![]() In 1998, two independent teams realized that much of the “blue” plumage of blue tits actually reflects a lot of UV as one of them wrote, “Blue tits are ultraviolet tits.” To humans, these birds all look much the same. Many birds also have UV patterns in their feathers. Rather than blending in, some of them attract their UV-sensitive prey by standing out. But they reflect so much UV that they are highly conspicuous to a bee, which makes the flowers they sit upon that much more alluring. To us, these spiders seem to match the colors of their chosen blooms, and they’ve long been treated as masters of camouflage. Crab spiders lurk on flowers to ambush pollinators. Usually, these shapes are guides that indicate the position of nectar. Sunflowers, marigolds, and black-eyed Susans all look uniformly colored to human eyes, but bees can see the UV patches at the bases of their petals, which form vivid bullseyes. Flowers use dramatic UV patterns to advertise their wares to pollinators. Reindeer can quickly make out mosses and lichens, which reflect little UV, on a hillside blanketed by UV-reflective snow. Rodents can easily see the dark silhouettes of birds against the UV-rich sky. Ultraviolet vision is so ubiquitous that much of nature must look different to most other animals.* Water scatters UV light, creating an ambient ultraviolet fog, against which fish can more easily see tiny UV-absorbing plankton. Most animals that can see color can see UV. Monet aside, most people can’t see UV, which probably explains why scientists were so eager to believe that the ability was rare. He began seeing the UV light that reflects off water lilies, and started painting them as whitish blue instead of white. This happened to the painter Claude Monet, who lost his left lens at the age of 82. Our lenses typically block out UV, but people who have lost their lenses to surgeries or accidents can perceive UV as whitish blue. Related Segment The Millions Of Ways Animals Sense The World They probably perceive UV as a deep shade of blue rather than a separate color, but they can sense it nonetheless. Not so: In the 2010s, Glen Jeffery found that reindeer, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, ferrets, and many other mammals can detect UV with their short blue cones. Okay, fine, mammals can have UV vision, but only small ones like rodents and bats. Still wrong: In 1991, Gerald Jacobs and Jay Neitz showed that mice, rats, and gerbils have a short cone that is tuned to UV. The narrative changed again: UV vision exists in many groups of animals, but not in mammals. ![]() But after another half century, in the 1980s, researchers showed that many birds, reptiles, fish, and insects have UV-sensitive photoreceptors. The narrative shifted: Some animals can see colors we can’t, but the skill must be very rare. Half a century later, bees and minnows turned out to see ultraviolet, too. Lubbock showed that ants are exceptional. “It would appear that the colors of objects and the general aspect of nature must present to them a very different appearance from what it does to us.”Īt the time, some scientists believed that animals either are colorblind or see the same spectrum that we do. It is largely invisible to humans, but must be “apparent to the ants as a distinct and separate color (of which we can form no idea),” Lubbock presciently wrote. Ultraviolet (or UV) light has wavelengths ranging from 10 to 400 nanometers. It was bathed in ultraviolet-literally “beyond violet” in Latin. This area wasn’t dark to the ants, though. But Lubbock noticed that they also fled from a region just beyond the rainbow’s violet end, which looked dark to his eyes. In the 1880s, John Lubbock-banker, archeologist, polymath-split a beam of light with a prism and shone the resulting rainbow onto ants.
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