[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAUD: [laughs] That's hilarious.

ROBERT KRULWICH: So then I was dismissed. I was not only dismissed from the day I was dismissed from—I'm not even supposed to come back tomorrow. And everybody's so elated, and I was kind of mopey, and they said, "What's wrong with you?" I said, "Well, I don't—I like jury duty."

JAD: Hmm. So you're gone all day tomorrow?

ROBERT: No, I'm not.

JAD: You're around tomorrow.

ROBERT: I'm around.

JAD: Oh my God. Okay.

ROBERT: So if we want to do this tomorrow, we could—if you want to package things.

JAD: Yeah, we could—oh, that's good. That's good to know. Okay, so Robert, Where do we start?

ROBERT: Well, I think we start where we left off, right?

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So where we left off, we thought we had simply the most fabulous animal, color-wise, in the world.

JAD: The champion of rainbows.

ROBERT: The champion of rainbows.

JAD: This is Radiolab, by the way. Jad. Robert. So seven-ish years ago, we did a show about colors. We asked a very simple question: who among us Earthlings sees the best rainbow? We crowned a champion, and we're going to reevaluate that coronation right now, as one does as time passes and science advances. So we're gonna—here's what I think we should do.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: I think we should play the original segment.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Because it is delightful. You hear the crowning of the champion.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And then we should re-evaluate whether the champion deserves to be crowned.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: And the early segment, it started with Robert asking a question to a cognitive scientist by the name of Mark Chagizi.

ROBERT: Well here's a question: if a dog and a human and a crow were to be staring at a rainbow, would they be seeing very different things?

MARK CHANGIZI: Yes.

JAD: Now this question that Robert just kind of tossed out during an interview, like, about how different creatures would see the rainbow, this ended up taking us down a little wormhole. And we ended up actually getting a choir to help us illustrate what we learned. But just to set a baseline, your normal rainbow goes like this, starting bottom up.

JAD: Three, two, one.

CHOIR: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet!

JAD: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. ROYGBIV.

TOM CRONIN: ROYGBIV. Yeah that—I don't know why people put the 'I' in there, but that's it.

ROBERT: If you didn't have the indigo, you couldn't say it, though. It'd be ROYGBV.

TOM CRONIN: That's why you need the 'I,' I think, just to say the ROYGBIV, yeah.

JAD: That, by the way, is Tom Cronin.

CHOIR: Hi Tom!

TOM CRONIN: I'm what's called a visual ecologist.

JAD: Mark suggested we give him a call. He told us that humans see seven colors in the rainbow.

MARK CHANGIZI: And in the case of the dog ...

JAD: Very different rainbow.

MARK CHANGIZI: It's gonna start off ...

CHOIR: Blue ...

MARK CHANGIZI: Blue. He'll be able to see blue just fine.

TOM CRONIN: So it would see a rainbow starting with blue.

JAD: Same blue we see.

TOM CRONIN: And then grading off into green.

CHOIR: Green.

JAD: Same green as us.

TOM CRONIN: And then disappearing. The rainbow would end there.

JAD: With a tiny bit of yellow throw in.

ROBERT: That's it?

TOM CRONIN: Yeah, so the rainbow would only be about half as thick as ours.

JAD: Wow!

MARK CHANGIZI: So ...

JAD: That's a sucky rainbow, dog.

MARK CHANGIZI: Yeah.

ROBERT: That's why when God promised that he would never deliver another deluge and he gave—he made the promise in a rainbow, that dogs just were totally unimpressed.

JAD: [laughs] And what is it about the dog eye that makes it see this way?

TOM CRONIN: It doesn't have red sensitive photoreceptors, no red sensitive cones.

JAD: The weird thing is that the difference between dogs and us cone wise is just one. They have cones tuned to blue and green—so do we. But we have this one extra. Red.

CHOIR: Red.

JAD: Which doesn't really seem like a big difference, I mean it's just one cone. But ...

