Many animals, plants and fungi use a wide variety of shapes and colors to attract the attention of their conspecifics (for example, during sexual courtship) or defend themselves from predators. As humans, in addition to being attracted to this colorful repertoire, we try to understand the behavior of species based on this type of visual signals. One of the problems to take into consideration is that, sometimes, the colors that humans see are not exactly the same as those perceived by other animals. There are thousands of species with greater visual capacity than humans and, in any case, the colors of life may be different from those seen by our (human) eyes.
With the aim of overcoming this perception problem, a team led by Vera Vasas, a researcher at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), and technicians from the Hanley Color Lab at George Mason University (United States) has developed a system that allows obtaining images with colors similar to those actually perceived by various species of animals.
This is not the first time that advances have been made in the processing of images of the real vision of animals, but, according to the authors in their article published in the journal PLOS Biology (January 23), this is the first “hardware and software that “They give ecologists and filmmakers the ability to accurately record the moving colors perceived by animals.”
Among the two examples presented in the scientific article summarizing the results is the orange sulfur butterfly (Colias eurytheme), in the main image of this information, and a scene with a daisy with different colors for humans and bees.
Many animals perceive colors differently than humans due to the different capabilities of the photoreceptors in their eyes. For example, insects such as bees or wasps, as well as some birds, can see ultraviolet light, which is outside the spectrum of perception of our species and other mammals.
Research in this field is not an anecdote, but rather provides substantial help so that scientists can better understand how various types of animals communicate and move through the world around them. Saving the distance, it is like when echolocation was discovered in bats.
Obtaining data on insect vision, for example, until now required complex methods such as spectrophotometry, which require good lighting conditions and only provide static images (without movement).
Those responsible for the project that is now presented consider that they have overcome a good part of these limitations with the help of a team of special cameras and a software system that captures and allows viewing videos of moving objects with a simulation of the colors that people actually see. animals in natural lighting conditions.
“The camera simultaneously records video in four color channels: blue, green, red and UV. This data can be processed into ‘perception units’ to produce an accurate video of how animals perceive those colors, based on existing knowledge about the photoreceptors in your eyes, indicates – with a somewhat technical explanation – the University of Sussex. The system is built from commercially available cameras, housed in a modular 3D printed housing, and the software is available in open source, which will allow other researchers to use and develop the technology in the future.
The team led by researcher Vera Vasas and Daniel Hanley, assistant professor of biology at George Mason University (Virginia, USA), “tested the system with a traditional method that uses spectrophotometry and discovered that the new system predicted the colors perceived with an accuracy greater than 92%,” indicates the British university.
“This novel camera system will open new avenues of research for scientists and allow filmmakers to produce dynamic and accurate representations of how animals see the world around them,” the authors indicate in the conclusions section of their scientific article.
Daniel Hanley recalls that humans, “for a long time, have been intrigued by the way animals see the world” without ever having an interpretation that is close to reality. Techniques used so far in fields such as sensory ecology have helped infer what static scenes might look like to an animal. The new system goes somewhat further because animals often make crucial decisions about moving targets (e.g., detecting food, evaluating a potential mate’s display, etc.). Thus, with the new device, moving images can be captured, for the use of ecologists and filmmakers, with the colors that other species actually perceive, explains Daniel Hanley.
