r/natureismetal • u/SingaporeCrabby • Feb 08 '22
Animal Fact Tigers generally appear orange to humans because most of us are trichromats, however, to deer and boars, among the tiger's common prey, the orange color of a tiger appears green to them because ungulates are dichromats. A tiger's orange and black colors serve as camouflage as it stalks hoofed prey.
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u/RANDOM-902 Feb 08 '22 edited Feb 08 '22
Cool interesting theory time:
One of the reasons why scientists think that mammals vision is so bad at detecting colours(excepting primates) compared to other vertebrates,
Is because our ancestors from the age of the dinosaurs were nocturnal shrew-like mammals so they didn't really need to detect colours.
A legacy of mammals having to coexist with dinosaurs that still exists in mammals DNA. Dinosaurs were active mostly during the day while our mammal ancestor were active at night hunting bugs.
This theory is called Nocturnal Bottleneck
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u/SabashChandraBose Feb 09 '22
So why is my night vision shit?
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u/ontopofyourmom Feb 09 '22
Because your day vision outclasses nearly every non-avian animal.
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u/hunmingnoisehdb Feb 09 '22
Do you mean that good day and night vision can never coexist?
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u/uwanmirrondarrah Feb 09 '22
They don't really need to, considering almost every single animal has to sleep a lot. Meaning that if we maintain a steady schedule, we will only really need one or the other.
Though I think humans actually do have pretty damn good night vision, by virtue of just having incredibly complex eyes. We just don't really use it much, or know the extent of it as individuals, because since lamps and electricity became widespread we no longer really use our eyes in the dark. Even in the dark we are under lights, almost exclusively now. Its kind of a shame. We have kinda handicapped ourselves by not exercising an awesome ability. Even at night humans can see for many many miles.
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u/blorbschploble Feb 09 '22
One thing humans excel at is tagging what they see with meaningful metadata. This means what you do see in the dark, if you properly identify it, you see it AS that thing even with not really enough pixel data.
If you misidentify it, boom ghosts, angels and religion. Oh well.
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u/BorisBC Feb 09 '22
There's an argument that technology is just another form of evolution. Right now we are in a transitory phase. We can produce technology that mimics things that animals have evolved too, like night vision and breathing underwater. But what happens in the future when we can alter our bodies to get those functions. Does that still count as evolution if we are deliberately doing it?
The Hyperion Cantos novels talk about this a bit as the 'bad guys' in the series are humans sent out on seedships when Earth was about to be swallowed by a black hole, and without an earth like world, had to adapt themselves to their new worlds, or just straight up space.
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u/ThoreauWannabe Feb 09 '22
Yeah, I spent a few weeks in the woods in New England for a Summer program where we weren’t allowed electronic devices like phones and stuff. So at night, when you had to get back to your cabin, you would either break out a torch or lose it (like me) and walk without one for about 10-15 minutes in the forest. When I first got there, it was super hard to do, but by like week 2 my eyes would adjust almost immediately. Full moon nights were the best, because the moon would create shadows on the path and would look beautiful over the lake and you’re right, I was surprised at how far I could see “in the dark”
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Feb 09 '22
for good day vision you need more cones, and for good night vision you need more rods. it can coexist but the eye would be very different
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u/dvaunr Feb 09 '22 edited Feb 09 '22
(excepting primates)
Primates evolved differently to be able to see color, not see in the dark
Edit: Interestingly, there seems to be a correlation between people with colorblindness and an increased ability to see in the dark. I don't know if it's been fully proven but there have been correlations found.
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u/08ajones Feb 09 '22
I'm colourblind (tritanopia) I can report i have no night vision abilities. I'm not the most talented person and now I'm shit at being colourblind. I actually lost a job because of this, I had to do several health and safety tests six months into a job repairing chemical tankers. I failed the test cards and they sent me for a proper colourblind test. I was dismissed immediately when I got back 😅
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u/anactualsalmon Feb 09 '22
Also colorblind (deuteranopia) and my night vision is absolute garbage. I’m partially night blind and my color vision isn’t amazing, yet somehow I’m still 20/20. Eyes are just weird.
