(September 27, 2023 at 9:38 am)Anomalocaris Wrote:(September 27, 2023 at 8:53 am)Confabulate Wrote: Sounds like cephalopod bullshit to me, they're infamous for it.
You shouldn't let yourself get taken in by them.
octopus can do many things, but they don’t bullshit about being able to adapt to color of their environment without color vision in their eyes or any vision in their eyes at all. the leading hypothesis for how they do this is they use a combination of their eyes and their skin to sense light and color in ways very different from color vision in other animals.
1. their eyes don’t have different color sensitive proteins and photo receptors like human eyes. so they can only form monochromatic images and can’t directly see color like most vertebrates can. however their eyes are adapted to precisely change the amount and distribution of chromatic aberration in the monochromatic image cast on their retina. by changing chromatic aberration and processing the changes in resulting image, they can extract color information.
2. unlike with vertebrates whose light sensitive pigments are all in the retina, octopus has the same light sensitive pigment in their skins as in their retina. like their eyes they don’t have different pigments in the skin to detect different colors. but by changing the color of their skin with the chromatophore cells in their skins, they can preferentially let pass components of ambient light or different colors. so they can process the intensity of light they sense with their skin in combination with which chromatophores are expanded to determine what color the ambient light originally were.
I have nothing useful to add to this, except that it occurs to me that perception of color seems a dubious ability for sea critters to have, considering how quickly most colors are absorbed by water at depth.
