While most people assume dogs and other animals only see in black and white, it’s not true, and while that has already been proven, researchers have made a breakthrough in that department.
Scientists at the U.K.’s University of Sussex, and their American colleagues from the Hanley Color Lab at George Mason University, have come up with an advanced camera system that lets them see, in real time, the world as bees, birds and other animals do.
While the tech is pretty complicated, the results are easy to see: Birds, for example, see the blue sky as magenta because they can actually see the UV light we can’t. Bees’ eyes also perceive UV light differently. As an example, scientists showed what a bee would see when a person puts on sunscreen.
While to us, slathering on the white cream looks, well, white, to a bee, it looks like you’ve covered yourself in caramel due to the reflection of the UV light.
While these images could be replicated in the past with still photos called spectrophotometry, the breakthrough camera system, married to cutting edge software, allows moving images to be translated in real time.
In the journal PLoS Biology, author Daniel Hanley explains that being able to capture moving images is much more important to understanding the animals and insects, as “animals often make crucial decisions on moving targets (e.g., detecting food items, evaluating a potential mate’s display, etc.).”
“The team tested the system against a traditional method that uses spectrophotometry and found that the new system predicted perceived colors with an accuracy of over 92%,” the published paper touts.