but shorter. They land somewhere quiet electromagnetically. Could even make it one of those super sensitive telescopes you can’t take any devices near for a bit of dramatic irony. There are some frequencies that are more quiet than others but most are pretty noisy. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to time travel to the past and see how much noise there is compared to now.
