TIL crows, starlings and similar birds only *look* black to us — they’re actually very colorful in ways human eyes are unable to perceive.

[zeborah@mastodon.nz]

@petitmote The alt text is wrong: that's very much a starling, which even to my human (pretty-sure-non-tetrachromatic) eyes only need a little sunlight on them to be irridescent.

@leaverou

[devnull@mamot.fr]

@alpacamale Cameras sensors work in black & white and have colour filters in front of it.

The exact filter layout varies depending on exact sensor types/brands (there's more than one type of filter), unless filter is removed, they all filter out infrared and ultraviolet. So you can't "see" ultra-violet by just editing RAW. Nor printers and screen can render it.

One might amplify visible colors and add fake colours, such as violet (instead of UV, which can't be seen by humans anyway)

@leaverou

[oatrapado@mastodon.social]

@leaverou so now we are birds haha

[rothko@beige.party]

@leaverou birds are tetrachromats and can see UV.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@jamesmarshall @leaverou

i think you already know, but if not:

there are human tetratchromats, they are rare

all women

because women get two copies of genes related to vision which are on the sex chromosomes: XX, while men get one copy: XY. so only women can get one normal gene, and one with a mutation that shifts one of the three cones, thus giving them tetrachromacy

normal people can see 1-10 million colors, such rare women can see 100 million or more

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision

[helvick@mastodon.ie]

@leaverou

It’s much easier to see with Starlings but the light has to be right.

I have a bunch of shots like this one that shows the iridescent nature of the starlings fairly clearly. Obviously it would be much more dramatic if the camera could detect further into the IR and UV but this is unmodified out of a Nikon D5300 and is how I remember it looked to my eye.

I’ve never noticed this with crows or ravens around here but it’s common to see that flash of weird blue and green on magpies.

[gladtherescake@todon.nl]

@jamesmarshall @leaverou Birds are tetrachromatic because their ancestors were larger carnivorous dinosaurs, they didn't lose their colour receptors because they were generally diurnal creatures. Mammals are mostly bichromatic (aside from a few exceptions like apes) because our ancestors were small burrowing creatures that couldn't go out during the day with all the big bird ancestors, so they only came out at night, as such our ancestors lost a large chunk of their unused colour vision.

[marymessall@mendeddrum.org]

@petitmote @leaverou

This page is a pretty decent explainer for human color vision... I'm afraid I don't have a link about birds. Maybe someone else will!

https://colourliteracy.org/seeing-colours

[lumiworx@mastodon.social]

@benroyce @jamesmarshall @leaverou

So, they see 10x the color data, they see it _without_ added tech, and why do I have a suspicion that they still get labeled as "inferior".

[thumptastic3@mstdn.plus]

@jamesmarshall @benroyce @leaverou I looked it up. Cool!

[evanwolf@mastodon.social]

@leaverou I wonder if this applied to dinosaur perception of dinosaur feathers...

[blizzarda@mastodon.social]

@leaverou more of this content pls

[ollicle@mastodon.social]

@leaverou @maudenificent the other thing that looks more interesting when you assign visible colours to invisible wavelengths – the universe as seen by radio telescopes.

[carl@chaos.social]

@benroyce I don’t like the word “superhuman” in the title. She is a human, isn’t she?

@jamesmarshall @leaverou

[xfq@w3c.social]

@leaverou The same applies to people. Don't deny your richness just because you're not understood for the time being.

[bumblefish@mastodon.scot]

@leaverou Yup. And we explain to ourselves that the females are usually drab brown because we are a ridiculous species of ape who have conditioned ourselves to view female as inferior, but to birds, that drab brown contains multitudes of colors that just confuse our eyes. If anything they are more brilliant.