Mantis Shrimp Color Vision: Really Superior? | Alien Analysis

Would alien beings evolved on another planet see the “world” the same way as we do? Here on Earth at least, there are many examples of creatures with superior vision compared to us humans.
One group of species that has become especially famous are mantis shrimp. Web comic artist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal already mused about how the Mantis Shrimp must see a “thermonuclear bomb of light and beauty”.
The reason given for this is that their compound eyes have 12 different kinds of photoreceptors each attuned to different frequencies of light. Humans only have a “measly” 3. So it is assumed that mantis shrimp colour vision must be both completely alien and spectacular!
But is that really so? And what would this mean for colour vision in extraterrestrial beings? Let's find out!
CREDITS:
Mantis shrimp comic on The Oatmeal: theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_s...
Special thanks to Loren Petrich for creating a color blindness simulator. (lpetrich.org/Science/ColorBlin...)
Images:
- Mantis shrimp character by bm.iphone (www.flickr.com/photos/bmiphon...)
- Aegyptopithecus by Nobu Tamura (spinops.blogspot.com simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil...)
- Multituberculate by Jude Swales / Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (www.burkemuseum.org/research-a...)
- "Bornean Tarsier (Cephalopachus bancanus borneanus)" by Bernard DUPONT (www.flickr.com/photos/bernied...)
- "Little Bunnies" Jannes Pockele (www.flickr.com/photos/jpockel...)
- "Mantis Shrimps' Eyes Crop - Odontodactylus scyllarus" by Silke Baron (www.flickr.com/photos/silkeba...)
Ambient music:
freesound.org/people/lemoncreme/
Outro:
freesound.org/people/frankum/
SOCIAL MEDIA:
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COPYRIGHTS:
Any copyrighted material used in this video is done so for purposes of education, review and/or satire and thus covered by "Fair Use". No ownership is claimed for any such materials other than my own.

[@Phrenotopia]

I could not link to The Oatmeal's comic with a video card after all, because Google/KZbin sets limits. So I will instead post the link here, in addition to the video description: theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

[@amogusinsuster9560]

I need some mantis shrimp glasses

[@mahatmaniggandhi2898]

DMT?

[@joaogabriel-capielcripto2958]

I need eyes

[@amogusinsuster9560]

@@joaogabriel-capielcripto2958 damn

[@amogusinsuster9560]

@@mahatmaniggandhi2898 DMT? more like DMV

[@awildpiizaroll]

lsd

[@DonaldKronos]

Actually, the number of distinct cones can make a difference even within the same range of hues. For example in the case of tetrachromatic human vision. It's entirely possible that the mantis shrimp's brain doesn't form composite colors reception from the different cone receptors but rather treats them as merely indicating a band of color ranging across those detecting light. This could be useful in poor lighting conditions and would not require sophisticated vision processing like humans have.

[@Phrenotopia]

Good point!

[@sreynolds3567]

I have no use what any of that said...

[@Dragrath1]

@@sreynolds3567 The main gist is that tetrachromats have better ability to see color contrasts in low light levels judging the way tetrachromats artistic representations of what they see look like

[@guisampaio2008]

Tetrachromats have better color depth however.

[@cherryblossom-zp9un]

@@guisampaio2008 ikr

[@jasondashney]

I was curious about mantis shrimp vision so I searched it. 1st video was from Science Magazine and it was absolutely dreadful. It said almost nothing. The next video was yours and it's so much better. Thanks for the info!

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks for the enormous compliment!

[@mauricejohnmac]

@@Phrenotopia, He's right! I've watched several videos about the Mantis Shrimp, color vision, and color blindness, and, actually, no other video explained this subject better than you! (though a video from It's Okay To Be Smart --- a video titled "What Color Is A Banana?" --- also contributed a lot to my understanding of vision) This video tops it up! I finally understood about this topic better. Thanks so much for such an informative video! :D

[@marciomaiajr]

I don't know why this video was on my recommended list. But I'm glad I watched it. Very interesting. Good job.