JAY NEITZ: To have three is so much better than two.

JAD: That's Jay Neitz, vision scientist.

CHOIR: Hi Jay!

JAY NEITZ: Because of this kind of multiplicative thing. Red can get mixed with blue.

CHOIR: Blue.

JAD: Which makes purple.

CHOIR: Purple.

JAY NEITZ: Or red can get mixed with yellow.

CHOIR: Yellow.

JAD: To make orange.

CHOIR: Orange.

JAY NEITZ: And green can mix with blue.

JAD: To get teal or turquoise.

CHOIR: Turquoise.

JAY NEITZ: And that's how we get about a hundred different shades of color that we can see. So by adding one photopigment, instead of adding just one more color, you actually add about 98 colors or so.

ROBERT: All right, let's move on. So now we have a crow. Unless you'd like to change the bird.

TOM CRONIN: Right. Well, the crow is not so interesting, because it's pretty much like us.

ROBERT: Oh.

TOM CRONIN: So let's take a—let's take something like a sparrow.

ROBERT: All right.

TOM CRONIN: Now sparrows have ultraviolet vision.

ROBERT: What do they see?

TOM CRONIN: So they see—the rainbow starts before our rainbow starts. Where we just see sky, it would see an ultraviolet color.

CHOIR: Ultraviolet.

TOM CRONIN: And then it would see the violet.

CHOIR: Violet.

TOM CRONIN: And it would see the blue.

CHOIR: Blue.

TOM CRONIN: And the greens.

CHOIR: Green.

TOM CRONIN: And the oranges.

CHOIR: Orange.

TOM CRONIN: And the yellow first and the orange and ...

CHOIR: Yellow.

TOM CRONIN: And then the red and probably would see ...

CHOIR: Red.

TOM CRONIN: Further into the red than us, because they have ...

CHOIR: Very very red.

TOM CRONIN: ... a more red-sensitive red receptor than we have.

CHOIR: Extremely red.

TOM CRONIN: So they see a much broader rainbow. It would start earlier and it would end later.

JAD: Whoo!

ROBERT: So should we assume that we've now got the sparrow as the champion? That that's the—that's that's as high as it gets?

TOM CRONIN: If you're talking about vertebrates. If you're talking about ...

ROBERT: No, I'm talking about anything that has a heart and a mind and a—and a body.

TOM CRONIN: Once you leave the vertebrates then oh, that's rough. You've got—many animals have much better color vision than the vertebrates do.

ROBERT: Oh, really?

JAD: Like what?

TOM CRONIN: Butterflies are a great example. Butterflies have five or six kinds of color receptors. We only have three, remember.

ROBERT: Butterflies see more colors than we do?

TOM CRONIN: Yeah.

ROBERT: So if a butterfly were looking at a rainbow. [laughs] I never thought we'd get ...

TOM CRONIN: Well they do, I'm sure. I mean, butterflies are out there when the rainbows are out, but would see colors we have no names for between the blues and the greens and the greens and the yellows.

JAD: Ooh!

ROBERT: So it would go from ultraviolet. It would see that.

CHOIR: Ultraviolet.

TOM CRONIN: Yup.

ROBERT: Then it would see violet.

CHOIR: Violet.

TOM CRONIN: And then blue.

CHOIR: Blue.

JAD: And then blue-blue-green?

CHOIR: Blue-blue-green.

TOM CRONIN: Yup.

JAD: And green-green-bluey-bluey or whatever?

CHOIR: Green-green-bluey-bluey.

TOM CRONIN: Right.

ROBERT: And then orange and red and all that?

CHOIR: Orange and red

TOM CRONIN: Yup. They have very complicated eyes.

ROBERT: Huh!

JAD: Okay, just to recap.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Here's the dog.

[Choir sings with fewer voices]

JAD: Here's us, humans.

