• Question: Is it true that animals like the mantis shrimp can see colours that the human eye can't?

    Asked by biozak to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 19 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Yalda Javadi

      Yalda Javadi answered on 19 Mar 2013:


      eye believe so…(sorry bad joke)

      They can see darkness, ultra-violet light and deeper into the electro-magnetic spectrum. And they can detect motion better than us… also their eyes can move independently from each other!

    • Photo: Tom Branson

      Tom Branson answered on 19 Mar 2013:


      Yes you are right. The mantis shrimp and many insects such as bees, can see ultra-violet light (UV).

      The cool thing is that we have no idea what this looks like! Our brains are not made to see these short wavelengths of light. Some flowers reflect UV light and so when a bee looks at a garden it is seeing something totally different to us.

      It would be very cool if you could have some kind of implant in your brain so that you could see these different wavelengths. You could see all the way from (large) radiowaves – seeing music from radios playing across the sky, to (small) x-rays – looking at peoples skeletons!

    • Photo: Jack Heal

      Jack Heal answered on 19 Mar 2013:


      Yes – it means they can detect more of the “electromagnetic spectrum”. As Tom said, this spectrum includes radiowaves and x-rays – and it also includes “visible light”. This is the part of the spectrum which we can detect with our eyes. Light waves of different colours have different wavelengths, and we can detect a certain range of wavelengths with our eyes. If your eyes are built to detect a wider range, like in mantis shrimp, you can see more colours.

      There are some eyes which are really different to human eyes. I saw a talk recently about a fish called the elephantnose fish. It looks really weird, lives in very muddy water and until fairly recently people thought it was blind. It has crystals in its eyes which help it to see dark things well on a dark background – such as catfish in muddy water. So it can escape predators more easily! Great example of an animal evolving to survive in its environment!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 19 Mar 2013:


      Everyone else has already answered it so here’s a different mantis shrimp fact instead: mantis shrimps can talk (well, sort of).

      Check out this video to listen to what sounds they make http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBtGWqRFaMQ- the loud clicking is coming from the shrimp. I definitely wouldn’;t want to be a little fishy caught by one of them.

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