[@ulivolga228]

Thank you!! This makes a lot more sense now, how mantis shrimp don't see more colors, and actually might see less based on how they process wavelengths.

[@pranjalshelar3830]

Hence human proved that he is superior now are u happy?

[@sofia.eris.bauhaus]

having more photoreceptors in the visible spectrum definitely could give an animal a much richer experence of color. mantis shrimp may not actually have good color vision, but that's somewhat irrelevant. for example the human eye can't tell apart colors that are a mixture of blue and green light or pure spectral cyan light. in the wilderness on earth that ability may not be enormously useful, given how common dichromatc vision is. but i suspect it would be handy when doing chemistry for example. "the number of color receptors is irrelevant, what matters is their range", then we would not need green cones. we need three different receptors to have a 3-dimensional color space. with more receptors, our color space could have more dimensions.

[@Phrenotopia]

Good points! I will take this into account!

[@sofia.eris.bauhaus]

@@Phrenotopia :) love you channel, btw. especially the alien biosphere series. :)

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks! You made a very interesting point in that, even though the electromagnetic spectrum that light sensitive cells cover is a single-dimensional metric, their significant overlap actually makes for a multi-dimensional space of perception. This is analogous to how different morphogens can overlap and interact in ways that can create highly intricate patterning of an animal body during development. For sensory perception, it all depends of course on what is done with the information in the nervous system. For the mantis shrimp, probably not much, but it's still interesting to speculate about other life forms that could.

[@calinguga]

yep, the explanation was right there in the video, concerning dichromats. sadly mantis shrimp hate prevailed.

[@fablereader4486]

Truly fascinating video ... very well done!

[@Phrenotopia]

Thank you very much! :-D

[@guilhermehsn7522]

Awesome video!

[@jasonalen7459]

4:39 This makes so much sense! I never knew until now why color-blindness filters had yellow when you need red and green to make it.

[@agepbiz]

Great video and nice use of illustrations. I learned some new stuff!

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks for the compliments!

[@captainstroon1555]

And then there are vipers which have an entire second set of sensory organs - thermal receptors - hooked up to their optic nerves in addition to their eyes.

[@michelvan97]

I like the video except the false perception that Planet near red dwarf star, have a Dim and dark surface. if they get same amount of energy like Earth from Sun to sustain life, the red dwarf star is quite bright in the sky the Light from Red Star has allot visible and near infrared wavelengths But not in UV and blue wavelength (under assumption the red dwarf star is stable and not flare star) So Alien would see there world in color it will not be UV or Blue wavelength , but dark Green, yellow, orange, red and finally Near-Infrared, what we not can see. and if there plants use similar Chlorophyl,l they would appear very dark Green or almost black Green.

[@Phrenotopia]

Thank you! Yes, I will have to go deeper on extraterrestrial vision in another video one day. However, it is also a question of definitions. Looking up the blackbody emission spectum of an object with the temperature of a red dwarf, most of the radiation, including the peak, is in the infrared range, that we as humans cannot see. So it would certainly be dimmer to us. It would perhaps also be so for the inhabitants, as lower infra-red frequencies may be less useful for sight as I also allude to in the video. I am not sure why you think M-star planet plants would be dark green. The reason that Earth plants are green is presumably related to the fact that the sun's emission spectrum peaks at the green part of the spectrum. That is certainly not the case there.

[@michelvan97]

Thanks for reply this light spectrum graphic below compare our Sun to Gliese 581 It show that red dwarf produce adequate light in green wavelength, but not like Sun, but enough to be reflected from plants. In visible light the peak lies at 710 N m ( red ) and maximum peak at 800 N m in near infrared. www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/201202_mielke/spectrum.gif This graphic show again Light from different Star compare to Sun filtert by Atmosphere of a Earth like planet www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kiang_01/ExtrasolarFig2.gif More on this NASA webpage got more information about photosynthesis on other Planets www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kiang_01/