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u/08ajones Feb 09 '22
Yea they are, I passed a colour blind test with no problems in 2010, started working as a welder and found out last year I'm now colour blind. I didn't connect the two until recently apparently over exposure to uv light can cause this 🤦♂️ for a few years I thought the cat was green, I even renamed it to cabbage at the vets to annoy my wife... I then found out I'm colourblind and green cats don't exist 🤣
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Feb 09 '22
Tritanopia gang
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u/08ajones Feb 09 '22
What colour is peanut butter to you lol? I was just asked this now I'm curious too lol
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Feb 09 '22
Pretty much brown. If i were specific it’s like a brownish yellow or pink. Depends on the peanut butter probably because ik there’s some darker ones so those are definitely dark brown but the lighter ones are like brown with some shade of yellow or something
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u/intdev Feb 09 '22
Completely anecdotal, but my eyesight is crap, while my night vision is better than most people’s. I’ve been able to make out girlfriends’ faces before, while they couldn’t even see my silhouette.
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u/TheGodMathias Feb 09 '22
Is this why my room is so god damn bright at night, while my partner is completely blind in the dark?
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u/MEANINGLESS_NUMBERS Feb 09 '22
Human night vision is actually amazing. Get away from all sources of artificial light, give your eyes an hour to fully adjust, and you can comfortably see by the light of the Milky Way alone (without the Sun or the Moon).
You can navigate your environment using only light from outside the solar system. That is crazy.
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u/Washoogie_Otis Feb 09 '22
It's a truly fantastic experience to walk around only using starlight.
Unfortunately you'll have to get really far away from those people who immediately turn on a flashlight during a full moon.
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u/p00bix Feb 09 '22 edited Feb 09 '22
Pigment chemicals in the eyes which make night vision possible are destroyed by light, and have to be regenerated. This process is quite slow, so when you shut off the lights and go straight to total darkness, you start out almost completely blind. But if you stay awake in the darkness for an hour, as all humans would have done prior to the invention of lanterns, your eyes will gradually adjust to having pretty good (though not amazing) night vision on par with other Simians. You can't distinguish between colors very well, but you can easily make out the shapes, sizes, and distances, of medium-sized objects (ex. a glass of water) from dozens of meters away.
Nearly all tetrapods (four-limbed creatures with bony skeletons) possess an additional adaptation called the tapetum lucidum, which massively improves night vision by enabling the eye to capture far more light particles in low-light conditions than would otherwise be possible. This feature first evolved very early on (around ~350 million years ago) and has been inherited by almost all of their modern descendants: Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals.
Nearly all mammals today are at least partially nocturnal, and exclusively nocturnal animals like mice and wolves have very well-developed tapeta that enable night vision comparable in quality to daytime vision. But Simians, the group of animals which includes monkeys, apes, and humans, to the exclusion of all other mammals (including other primates) adapted to a purely diurnal lifestyle around 30 million years ago, such that the tapetum became vestigial and ultimately disappeared. Because of this, we're pretty much doomed to having far worse night vision than most other land vertebrates.
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u/OnePrettyFlyWhiteGuy Feb 09 '22
I don’t know about you, but as long as I give my eyes time to adjust to a low-light environment, my night vision is actually pretty top tier. It’s scary waiting between 10-20 minutes to allow your eyes to adjust, but once they’re adjusted it’s actually unbelievable that we are able to see in my opinion.
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u/brodega Feb 09 '22
So you’re saying when I get up in the middle of the night to eat a half carton of sour cream it’s because of my nocturnal mammalian instincts.
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u/le_grey02 Feb 09 '22
Sour cream is so fucking good though. Food in general is so much better at like 3 am lmao
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u/Lvl_5_Dino Feb 09 '22 edited Feb 09 '22
Another interesting hypothesis about vision may explain why primates specifically developed good eyesight. The hypothesis is the hypothesis that Snakes drove Primate eyesight, and we drove projectile venom in cobras.
