Nowadays, more than 30,000 players in the world play online games every day and are helping scientists to understand the animal camouflage and color vision. University of Exeter researchers was looking for the answer why some animals are dichromats, while some animals are trichromats. They are also trying to understand how color vision affects animals' ability to detect camouflaged prey.
Humans have trichromat vision as they have three types of color receptor in their eyes, but dichromats have two color receptors that are common in most of the animals. Scientists showed the sample photographs in normal color and dichromatic color to gamers to find out camouflaged nightjar birds or nests containing eggs. The main purpose of this test was to find if there is any evolutionary advantage in two color vision to find the prey in camouflage.
In the paper published in Behavioral Ecology, scientists explained that it was assumed that for dichromats it is easier to find camouflaged prey. But, surprisingly Exeter team has found that trichromats found the nightjars and eggs faster than simulated dichromats.
Although capture times are also dependent n the camouflage types and patterns. During the egg hunting dichromat(red-green colorblind) peoples performed better than trichromats. Lead scientist of this study Dr Jolyon Troscianko from the University of Exeter's Centre for Ecology and Conservation in Cornwall, said in a report,“Our findings suggest that the role of colour perception in spotting camouflaged objects is complex, and this could help explain why colour vision with just two receptor types is so widespread in nature”.
ScienceDaily reported that dichromats have limited color vision but they can better differentiate the light and dark shades in hidden objects. Researchers conducted their study at the Zambia where nightjars are usually hunted by both trichromat animals such as humans, velvet monkeys and dichromats animals such as mongooses.
Various creatures in nature have different types of vision. Most of the mammals are actually dichromats and very few animals including humans are trichromats. However, there are some marine mammals have only one receptor, so they cannot differentiate any colors. Most of the birds are tetrachromats which make their eyesight better than the humans, but the species with the strongest eyesight in the world is the mantis shrimp. They have 12 types of receptors in their eyes which help them to see ultraviolet, infrared and polarized light vision including visible lights.