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks for the feedback! You are right that I need to look more deeply into this. My video, though called "Alien colour vision", was more focused on debunking the mantis shrimp myth. I will have to follow up on this in the future. I did stumble on that article you refer to, while I was doing research for my Proxima b video, but I also read some others that suggested plants on those worlds would be blackish. I think it is an ongoing debate and we won't know for sure until we closely observe such a world. I would still find it odd that planets on M-star worlds would be dark green. Earth land plants being green seems related to this frequency peaking from our Sun. I find the most compelling explanation for this being that green light is reflected to benefit chlorophyll cells deeper in the leaves, because there is most available for that frequency anyway. On M-star worlds there is no such excess, so no reason to be wasteful with those frequencies. But again: I will take a closer look when I do my followup video.

[@Dragrath1]

There is some evidence that plants are green largely due to competition among early photosynthetic life. Purple sulfur bacteria for instance absorb green light and reflect red and blue where as cyanobacteria which were eventually absorbed via endosymbiosis to form the basis for eukaryotic chloroplasts, absorb red and blue and reflect green. Looking at bacteria other than cyanobacteria reveals a complex landscape of photosynthetic pigments using different electron donar molecules From what I have found Other than the typical aerobic photosynthesis where water->oxygen and released via the reverse reaction to fuel metabolic activity there are other organisms using wildly different compounds. Hydrogen Sulfide to sulfur and or Sulfate (or other sulfur compounds) is probably the most noteworthy but given most phototrophs went extinct during the oxygen revolution and the wide assortment of microbial metabolisms involving substances such as Iron, Magnesium, nitrates, even Uranium that it suggests there may have well once been far more expansive ecoregimes for these organisms in competition to dominate the biosphere with their photosynthetic/photosynthetic and respiratory pathways. Oxygen won in the end resulting in green photosynthetic life dominating it is hard to say whether any of the other modes could have produced complex life as their energy yields per molecule are less than oxygen but Iron at least comes close compared to other electron donar and acceptors just it doesn't form a gas under hospitable conditions. Note that apparently that at temperatures around a few thousand kelvin that Iron does form a gas with hydrogen within the atmospheres of M dwarf stars, Hot Jupiter planets and young or "hot" Brown dwarf stars but I can't see life as we know it ever surviving under those extremely high temperature conditions.... >_> But given a single example of life who knows we might be surprised

[@Iquey]

So that would be like an amber ranges colored world then, not a totally red world?

[@TURBOMIKEIFY]

I remember when I learned that the tree canopy has different shades of green (heard there's some blues and purples too which blows my mind). I also learned that peanut butter is not green. Moderate deuteranopia is something else.

[@blomakranz]

keep up the great work

[@Phrenotopia]

Thank you for your support!

[@kaisamuels9382]

It’s interesting that we understand that this shrimp can see completely different colours but we as humans couldn’t even conceive what they look like because we just can’t see them

[@rgygduysdgyuygsduysd]

yea interesting that this gray color cellphone im using could be a color that i can't see 🤣

[@Dragrath1]

Interestingly vertebrates have inverted or backwards eyes compared to other animals as for some reason our front visual cells that directly receive light are used to set circadian rhythms unlike in all other animals where this is reversed

[@kingmasterlord]

7:06 that company needs to make glasses for UV and polarized light then. I remember back in like 2004 hearing about some kind of thin film that they were talking about putting on windshields that could display infrared

[@Jisu_mp2]

No one's talkin' about the cute little 10 year girl Who is swing colours got the first time very emotional for their parents so cute moment 🥰🥰

[@wires-sl7gs]

Good job on the video!

[@Phrenotopia]

Thank you! BTW you have given me an idea with our previous conversation. Maybe I should do some polls on my facebook and twitter on upcoming video topics. :-)

[@wires-sl7gs]

Yeah, though you should probably also add links to those polls in the description as well. Also have you heard of the Game plague inc evolved?

[@Phrenotopia]

Will do! Never heard of that game, though...