[Choir sings with more voices/harmonies]

JAD: Now the sparrow:

[Choir sings with more voices/harmonies]

JAD: Little bit more bass, little bit more high end so to speak. And finally, the butterfly.

[Choir sings with more voices/harmonies]

JAD: Which is, you know, not so far above the sparrow but it's got more mids in there.

ROBERT: So I'm now thinking butterflies get the crown.

TOM CRONIN: Yeah, but then if you go onto coral reefs, you come across these animals called mantis shrimps.

JAD: What are they called? Meta? Like ...

TOM CRONIN: Mantis, like a praying mantis.

JAD: Oh.

ROBERT: Oh, mantis shrimp.

TOM CRONIN: The shrimp catches prey using an arm like a praying mantis has.

ROBERT: Oh!

TOM CRONIN: Mantis shrimps are—are mostly pretty small, about the size of a finger. Some get to be as big as your forearm. They're pretty big animals.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: I'm actually looking this up right here. [gasps] Oh my God, they're so colorful!

TOM CRONIN: No, they are colorful though.

JAD: Here look at this. Oh my God, they're just like a—it's like they're electric colored.

ROBERT: Yeah they're like ...

TOM CRONIN: Yeah.

ROBERT: ... turquoise or something.

JAD: Iridescent. And their eyes are like little cartoon eyes. They're gigantic!

TOM CRONIN: Yeah. They have two really big eyes right on the front.

JAD: And you said that dogs have two cones, we have three, how much does the butterfly have again?

TOM CRONIN: Butterfly has five.

ROBERT: Yeah.

TOM CRONIN: Depends on the butterfly. Mantis shrimps have 16.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: 16?

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Oh my God!

ROBERT: Well if you have 16 ...

TOM CRONIN: 16 kinds of receptors.

JAD: What would the rainbow look like to them? I mean, could they even see it?

TOM CRONIN: Mantis shrimp would see a rainbow fine because they live in very shallow water, and so the water is pretty clear, almost like air.

JAD: Huh.

TOM CRONIN: They would start the rainbow way way way inside where we see violet—they would see ...

CHOIR: Super duper ultraviolet!

TOM CRONIN: Extraordinarily deep ultraviolet. And then they would go on through several kinds of ultraviolet, probably five or six kinds of ultraviolet. And then they would get to violet, which is—now they're reaching our colors. And go through violet and violet-blue and blue and blue-green.

CHOIR: Blue green.

ROBERT: Would they have those green-green-blue-blue-blues as well?

TOM CRONIN: Yep.

CHOIR: Green-green-blue-blue. Yellow orange ...

TOM CRONIN: And then they would go out into the reds. So they would be about—about as red as us when they get to the red end.

ROBERT: But only in the reds.

TOM CRONIN: Yeah.

[cheering]

JAD: What a rainbow that must be!

ROBERT: Yeah.

TOM CRONIN: They have the most complicated visual system of any animals by a factor of two of more, so ...

JAD: Wait, wait. You said any. Do you mean—did you mean unequivocally any?

TOM CRONIN: Yeah! No other animal that we know of has a visual system within 50 percent as complicated.

JAD: All right, mantis!

CHOIR: Mantis shrimp! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

TOM CRONIN: But, you know, on the other hand, their brains are tiny, so who knows what ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

TOM CRONIN: ... it turns into.

JAD: So they do not have the ability to perceive the beauty of the rainbow in the way that ...

TOM CRONIN: No, I don't—I don't—no, they're—mantis shrimps are into violence, they're not really into beauty. They go around and—and kill things. That's—I mean really, that's what they do. That's one reason they're so fascinating is ...

JAD: How ...

TOM CRONIN: They have to go around and kill things.

ROBERT: But what do they kill?

TOM CRONIN: Crabs. Other mantis shrimps, shrimps. Octopuses.

JAD: They'll kill octopuses?

TOM CRONIN: Yeah, small ones. A good-size mantis shrimp will—can break the wall of an aquarium.

