Wild Hummingbirds Can See Colors We Humans Can’t Even Imagine
Infographic by the Stoddard Lab, Princeton University
The team placed the LED tubes beside water-feeders, some of which contained sugar water (which the birds like) next to one colour, while others contained plain water next to a different colour. They would then swap the positions of the feeders to see if the hummingbirds could use the colour indicator to tell which feeder was which. In a matter of several hours, wild hummingbirds learned to visit the rewarding color. Using the same setup, the researchers recorded over 6,000 feeder visits in a series of 19 experiments.
According to the results, hummingbirds can see a variety of nonspectral colors, including purple, ultraviolet+green, ultraviolet+red and ultraviolet+yellow. For instance, in the course of this experiment hummingbirds readily distinguished ultraviolet+green from pure ultraviolet or pure green, and they also discriminated between two different mixtures of ultraviolet+red light — one redder, one less so.
Appreciating how these colors actually appear to birds can be a difficult difficult task though. “It is impossible to really know how the birds perceive these colors. Is ultraviolet+red a mix of those colors, or an entirely new color? We can only speculate,” said Ben Hogan, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and a co-author of the study.
In a post on human vision vs bird vision published on The Mission earlier, we did publish some interesting renderings of how birds might see the world, according to research. Here are two examples:
The team placed the LED tubes beside water-feeders, some of which contained sugar water (which the birds like) next to one colour, while others contained plain water next to a different colour. They would then swap the positions of the feeders to see if the hummingbirds could use the colour indicator to tell which feeder was which. In a matter of several hours, wild hummingbirds learned to visit the rewarding color. Using the same setup, the researchers recorded over 6,000 feeder visits in a series of 19 experiments.
According to the results, hummingbirds can see a variety of nonspectral colors, including purple, ultraviolet+green, ultraviolet+red and ultraviolet+yellow. For instance, in the course of this experiment hummingbirds readily distinguished ultraviolet+green from pure ultraviolet or pure green, and they also discriminated between two different mixtures of ultraviolet+red light — one redder, one less so.
Appreciating how these colors actually appear to birds can be a difficult difficult task though. “It is impossible to really know how the birds perceive these colors. Is ultraviolet+red a mix of those colors, or an entirely new color? We can only speculate,” said Ben Hogan, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and a co-author of the study.
In a post on human vision vs bird vision published on The Mission earlier, we did publish some interesting renderings of how birds might see the world, according to research. Here are two examples:
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05 April 2022
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