[@wires-sl7gs]

It's sort of a Plague simulator, but I'm not sure if it is quite a simulator but the goal is evolve your own plague and use it to wipe out all of humanity. there are different plague times as well, more than just bacteria and viruses. What like to do sometimes is not win, make my plague spread around the world, make it deadly and see which nations survive. I was typing it all down and was almost done but When replying to a friend I accidentally clicked on a video and lost all of my progress I had typed down. Do you have Discord or skype? I think that would be better because It would be less likely that something like that would happen and it too me a long time to type it down...

[@Phrenotopia]

Gosh! I hate it when that happens! I will see if I can add Discord to my list of social media & contact places. There is of course always facebook, if that's your thing, but even there I experienced losing entire messages, while I was at another browser tab for too long. Sometimes I write longer comments in notepad first before pasting them over. BTW what you describe reminds me of a scenario I thought of the other day: What if a plague wiped out most of humanity except for the most isolated of places (or easiest to isolate) like islands the size of iceland and lower. Then the earth would be repopulated from those places...

[@jordantoms4367]

good shit man

[@Phrenotopia]

Thank you and thanks for watching!

[@wendten2]

Almost skipped the video due to the weird title.. so glad I didn't The video is well made and does a really good job describing what vision and colorblindness is, however the part about the alien should not have been there, its to brief to be significant and in my opinion just make the video messy So in my opinion: the title should be something like: "Colorvision vs colorblindness " or somthing like that the idea about alien vision is not a bad ideal, and I would love a secound video about that, where the focus is about that specific topic: how the eyes have evolved severeal times on earth, organisms that live where there is no sunlight, organism that doesnt have eyes at all ect.

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks for your feedback and compliments! I can see what you mean with your remarks. While my channel still is growing, I am torn between focusing both on specific topics and catering to a wider audience by optimizing for the KZbin algorithm. In time, it is my plan to become less "all over the place" and treat my topics with more diligence. I will want to spend more time going in depth with each topic separately as you also suggest. In any case, I have now changed this video's title to be a bit more appealing and less confusing as per your input. So thanks again!

[@kareemabdallah7024]

I get what you are tryna say, but how can we test for colors we don't see, with colors that are visible to us

[@jamesworley9888]

What's your thoughts then on Concetta Antico?

[@Zhranzagul]

With all these smaller stars carrying potential for life, it makes me wonder wether black (or blackish green as Michel Van points out) is in fact the norm for floral life, and our lighter greens are considered the exotic oddity to the galactic standard. Great video as always! It's a party anytime you post something.

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks for your kind words as always! It is great to know I am not only doing these for my own enjoyment. It is an interesting question what would be the norm for photosynthesizing life. We are heavily biased as land creatures by all the green plants we see around us. Underwater, there is a much greater diversity, because different wavelengths are available at different depths. The first photo-synthesizers were in any case not green, but purple. I will ponder this some more...

[@DonaldKronos]

Purple chloroplasts were common on Earth before the green variety took over. Yeah... gotta wonder.

[@Mrcabletwitch]

so basically Mantis Shrimp's color vision is like us taking Acid X 1000000

[@txd]

8 bit guy got me here :D

[@Phrenotopia]

Woah! I didn't even get to see his latest video yet! Thanks!

[@txd]

A fellow dane. Your videos are really great :D

[@danilorainone406]

where which/;what/ site shows WHAT THEY SEE? our best guesses w CGI vid of what air land and sea critters see?

[@immigrantworld4899]

When red green color blindness treatment can be tested in human??

[@kaankocaman8154]

Does proxima b has black plants? Your phrasing makes it sound like its a fact, or maybe im not familiar with the wording? Anyone?

[@DavidMartinez-mq7zz]

In the color deficiency chart, did all the lines look the same or am I color blind😱

[@thekingofnipples9806]

They were all different but some monitors display colors poorly which can make similar colors look the same

[@brianpitts922]

If youre talking about the 3 circles they are def different hues to me.

[@rgygduysdgyuygsduysd]

dogs should be able to see the color green, don't see how missing out of red would take out the green color.

