this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

I'm no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better

And of course we can't really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can't actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.

AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there's gonna be some "gaps" in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.

Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can't (though it doesn't necessarily mean they can or can't see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)

And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.