Please tell me animal facts!

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some human animals have a 4th color [cone] receptor in their retinas enabling them to see a hundred million colors, compared to the million or so colors a regular human animal can differentiate.

Really? ^

Try to even imagine a color that you have never seen. You cant do it. Or atleast I cant.

Sharks and rays can "see" in the electromagnetic spectrum too - they can detect bio-electricity and use it for hunting. Many animals have these "sixth-senses". Some birds can detect the magnetic force lines from the earth's poles and use them for navigation - at least that is the a real scientific theory, though not all scientist are convinced. I think "pink" is a real color: if you aim a tv camera with sensors for RGB at something that humans call pink they will pick up something: something like red at a high energy level and green and blue at lower levels. If all three sensors are detecting at the same levels these are the colors humans see as "grey" levels - so pink is like red mixed with white - or a "bright" or "light" grey mixed with a brighter red. So in a sense the color pink IS in the rainbow - but the rainbow breaks out the white light into all the constituent wavelengths so pink light put through a prism will be a rainbow with a bright red band and dimmer orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet bands. Pantone "Barbie Pink" is produced on a RGB computer monitor with red at 87.5 percent of maximum brightness plus green at 12.8 percent or maximum and blue at 53.9 percent of maximum. If all three were producing 12 percent of maximum the human eye would see a dark grey, if all three were producing 87 percent of maximum the human eye would see a light grey. A "natural" color source with power levels for the "in between" colors of ROY. G. BIV (that is orange, yellow, indigo and violet) at levels somewhere in between the light-primary colors of red, green and blue would be seen by the human eye as pink, and the colors could be broken out by a prism. A pigment, paint or ink which looked like Pantone "Barbie Pink" would absorb 12.5 percent of the red, 87.2 percent of the green and 46.1 percent of the blue when exposed to "pure white" light (a nice mix of all visible wavelenghts each at the same intensity). The orange and yellow would be absorbed at levels somewhere between the percentages or red and green absorption, and the indigo and violet light would be absorbed someplace between the red and blue absorption.

(I will leave out things like the human eye perceiving the same intensity of red and blue as different levels of "brightness" for simplicity.)

Computer printing and video screens need to deal with color one way, the textile and printing industry another way. Pantone tries to being some order to the chaos. But there are some colors (like metallics and iridescents) that even Pantone doesn't cover - but the human eye can see and distinguish.

Some types of highlighter pens and "day-glow" color clothing absorb light in the non-visible (infrared and ultraviolet) but emit it in the visible spectrum (red or yellow). These colors seem to "glow" eerily (or attractively depending on your point of view) with more light "reflected" than what might appear available. Pantone cannot handle these very well either.

Robotics tries to imitate the animal and human senses - but isn't above using more mechanical senses like radar or lidar either.

Some animals give off light - bio-luminescence - and all animals give off heat (infrared) and other kinds of electromagnetic energy - human mussels and nerves give off detectable electrical-radio-type waves which can be picked up by some electronic equipment and some animals.

Sonar can also be used by machines and some animals as a sense, but it is not electromagnetic - though it is energetic.

A small number of human individuals can see ultraviolet light due to genetic mutations or injury.
But this is the basic function of bees.

The co-evolution of bees and many plants allows bees to quickly locate the center of a flower under UV vision.

Flowers are signaling to bees.
But with typical human vision, we miss the communication between these creatures.

Yellow and blue combined is called..."green".

Labord's Chameleon, from Madagascar, has probably the shortest life span of any land vertebrate- they spend more time in the egg than they do out of it. They hatch out in November, mate in January, and are generally all dead by the end of March, leaving the new eggs to develop very slowly on their own.

Yellow poster paint and blue poster paint poured in a paper cup and mixed with a craft stick will turn green. A yellow theatre spot light and a blue theatre spot light aimed at the same blank white wall will not. (I cannot recall what they will do - i would have to look it up - decades working with RGB computer monitors and light mixing is still not intuitive to me).

Humans think in paints. Not in theater spot lights.

So most folks (I would assume) would think of "Pink" as a combination of red and white. Whitish red.

Its a fact that if you mix white paint into the red paint on your artists pallet you get pink.

And thats how pink looks to the untrained eye of a child. Like a white tint of red.


Consider purple. In your minds eye imagine blue dots. Then imagine red dots. Imagine the dots intermingled. Like a crowd of people seen from above- half wearing red hats, and the other half wearing blue hats. As you get higher in the helicopter the crowd will look less and less like a mass of intermingled red and blue dots, and will look more and more like one mass of purple. That would be true in real life, and its even true in your mind's eye. Or at least with me it is.

Thats pigments. But Ive had it explained to me that with lights the "primary colors" and "the secondary colors" swap roles. For starters. And gets more complicated than that.

My mom told me last week she's got an ant infestation in her kitchen. She's feels bad about trying to exterminate them, because they are such hard working industrious little creatures, she doesn't want them in her house.

Someone posted how "social" insects aren't don't really act that much like humans. I have to agree. Ants are basically robot-like and do everything out of instinct. Also in human cities the males don't usually die right after mating. Or feed each other by mouth-to-mouth regurgitation.

And then there are the honeypot ants, that store honey in their bellies, which swell up like little grapes. Which other ants drink when food is scarce. People eat them, too.