JAD: Really?

TOM CRONIN: Yeah, there's ones in California that can break aquarium walls if they hit it hard.

JAD: Oh my God!

ROBERT: So you have a pugnacious Muhammad Ali seagoing animal with incredibly great visual sense!

CHOIR: Visual sense! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Mantis shrimp! Mantis shrimp! The mantis shrimp!

JAD: Special thanks to Jim Briggs, our engineer for the choir session, which was a blast.

ROBERT: To Mark Changizi for setting us off in this direction.

JAD: To Michael Kershner and the Young New Yorkers Chorus.

ROBERT: And John McClay and the Grace Church Choral Society, and those folks from the Collegiate Choral and the Dessoff Choirs who joined us.

JAD: And to Alex Ambrose of WQXR for getting everybody together.

ROBERT: Thank you thank you thank you.

CHOIR: Hallelujahhhh.

[cheering]

JAD: Okay, so here we are back in the present, 2018. That was how we left it seven-ish years ago.

ROBERT: And now we take a second, somewhat more sober look at this animal, its glorious achievement.

JAD: Well, actually, we get to actually look at it. Like, I get to—in fact—well, you know what?

ROBERT: You met one.

JAD: I did. I met the champ. And we shared a moment that I certainly will never forget.

JAD: [screams] [laughs]

JAD: That's coming up after the break.

[LISTENER: This is Amy Lantinga from Boston, Massachusetts, Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumurad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Okay, so we did the thing about the mantis shrimp.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And partially because of us, partially because I think just the world was ready, the mantis shrimp has become a little bit of a celebrity animal. It's become quite a popular little crustacean.

ROBERT: It's been celebrated in cartoon.

JAD: Yes it has.

ROBERT: It's celebrated on television.

JAD: Yes it has.

ROBERT: It's had its moments.

JAD: It has had its moment.

ROBERT: Well, and deservedly so, when you think about what—you know, when you think about what its rods and cones apparently are able to appreciate.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You know, you just want to close your eyes and imagine whatever it is that animal might be seeing.

JAD: Which is what we tried to do seven years ago, but as happens, the science keeps going. And one of the things that happened recently in the last few years is that the people who study the mantis shrimp, they have released more knowledge about what it might be seeing. And we're gonna update you on that right now. But first, can I just tell you something?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: I actually got to meet a mantis shrimp, just very, very recently.

ROBERT: In Brooklyn, as I recall.

JAD: In Coney Island.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Oh, yeah. I have dreamt of this moment, I must say. So the mantis is in one of these tanks?

CHRIS MARTIN: Yeah, one of these saltwater tanks.

JAD: Producer Amanda Aronczyk and I, we found a fish store at Coney Island.

JAD: Must be armor.

JAD: That actually had a real live mantis.

JAD: Oh, hello! Whoa! It looks exactly as I imagined it! It's so—wow, they're so cool.

JAD: It was sort of tucked away in an aquarium in the corner of this sort of dimly-lit shop. The shop is run by this guy.

CHRIS MARTIN: Chris Martin, from Creative Aquarium Nation.

CHOIR: Hi, Chris!

AMANDA ARONCZYK: Excellent. And this is your store?

CHRIS MARTIN: Yes.

AMANDA: Okay. And how long have you been here?

CHRIS MARTIN: Four years.

JAD: Chris sells all kinds of fish.

CHRIS MARTIN: Tons of brittle starfish, urchin, different kinds of clownfish. We have designer clownfish.

JAD: Hey, have you ever heard of designer clownfish? Have you heard of this?

ROBERT: I have.

JAD: Like, apparently, these fashion designers are designing new clownfish.

CHRIS MARTIN: So, like, you have a Gucci clownfish or a Louis Vuitton clownfish.

JAD: Stop!

CHRIS MARTIN: Yeah, definitely. I should design a clownfish.