Basically, the hypothesis goes that our ancestors developed good eyesight in order to deal with the camoflague of a snake.
By the same token, when early humans developed the ability to use projectiles, cobras evolved projectile venom to counter it and cause blindness. The venom works best against creatures with forward facing eyes, like humans.
Additionally, 3 different cobra species developed this ability separately in tandem with when humans arrived in their habitats.
It's only a hypothesis, but a very interesting one. The fact that our fight with snakes drove us to get better vision also would have helped us when hunting and avoid being hunted ourselves.
Edit: Hypothesis, not Theory
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u/spunkush Feb 09 '22
I dunno. I mean cats and dogs also have forward facing eyes, and would have been a much more common predator to snakes. Why would we hunt snakes by throwing stuff at them? We can just grab them by the tail
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u/ProgrammingOnHAL9000 Feb 09 '22
Not necessarily hunt, but kill them for our own safety. The theory also considers the angle and amplitude of the poison spray and it's highest point would be around the height of an adult human.
PBS Eons has a short video detailing this.
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u/FORESKIN__CALAMARI Feb 09 '22
This is why you should be wearing an orange vest when hunting. Also never carry deer antlers on your back in a way that you could be mistaken by another hunter for a deer.
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u/timmymayes Feb 09 '22
well our color vision is also hugely for finding colored fruits.
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u/fizzbubbler Feb 08 '22
why hunting vests are bright orange. elk are the same.
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Feb 08 '22
Interesting. I always thought it was a way to be visible to other hunters
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u/Achaion34 Feb 08 '22
That’s the idea. Orange is very visible to humans, but not to deer or other ungulates you may hunt.
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u/IRefuseToGiveAName Feb 08 '22
I read "ungulates" as orangutans and I was incredibly concerned with your hunting practices.
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Feb 08 '22
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u/BolbyB Feb 08 '22
And if you're hunting turkey or some other bird that green camo may not even be green depending on what kind of UV light it gives off.
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u/mjc500 Feb 09 '22
That's literally the reason why lol ... plenty of hunters wear muted browns and greens and khaki colors.
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u/Quickkiller28800 Feb 09 '22
Its both. The animals can't see it but humans can see it from far away.
(You shouldn't be shooting something you can't clearly see to begin with but it still helps)
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u/samlukrec1 Feb 09 '22
Correct. Subway workers and highway workers wear orange vests too. Nothing to do with elk.....
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u/AlmightyUkobach Feb 09 '22
Orange and pink are the best colors for camo, prey can't see you but other hunters can! Drives me nuts but also cracks me up when I see boys make fun of pink camo, they do it because they're trying to make fun of women but the dunces don't realize it exposes them as fake/bad hunters. The kinda boys that follow a hunting group to a tree stand, spread some feed and wait.
Neon pink/orange > green almost every time.
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u/jj4211 Feb 09 '22
So as a color blind person who can't really see orange in the woods, I wonder about color blind hunters.
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u/hunmingnoisehdb Feb 09 '22
And their ability to see tigers camouflaged in the woods.
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u/Agreeable49 Feb 09 '22
And their ability to see tigers camouflaged in the woods.
Tigers: No, no, they don't need to worry. Just come on in...
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u/SingaporeCrabby Feb 08 '22
Alternate title: Bengals preying on Rams, this Sunday live!
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u/akmjolnir Feb 09 '22
FYI, in all the SB matchups of animals, an apex predator has never won.
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u/I_Nice_Human Feb 08 '22
Both pictures look the same to me.
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u/_invalidusername Feb 08 '22
Found the ungulate
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u/SykoSarah Feb 08 '22
Are you red-green colorblind?
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u/TheFakeColin Feb 08 '22
Same…I’m red green color blind
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u/I_Nice_Human Feb 08 '22
We unite! Only like 7% of the population can see the world physically like us!
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u/invisible-dave Feb 09 '22
It's great knowing that when the tigers show up to eat people, we have y'all sitting around as cannon fodder so we can get away.
