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.

I think this speaks to a significant misunderstanding that most people hold of the way vision actually works.

Most people imagine that vision is a relatively simple process by which our eyes detect and transmit to us the nature of the world. Not so.

Eyes are complex and interesting organs in their own right but fundamentally what they do is relatively simple. They are able to detect and report to the brain certain qualities of the light that hits them. Primarily these are: intensity, direction, and proximity to three points on the frequency spectrum (what we perceive as red, green, and blue). But this data alone is not vision. Vision is a conscious experience our brains create by interpreting and processing this data into the visual field before us—basically, a full scale 3D model of the world in front of us, including the blended information on reflection and emission that color entails.

Quite amazing! Most of this takes place in the human brain, and not the eyes. From this perspective, it is not terribly surprising that an organism with more complex eyes but a much simpler brain might have worse vision than we do.

Reminds me a little of CD digital audio. The original Red Book audio standard hasn't really been improved upon because it's uncompressed audio which covers basically all of the range of human hearing within the capabilities of any speaker we could build. It's uncompressed because in the early 80's when the tech hit the market, it was completely unfeasible to include the CPU and RAM needed to decompress audio in real time.

Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn't have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.

Horrible news

How did they test if they could see color? Did they make little shrimp dioramas or something?

The shrimp are holier than we are because they cannot see the devil's color (it's pink 🩷)

I need to use wherewithal more in my daily life

Technically, all the colors are fake. They're just the halucinations of a brain trying to understand the input from sensory organs.

My whole world is crumbling

This is really cool, but it's also over a decade old info. I remember growing up in awe of Mantis shrimp and then, as with all wonder, this was removed from my life in adulthood. :)

Isn't it amazing how birds reverse engineered airplanes?

Really wish talking about what shrimp see didn't remind me that in farming them females have one eye removed to promote breeding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyestalk_ablation

But compared with human eyesight, they could still see more 'colors' - As we see (almost) the same white in incandescent bulbs as LEDs and fluorescents, they might actually see the component colors and their intensities.

Not unlike how we may hear a combination tone when multiple other tones are played, and hear the difference (or sum) of them.

I... must... be... strong... must... not... do... it... must... resist... the urge...

🎵 But I'm only human 🎶

Yeah, but, imagine the possibilities in humans

Imagine how OP their colour perception would be if they did have that mental processing power

Shrimply*

Hardware vs software solution?

Shrimp photoreceptor situation is crazy

Disappointed. But didn't the have receptors for differently polarized light? What about that?

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. 😤

I hate that it invalidates this episode of radiolab, which is, without a doubt, a masterpiece of podcasting:

https://youtu.be/jibvu9BHV_k?t=795

i saved the video at the 13 minute mark where they do the audio representation of the vivid colors. still worth a watch/listen