JAD: Just a little weird fish fact. Anyhow, back to the mantis. It was in the corner of the shop in this aquarium of reinforced glass.

CHRIS MARTIN: We actually got someone from Sri Lanka.

AMANDA: This mantis shrimp came from Sri Lanka?

CHRIS MARTIN: Yeah.

JAD: This is one of the stranger creatures I've ever seen.

JAD: And have you ever seen one of these things up close?

ROBERT: They're very, very stunningly colored.

JAD: Oh, my God. Oh, my God!

JAD: The color is just—I mean, astounding.

CHRIS MARTIN: Yeah, these are called peacock because they're particularly colorful.

JAD: This was a particular guy that we saw. He was hiding in a tube in the middle of the aquarium. This was a peacock mantis shrimp, as they're called.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: So if you can imagine, like, it's got—they're big, first of all, they're, like, seven inches or so. So that's a big creature. And if you can imagine the head of a hermit crab painted like a peacock stuck on the bright green, slithering body of a miniature dragon.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: That's what it looks like. I mean, they're the weirdest looking things that you've ever seen.

JAD: God, you can really see its eyes, like, swiveling in all different directions.

JAD: And they have these really big googly eyes.

CHRIS MARTIN: They have beautiful eyes.

TOM CRONIN: Well, we're looking at a peacock mantis shrimp. It's sitting in a lucite tube, and it's looking out at the world. It's treating the tube like it's its home burrow, which it would have if it was in the wild. It's basically looking for something to eat.

JAD: Okay, so the voice you just heard, that's Tom Cronin, our mantis expert from the last segment.

ROBERT: He's your salesperson?

JAD: No, he's an expert.

ROBERT: Oh, he's an expert. Okay.

JAD: I mean, he sells science.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: He drove down from Baltimore to meet us. And remember when he was telling us in the last segment a while ago that the mantis are these violent little bastards?

TOM CRONIN: They love to go around and kill things, yes.

JAD: He was not kidding. I just want to, like, describe this to you before we talk about the vision.

JAD: All right, we're staring at a peacock mantis shrimp, huddled in a tube in an aquarium, and Chris is about to feed—now, what kind of—what's the poor little blue thing that you're about to put in?

CHRIS MARTIN: We're actually gonna feed him a damsel fish.

JAD: At a certain point, Chris drops in this little blue fish. Looks a little bit like Dory from that movie.

CHRIS MARTIN: Here it goes.

JAD: Drops it into the mantis tank.

TOM CRONIN: Oh, oh. Fish is in. Now the fish is sensibly hiding in the back. Fish is hiding behind the tube, as the fish should.

JAD: The little dory fish swim around for, like, I don't know, five minutes, trying to find a way out. The whole time, the mantis was like icy calm, just chilling in its tube. And then ...

TOM CRONIN: Oh, oh, is it coming out?

JAD: Is it coming out?

JAD: It launched out of its tube and then ...

JAD: [screams] [laughs]

JAD: ... just pow! Like. Like ...

JAD: Wow, that was just so sudden.

TOM CRONIN: You can hear the snap as it hit it.

JAD: I mean, it made Amanda and I scream.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: We just—it was shocking. You know, because they have these claws on the front of their body that they used to punch their prey, and you can literally hear the snap from across the room.

ROBERT: Wow.

JAD: And then he—and this was sad. He then took a lap and then came back and just ...

JAD: Oh! Oh!

JAD: ... just punched the fish a few more times.

TOM CRONIN: Oh, wow. That's a hard ending for that little damsel fish.

JAD: Oh, poor fish!

TOM CRONIN: It's been hit three or four times now.

JAD: This is one of those nature moments where you're sort of amazed, but you also sort of want to cry. But so okay, let's talk about his vision.

JAD: Now he's just—he's back in his hovel, and he's just cleaning his eyes now.

JAD: After it killed the fish, it went back to its tube and started kind of like, scrubbing its eyeballs with its little brushes.