[@npaisfordummies2162]

Some humans have 4 cones. They say they can see more color than normal visioned people

[@Muenni]

Almost none of them can. Perceiving a something as a separate colour happens in the brain - humans likely weren't able to see blue in antiquity (and some tribes still aren't) even though their receptors haven't changed. It might require tetrachromats to come together as kids and talk to and teach each other about their perception to learn to differentiate, I assume.

[@Bwizz245]

@@Muenni A lot of older languages didn't really distinguish Blue as its own color, but that doesn't mean people couldn't see or distinguish blue, just that it wasn't super important for people to distinguish it in speech, and even in situations where you might need to specify the color of something, you could use comparatives (i.e. calling blue things "ocean-colored".) The development of distinct color terms in languages often has to do with things like the availability of pigments and common things that come in a variety of colors. A good example of the former is the Ancient Egyptians, who made extensive use of blue dye and whose language is one of the earliest in the historical record to have a distinct word for blue

[@kacperxt371]

make video about evolution of how to train your dragon

[@BensLab]

What's your next video?

[@Phrenotopia]

It's gonna be on dragons. :-) I hope to be able to get it out soon, maybe already this weekend!

[@BensLab]

That sounds wicked!

[@danielbickford3458]

Interesting, so according to this Superman should be color blind

[@chadbroski6711]

I have protanopia

[@adrianoferreiradasilva3246]

Isn't 16 Photoreceptors?

[@axz647]

No the others are just polarized light

[@sizanogreen9900]

Whohoo!

[@Phrenotopia]

:-D

[@Marina-nt6my]

6:54 ohh..?

[@exceptionhandler78]

birds. insects and viruses are helping me

[@ar.husnakalsoomp.p7969]

👌👌👌👌

[@imsociallyawkward1612]

2:30 lol I think I have tritanopia xD

[@smiled1690]

I skiped my science class ;-;

[@TurinTuramber]

And English class. ^^

[@boid9761]

Can you help me? I need a scenario, and some serious info about alternate history. I'm creating a fictional story, and the major strain is, what will happen is vikings endured up until the 16th Century? And That alone is just part of the big scenario that I need; what would happen to the outcome of the Qing invasion of Joseon, or the overall outcome of Korea if Icelandic vikings colonized the northern majority of Korea? I know that this is absurd, but as absurd as it is, it's pretty interesting. Interesting enough for me to create a story about it. Since Koreans and Icelandic vikings never met, this will be a very interesting battle. Will the Korean dynasties ward off the Icelandic foreigners? But, I'm looking forward to the colonization. That is where my story takes place. Thank you.

[@Phrenotopia]

Hi there! I would love to help, but I am not sure what you need help with. Do you need help with coming up with ideas or with finding out facts?

[@sega.milkis]

Enchroma and others alike is a proven

[@rebelbeammasterx8472]

They see the same wavelengths but have different experience of color.

[@Phrenotopia]

Thanks for the feedback! I am curious to hear: How do you know and what exactly do you mean? :-) We can tell that they process color information differently, but not in a qualitatively better way, as I already explain the video. The larger amount of colour receptors only appears to a way to cut down on processing the information in the brain.

[@petersmythe6462]

Wait the 5 nm apart isn't distinguishable to some people? I think I would have different words for those colors. Like "orange" and "gold orange."

[@tedarcher9120]

Colors are found not only in rainbow. Most colors we see aren't actually in rainbow, they form by absorbtion from it

[@earthcoloredeyes5043]

Most women have four and some of us can see polarized light 😉

[@pranjalshelar3830]

Human always trying to prove what he has got is the greatest🤣😂😂🤣 mantis shrimps are better than you

[@indigomontoya1970]

I share these with my mom. She can't get over the evolution theory. It really bugs her lol I say why can't GOD use evolution? Why can't both be true?

[@khazerax5742]

The most basic clue is you are different than your mom, evolution is that simple if you see you can describe her like that.