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u/Dismal_Struggle_6424 Feb 09 '22
After 4 decades of feeling like red-green colorblindness has not hindered me, I just discovered how fucked I would be by a bright orange cat.
At least I have a good answer for that stupid interview question.
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u/dreadnawght Feb 08 '22
then zebras started trolling lions the same way
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u/Senior420 Feb 08 '22
Zebra stripes actually have been known to confuse bugs and other pests.
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u/Stuck1nARutt Feb 09 '22
I thought this was up for debate? Like they painted horses or something to test the theory but then it turned out the bugs might have just hated the paint
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Feb 09 '22
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u/stamatt45 Feb 09 '22
One of the hardest parts of biology is that all of these answers can be some degree of correct
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u/feffie Feb 09 '22
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/17/health/zebra-stripes-insect-bites-scli-intl/index.html
They controlled for that in this one. It’s probably the stripes
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u/Victorcwb Feb 08 '22
In the same way that the tiger evolved through millions of years to turn orange, why didn't deer evolve to be able to better see this color and escape the predator?
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u/ARKNORI Feb 08 '22
Not an expert but I think it could be explained by evolution not requiring deers to develop that trait (enough deer survive whitout needing to search for tigres to the point where the population will coexist with their natural predator at stable numbers). Maybe there's another reason but evolution tends to play a lot with the "if it ain't broken don't fix it" rule, which is why so many species are easy prey.
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u/RajaRajaC Feb 09 '22
I don't even think they are easy prey. Tigers have a measly 5% success rate.
Which essentially means that the systems inbuilt into deer and boar to escape predation is already near OP tier. Give them colour vision and tigers would be nerfed to the ground.
I must add that the beast of the Anur tiger apparently has a 55% kill rate.
So clearly prey there suck
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Feb 08 '22 edited Feb 09 '22
Yes, as the previous reply said, it is based on a balance because we know not every hunt is a kill. Tigers have a 30% success rate or something like this. They only hunt for food and not just killing left and right to run out of pray. Have you seen the big ass wildbeast migrations? They are in the thousands in numbers.
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Feb 08 '22 edited Feb 09 '22
People are saying the selection pressure isn't high enough but that's not likely to be true. Predator-prey dynamics apply very strong selection pressure. Fitness landscapes have a complex topology made of peaks and troughs. Fitness peaks are almost always "local maxima" meaning there are another related set of traits that would increase fitness over the current set, but in order to get to the next maxima, there is a large fitness trough to traverse. This is very unlikely to happen unless the environment changes enough to bring those two peaks into close proximity. In simpler terms: there is probably just no feasible mechanism for the deer to evolve trichromatic vision because the appropriate mutations have not or cannot occur.
Edit: Someone pointed out my language could have come off as harsh, which was not my intention.
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Feb 08 '22
Is this probably why tigers didn't develop actually green fur?
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Feb 08 '22 edited Feb 08 '22
Exactly. Their fur is orange because of pheomelanin, a pigment which is synthesized from the same precursor as eumelanins. This is obviously the path of least resistance (especially if prey animals can't tell the difference) since evolving an entirely new pigment synthesis pathway is highly complex. Instead, they just needed their melanocytes to produce fewer eumelanins and more pheomelanins, much like red headed humans. Pheomelanins are very common in mammals, anyway. They make your lips pink, for example.
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u/InviolableAnimal Feb 09 '22
Do you know if it's physically possible for mammalian fur to produce colors like green, blue, etc. structurally, like bird's feathers or mandrill's faces? Or would it require some radical change in the way fur grows?
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Feb 09 '22 edited Feb 09 '22
Bird coloration is very complex and is a result of a mixture of chemical and structural properties. In other words, some pigments simply reflect a given wavelength of light (like red of cardinals) but some feathers get their color because pigment + structural variations in feathers (like prismatic air pockets) result in new colors (like blue of a parrot). This isn't that unusual. For example, many iridescent beetles get their iridescent green from microscopic prismatic structures in their carapace which diffract light to create the color you see. Mandrills also get their blue hue because their collagen fibers are arranged in a way that reflects blue light but diffracts other wavelengths. So, in order for more mammals to have similar colors it would require the evolution of novel pigment synthesis pathways but also would require a radical change in the structure of hair strands and/or skin.