AMANDA: It's so crazy!

TOM CRONIN: Well, he's doing his eye thing, which is the important thing.

ROBERT: Because it knows that it's got the best eyes in the house?

JAD: He was like, "Did you see what I did to that fish? Now check out my eyes." And as for what those eyes see, our notion of that has totally changed over the last few years. So for that, I'm gonna bring in another marine biologist that Amanda talked to.

AMANDA: Do you mind introducing yourself?

JUSTIN MARSHALL: No. To who?

AMANDA: To me. Like, "My name is Professor Marshall, and this is what I do for a living."

JUSTIN MARSHALL: And you want me to do that now?

AMANDA: Now is good. Now is good.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: Okay. Yeah. So hello, my name's Justin Marshall. I'm a marine biologist and neuroscientist working on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

CHOIR: Hi, Justin!

JAD: Just for context, Justin is the guy who basically put the mantis on the map.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: He was the first guy—his lab was the first lab to notice that they saw color at all.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: Oh, yeah. I mean, that was cool. That was the University of Sussex.

JAD: It's about 1995, '96. Apparently, he had a colleague from West Africa who was wearing this particular dress.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: She had this wonderfully colorful, traditional dress on.

JAD: She walks into his lab where he's got all the aquariums, and immediately, all the mantis shrimp rush to the top of the aquarium, and they're like, "Hey, baby!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

JUSTIN MARSHALL: She walked in and the shrimps went wild.

AMANDA: What does that mean?

JUSTIN MARSHALL: They started waving their appendages, and they show off all their colors. Now that I know a little bit about mantis shrimps, I know exactly what they were saying to her, which would be entirely inappropriate.

ROBERT: Oh, they were turned on.

JAD: Yeah, they were all aroused.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: They were saying, "Hello, colorful thing. What should we do?"

JAD: So Justin was the guy that basically proved ...

JUSTIN MARSHALL: Okay, these animals have color vision.

JAD: Like, they see color. He confirmed that with this experiment with colored containers.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: With mantis shrimps, you can get them to go and just beat the living daylights out of a thing that's colorful because they love to smash things.

JAD: So anyhow, that was all background. Here's the new information.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: Recently, Justin and his lab decided to ask a new question. He decided to say, all right, all of these shrimp, they have so many rods and cones in their eyes—and by the way, he would say there were 12 rods and cones in their eyes, not 16, which is still four times what we have.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: So it's a lot. All right, they've got all these rods and cones. How well do they use them?

ROBERT: I wonder what that means. How well do they use it? If they have them, they must use them for something.

JAD: Well, it's sort of like if you're a scientist, you can't just assume that they see things the way that we see things. I mean, you kind of have to make sure.

ROBERT: Of course not.

JAD: So I mean, you know, his simple question to start off was: how well do they see different shades of the same color?

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: It's like the kind of thing that we do at the grocery store all the time.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: So, you know, if you go pick a banana from a store, even if you pick one that's just gone yellow, it's still a little bit green.

JAD: You're like, "Is it too green? Not yellow enough? Too yellow?" You know, you use your eyes to make the call.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: He wondered, can the shrimp do that?

JUSTIN MARSHALL: Can this animal distinguish between this shade of red and that shade of red, this blue and that blue?

JAD: Can they make those fine distinctions?

ROBERT: I assume so.

JAD: Yeah. Because they got all the rods and cones, right?

ROBERT: Right. I mean, they wouldn't have all those things in their eyes if they weren't putting them to some extraordinary use. And the obvious use would be more blue or more green, more yellow.

JAD: Sure. Exactly. But he wanted to be sure.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: So what you do is you say, "All right, mantis shrimp. I'm gonna give you food from this yellow thing."

JAD: So what he did, basically, is that he would show the shrimp a yellow light, give him some food. Yellow light, food, yellow light, food. They quickly learned that yellow means food. Cool. So then he shows the shrimp a blue light where there is no food, and naturally ...

