A new form of colour vision in mantis shrimp?
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1
University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute, Australia
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2
National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
With twenty channels of information input, including colour, polarisation, intensity, form and depth, mantis shrimps (stomatopods) have revealed a great deal at the optical and retinal level. They are still keeping secrets, however, when it comes to how they actually process all the data-streams. This presentation reveals new and surprising behavioural evidence as to how they avoid chromatic constipation.
With twelve spectral sensitivities evenly spread out over the spectrum, one would predict exquisite discrimination, colour-constancy and a dissection of colour space far better than other, merely tetrachromatic, beasts for instance. A twelve-dimensional colour space would require a complex neuronal wiring network that has not been detected in earlier work on their neural architecture and frankly, their brain is not big enough! Two hypotheses on how stomatopods process colour have previously been proposed: a) Serial dichromacy, where spectral output from spectrally adjacent receptors in each mid-band row is compared. b) Colour “binning” across the spectrum where information is parallel-processed from the photoreceptors without any initial opponent process. A prediction from (a) is fine discrimination zones between two opposing pairs of photoreceptors within each row. With (b), where colour is examined as a pattern of excitation, discrimination might be limited to the spectral separation of the peaks.
Using associative learning experiments, where stomatopods are given the choice between a trained colour and a test colour of variable intervals we determined their spectral discrimination (Δλ) performance from 300-700nm. Our results show that the mantis shrimps do not discriminate colours well in any spectral region, averaging around 18nm, compared to 1-7nm in humans or 1-10nm in butterflies. This strongly indicates simple form processing, possibly more like the way the cochlea process sound using frequency analysis. This is a new form of colour vision in animals and creates decades more work on this remarkable system.
Keywords:
Stomatopod,
Colour vision,
behaviour,
neural architecture,
Electrophysiology
Conference:
International Conference on Invertebrate Vision, Fjälkinge, Sweden, 1 Aug - 8 Aug, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation preferred
Topic:
Colour and polarisation vision
Citation:
Thoen
HH,
How
MJ,
Chiou
T and
Marshall
J
(2019). A new form of colour vision in mantis shrimp?.
Front. Physiol.
Conference Abstract:
International Conference on Invertebrate Vision.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fphys.2013.25.00074
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Received:
26 Feb 2013;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mrs. Hanne H Thoen, University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute, St Lucia, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia, h.thoen@uq.edu.au