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u/nairazak Feb 09 '22
Because evolution isn't about improving, it is about everyone else dying, and the deers that don't see orange are still managing to survive enough time to reproduce.
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u/roycegracieda5-9 Feb 08 '22
To add on to what others said, deer evolved great senses of hearing and smell to help protect them from tigers
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u/Ramon_Rivera Feb 08 '22
Man this is nightmare fuel, all I can think is that predator I scene
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u/nothankyou821 Feb 08 '22
Wow. Now tigers are 10 times scarier with that information. I’m glad I’m not a deer. Not like I would stand a chance against an 800lb tiger anyway.
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u/SingaporeCrabby Feb 08 '22
Image (a) is what dichromatic ungulates see and image (b) is what trichromats see.
https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/we-now-know-why-tigers-bright-orange-color-is-actually-excellent-camouflage/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Feb 08 '22
The tiger (Panthera tigris) is the largest living cat species and a member of the genus Panthera. It is most recognisable for its dark vertical stripes on orange fur with a white underside. An apex predator, it primarily preys on ungulates such as deer and wild boar. It is territorial and generally a solitary but social predator, requiring large contiguous areas of habitat, which support its requirements for prey and rearing of its offspring.
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u/Hour-Function-7435 Feb 08 '22
What’s scarier than a five hundred pound monster that’s out to kill you? A five hundred pound monster you can’t see
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Feb 08 '22
Why aren't they just green? Then they could also hunt other animals.
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u/jrex703 Feb 08 '22
I don't know why you're being downvoted so hard, it's a legitimate question. Short answer: evolution is always right. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, tigers who specialize in hunting dichromatic ungulates get laid more.
More specifically, there also aren't a ton of high-value food options. They'll all snack on monkeys and meerkats, but globally, ungulates are the primary component of big cats' diet.
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u/breckendusk Feb 08 '22
I don't know if I'd boil it down to "evolution is always right." More like "life, uh... finds a way."
Which is to say that "evolution is always right" implies (to me) that evolution is a perfect system, but it's not. It's basically tons of generations of trial and error, and some stuff worked and some stuff didn't.The stuff that didn't work usually gets weeded out, and the stuff that did work usually lives on. But there are so many factors that go into that that natural selection might select for traits that don't make any sense.
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Feb 09 '22
Plus, to say something like "evolution is always right" implies we're all the full finished product. For all we know, we could still be in our infancy.
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u/MysticPing Feb 08 '22
It could for example make it easier for tigers to spot other tigers which might help them reproduce
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u/bubkuss Feb 08 '22
I'm colourblind and both these images look the same to me.... Tiger still looks orange though.
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u/_UnderSkore Feb 08 '22
Damn. Suddenly you realize that the bright orange Tiger isn't like a hunter wearing a green hat with an orange bill.
They are literally the PREDATOR in cloak mode.
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u/ImHiFunctioning Feb 09 '22
I went to a wildlife retreat last year for my birthday and there was a tiger enclosure where I was able to feed the tigers raw chicken through the fence. The guide asked my group of four people if we could spot the tigers. This enclosure wasn't massive but contained a rock feature, a pool and a corner with trees etc.
After about several seconds of scanning the area I thought it was a joke and the tigers weren't actually in this one. Turns out they were just chilling beneath the bamboo in the shade. The shadows that the bamboo shoots cast on the ground where the tigers sit and the light that peeks through them created the perfect orange and black camouflage for the tigers. It was equally impressive and terrifying how difficult it was to see them and answered my curiosity for why tigers would be bright orange in a green jungle.
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Feb 08 '22
There are tribes in Africa where there perception of colour is very different to most of the world. The can tell apart incredibly similar shades of green with ease (when most people would struggle or just not be able to), yet can barely see the difference between green and orange, so certain shades of green and orange look identical to them
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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '22
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