JUSTIN MARSHALL: It learns to ignore that very quickly, because the food's at the yellow, it's not at the blue.

JAD: Right.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: Most animals can do this.

JAD: But then what he did is he sort of mixed it up. He would gradually make the blue side, the non-food side, a little more yellow.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: Very gradually ...

JAD: He would shift the color ...

JUSTIN MARSHALL: From blue through to blue-green through to green.

JAD: Then green-yellow, just to see if the shrimp could tell the difference between yellow, which means food, and yellow-green, which doesn't mean food.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: That's what we did. And we expected the mantis shrimp to have far better distinction at that sort of level, and were surprised to find that it was the worst animal on the planet so far tested.

AMANDA: No. No. Are you exaggerating?

JUSTIN MARSHALL: No, not at all. [laughs]

JAD: Our champion of the rainbow was the worst creature ever tested.

ROBERT: The worst. So in other words, nature gives them a panoply of choice, and then they can't tell the difference? Then what's the point of that? There's something wrong with this theory.

JAD: I know. It's kind of tragic.

ROBERT: If I'm Benjamin Moore and I say to you, "Come to my paint store, I'm gonna show you 50 shades of purple," and you can only see three. Then what are you doing in there? Like, I don't know what you're doing.

JAD: Yeah. They seem to have the equipment to see all the purple, all the colors, all the many, many shades. So they've got these amazing eyes, but they just don't seem to use them the way that we do.

ROBERT: I don't understand that.

JAD: Yeah. Okay, so ...

JUSTIN MARSHALL: This is where you need to start thinking about color and what colors are.

JAD: I mean, according to Justin Marshall, the basic thing to understand is that you don't actually see color with your eyes. I mean, you take in the light with your eyes, obviously, but then the color is perceived in your brain. And they have these little insect brains that don't seem to do color the way that our brains do.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: The way in which we see color is if I see a thing, let's say somebody wearing a blue sweater walking down the street, a nice-looking lady or gentleman wearing a blue thing, and my blue photoreceptor in my eye gets really excited.

JAD: So your brain's gonna see that thing blue. That's a blue sweater.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: Now if that blue sweater had a little bit of red in it ...

CHOIR: Red!

JAD: ... the red photoreceptor would also buzz, but not as loudly.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: And it's actually the ratio of those excitations that gives my brain the sensation of color.

JAD: Your brain will basically say, "All right, got a lot of blue, a little bit of red. What could that be?" Magenta. That's what you end up seeing. Like, your brain sort of paints the gap.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: And that's how every animal on the planet sees color, except for mantis shrimps.

JAD: Its brain doesn't seem that interested in painting gaps. So back in our segment when we said it sees a full-throated, wide-voiced spectrum of color ...

CHOIR: Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

JAD: Like, this ecstatic, glorious vision.

ROBERT: The best rainbow view of all creatures on Earth. That's what we said.

JAD: That's what we said.

ROBERT: More variety in the rainbow, than we can or than anybody can. That was our thought.

JAD: That was our thought. We might need to amend that.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Okay, so they still see colors that we don't see, but they might not just be seeing as many colors as we thought. Like, maybe their rainbow is more a series of rather focused, discreet bands of color with not a lot in between.

ROBERT: I am very, very—well, that's actually extraordinarily puzzling. They're given the equipment that we use to see various shades of color, and they don't use it to see shades of color? What do they use it to see?

JAD: Well, they use it to—I mean, this is all speculative, but, you know, Tom Cronin was telling us in the fish shop that, like, the science seems to be heading towards this idea that they use colors to communicate. And if that's the case, like, they don't need to see all the colors, they just need to see the ones that mean something.

TOM CRONIN: At least in the ultraviolet, there's really good evidence now—it's not published, so I don't want to talk about it too much because it's not my work. But it looks like different parts of the UV have very different meanings. Like, one part might mean fear.

