For a moment there, that headline had me thinking that school kids who happen to be weird have colorful gardens and are showing these gardens to octopuses.
[cephalopds] are colorblind – their eyes see only black and white – but their weirdly shaped pupils may allow them to detect color
Do PR people ever think about the awfulness of the drivel they write? I see the point the author is trying to make here but writing self-contradictory sentences is not the wright approach.
Cephalopods, long thought to be color-blind, may in fact be able to detect color....
Although the retinas of cephalopods cannot detect different colors, new research suggests they may be able to detect color another way.
...etc.
What a beautiful hack by nature. I wonder if you could create a lens with a similarly shaped pupil/iris and see the chromatic aberration in a black and white camera correctly focused on the output. Would make for a fun weekend project :)
This was brilliant to me at first blush. After thinking about it, though, wouldn't the image have to be a higher resolution to compensate for the blurring of the chromatic aberration? When you process out the blur to extract the color information, you'll have less resolution left over. I'm guessing that would offset the gains on using a single channel. Ultimately for "full color", at a specific resolution, you need a specific number of bits of information, regardless if it's encoded in three color channels, or a single channel.
It might still be good for other reasons, though. Like if the colour filters used in space probes degrade over time (I don't know, do they?) then it would allow more consistent colour recording. Also it might be usable on very small probes that primarily take black and white images but can capture colour (at expense of resolution) if required.
Actually, the opposite, this is the same principle as a hyperspectral sensor. These line scan sensors (kind of like the pupil photos in the article) create "data cubes" (i.e. an 2D image with a 3rd spectral dimension for every spatial pixel) which are huge compared to red, green, & blue images. The article actually talks about how computationally intensive it is to handle and how that made squid so smart.
The black and white film is still only going to record black and white images ... The "may be able to judge color" part of the theory requires "processing". You might however be able to digitize your black and white photo and "colorized" it.
Octopus does not originate from latin, but instead greek. So it would be octopodes[0], however, we all speak english, so octopuses is fine. Or, you know, use what you want because english isn't prescriptive...
Fascinating tidbit for those who check the comments first:
> Intriguingly, using chromatic aberration to detect color is more computationally intensive than other types of color vision, such as our own, and likely requires a lot of brainpower, Stubbs said. This may explain, in part, why cephalopods are the most intelligent invertebrates on Earth.
Can someone tell me if I am understanding this right? If not, can you clarify?
This is how I understood it:
They don't have different cones cells for detecting color. Instead, their pupil is more like a slit, causing light to be diffracted, not unlike a prism. Because of the diffraction, different wavelengths of light fall on different areas of the retina. Their brain is mapped as such that they understand the location of the light as the color. Moving the eye around helps them refine this information.
I'm not a biologist nor vet, so not my area of expertise, but there are a lot of jokes about dogs being colorblind (tv series, movies, etc) and in the end it happens that they do have some limited color vision. Sorry I can't give any reference.
