In a series of experiments involving sugar water and LED tubes, researchers found that wild broad-tailed hummingbirds can discern colors created from various combinations of ultraviolet and visible light. This ability likely helps the birds home in on nectar-bearing flowers covered in patterns that are imperceptible to people.
Human color vision depends on three types of cones—special cells sensitive to red, blue, or green light. However, many birds, reptiles, and fish have an additional kind of cone that can pick up ultraviolet light.Hummingbirds can see an impressive array of colors that are invisible—or appear very different—to the human eye,.
“If humans are looking at a rainbow, we can see ROYGBIV; a bird looking at the same rainbow would see all those colors in addition to ultraviolet,” Stoddard says. “The second advantage is that the UV cone type should in theory give birds an extra dimension for color perception relative to humans.” Hummingbirds made ideal candidates for this investigation because they are sugar fiends that are naturally drawn to brightly colored flowers in search of nectar. For each experiment, the scientists set up two bird feeders—one filled with nutritious sugar water and the other plain water—at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado. Beside the feeders were two LED tubes, each of which emitted light in a different color.
The researchers visited the site for three consecutive springs and performed a total of 19 experiments that forced the birds to distinguish between a variety of different pairs of colors. They found that the hummingbirds could readily perceive colors from the visible light spectrum such as red, pure ultraviolet light, and different blends of UV and visible light such as ultraviolet mixed with red. They could even tell apart two hues created from different mixtures of red and ultraviolet light.
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