CHOIR: Fear!

TOM CRONIN: Don't go there.

CHOIR: Don't go there!

TOM CRONIN: Another might mean ...

CHOIR: Sex!

TOM CRONIN: ... sex. I'd like to get to know more about this.

CHOIR: I'd like to get to know more about this.

JAD: Maybe another part means home. Who knows? It certainly varies species to species.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: We're talking about a whole range of at least 500 species, so to sort of blanket an explanation over that is a bit simple.

ROBERT: But what you're saying is that instead of seeing rainbows, they're having a conversation with the color.

JAD: Yeah, maybe.

ROBERT: This is their vocabulary? That is, they have all these rods and cones so they can talk to the world, not that they can see the beauty of it.

JAD: And this is complicated, but they have—they can do polarized light.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. We can't do that.

JAD: Which is—which is so hard to explain, but apparently it's thought that some species can flash polarized light at each other as a way of communicating somehow. I'm not even gonna try and explain that because I don't get it.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: They are an unbelievably amazing and different system to any other animal on the planet. So you've got to ask yourself the question why? And I've been asking myself that question for 30 years, and I guess I'm a failure because I still haven't answered it. So you could call me a failed biologist. [laughs]

AMANDA: I don't think we would do that. I don't think we're gonna do that.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: I'm not, really.

AMANDA: Yeah, that seems not really true. If you had to distill the new information that you had—that you have, how would you explain it? Like, the thing that we know now that we didn't know 10 years ago is this.

JUSTIN MARSHALL: They're really fucking weird.

AMANDA: [laughs]

JUSTIN MARSHALL: [laughs]

JAD: You know, what I'm left with is that at the end of the day, I mean, you know, yeah, it has eyes. We have eyes. We assume that its eyes do for it what our eyes do for us, but apparently not. And I don't think a choir is gonna bridge this gap.

ROBERT: That's what's called an umwelt. Like, every animal in the world lives with its own senses in a world that is defined by those senses. And in a way, it's one of those tragic things that as try as you will, you will never know what a bat knows when it echolocates. You will never know what a deer, when it looks out—because we know that deer don't see orange. That's why all the hunters wear bright orange and yellow. They just don't see that range.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT: Do they see more of something else? I don't know.

JAD: Well, how do—what's it? Umwelt?

ROBERT: It's U-M-W—it's a great word, umwelt. It's the word that says that you are limited by what you can feel, touch, smell, see.

JAD: Yeah. On some level, I mean, I feel like that's a problem that exists even between people.

ROBERT: Of course.

JAD: You know what I mean? I regularly have moments with my wife where I'm like, "That's not blue." And she's like, "Yeah, it's totally blue."

ROBERT: I have that, too. I have that all the time.

JAD: I sometimes wonder. I have no idea what you're seeing right now.

ROBERT: I know. That's the lonely part, the unlonely part is that you can try.

JAD: Yeah, that is—it is really fun to try.

[choir singing]

JAD: So we'll just keep trying. The original mantis shrimp episode was produced by Tim Howard and Pat Walters.

ROBERT: And updated by our producer Amanda Aronczyk.

JAD: Very special thanks to Chase Kolpan for recording the choir the second time around, and to Chris Martin from Creative Aquarium Nation, Michael Kirschner and the young New Yorkers Chorus. And they have quite a range! I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[CHOIR: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gabel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kilety, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Wester. With help from Amanda Aronczyk, Sima Oliaee, Maya Hughes, and Jake Harlow. Our fact checker is Michelle Garrett.]

JAD: One final note. After we wrapped up this episode, we learned that one of the members of our shrimp choir, a baritone by the name of Daniel Thompson, was one of the five people who died in the tragic helicopter accident that happened over the East River this past Sunday night. We at Radiolab were devastated to hear this news, and we're sending our thoughts to his family and to the rest of the choir, and we would like to dedicate this episode to him.

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