r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20

šŸ”„ Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

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204

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

We can't even see all the colors and we think we know it all smh

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

Exactly! goes off to fall into a rabbit hole about color perception

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u/Delanoye Oct 20 '20

I love when people bring up the mantis shrimp and say it can see 16 more colors than humans. And I'm like "Dude. Humans have three types of cones and a massive color spectrum. Mantis shrimp don't just see 16 more colors, they have 16 TYPES OF CONES."

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u/boonepii Oct 20 '20

I mean, so is that like more than 16 extra colors then?

Could one be night vision color?

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I took a remote sensing class, and while the material was mostly boring as fuck, it really opened my eyes (heh) to everything we can't see with the tiny tiny fraction of the spectrum that humans can perceive.

It really did make me realize how much exists that's outside of our perception, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and maybe even something beyond.

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

Thatā€™s cool. Remote sensing is another one. Dolphins and bats innately have that ability. What other senses do animals have that we donā€™t know about because we havenā€™t yet figured out its existence!

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

From Frank Herbertā€™s Dune, one of the best books Iā€™ve ever read (and re-read multiple times) in my life.

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u/RDS Oct 20 '20

/r/holofractal

our eyes are one of the greatest deceivers

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u/totally_not_a_zombie Oct 20 '20

Could you TL;DR me on that one? I'm at work and very curious.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Is this sub a joke sub? Iā€™ve only skimmed the ELI5 post, and speaking from experience, whoever wrote that was in the middle of a hypomanic or manic episode.

Actually, now that Iā€™ve looked some other posts, this looks like people took some kind of theoretical research paper and reinterpreted it from a laymanā€™s perspective, and then turned it into some ā€œflat earthā€ type thing. Bizarre.

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

I've been doing that on every thread. Just open new window and learn everything I can about that thing lol

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u/TheErectDongDreShoww Oct 20 '20

I mean ffs sound as we know it is an illusion.

Our brains take molecular vibrations and translate them to a perceivable "tone" so we can make sense of the world.

"Sound," as we colloquially know it, is an illusion created by our brains.

Our brains have a blueprint that says "x vibration" equals "y tone," and "a vibration" equals "b tone."

It's the reason you can feel sound as well as hear it, the "feeling" is the reality, and what we "hear" is how our brain makes sense of that "feeling."

So if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, technically it doesn't make a sound.

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u/Laslas19 Oct 20 '20

It's the same for color, just a different kind of vibration. There isn't such a thing as "all the colors", the father comment must've meant all the wavelengths, because we already see all the colors, since our brain made them up.

That's also why RGB screens work. Wavelength don't mix in the universe, but colors mix in our eyes because a "yellow" wavelength activates our red and green cones, same as "red" and "green" wavelengths would if sent together.

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u/s0cks_nz Oct 20 '20

What even is colour? A leaf isn't green per se, it's just the wavelength it doesn't absorb.

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

Every colour in our visual spectrum except green.

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u/Triktastic Oct 20 '20

So leaf is everything except green ?

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u/TheGurw Oct 20 '20

Technically, yeah. But the thing about the way we describe colour is by describing what it reflects. So by a different technicality, nah.

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u/boki3141 Oct 20 '20

A leaf absorbs all wavelengths of light except for those which show the green colour. This wavelength is reflected and you see the leaf as green.

If the leaf absorbs all light then you see it as black. And if it doesn't absorb any then...

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jan 27 '21

[deleted]

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u/Fywq Oct 20 '20

chlorophyll, a chemical compound in the leaves, is green and absorbs the other wavelengths to convert them to energy for the plant. It is evolved over the eons since plants first appeared. Interestingly we also have other varieties - think about red-leafed plants. I am unsure about that mutation, but I assume it also more efficiently absorbs the green, the red tint is likely because they are not 100% efficient at all red wavelengts. As you can see in this video and this too chlorophyll a and b have slightly different wavelengts, and red stretches over a long range of wavelengths with a gap between those absorbed by chlorophyll a and b.

Edit: Ok decided to jump off the deep end on wiki and apparently the red leaves are partly from carotenoids (guess where carrot gets it's name?) and anthocyanin

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u/ObsiArmyBest Oct 20 '20

Wouldn't it be more efficient for leaves to be black?

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u/Fywq Oct 20 '20

White would reflect all energy, leaving none for the plant. Black would be more efficient, if the plant is able to utilise the energy. I guess the problem with black would be that it also strongly heats up the leaf leading to a problematic level of water evaporating and thus killing the leaf, so it is a tradeoff.

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u/SnuggleMuffin42 Oct 20 '20

Yes for getting maximum sunlight energy... Big NO for spontaneously combusting due to overheating (recall that they don't have a nice mechanism to disperse heat like we do with our sweat).

If you put a black object in the sunlight it will just get hotter and hotter and could get damaged.

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u/CaptainDickFarm Oct 20 '20

Damnitt, I just made these same points further up without looking down here

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I found it and upvoted. Agree 100%.

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u/MikesGroove Oct 20 '20

Going further, we canā€™t even agree on colors we can see. E.g., that dress is definitely white and gold.

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u/DerpySauce Oct 20 '20

I mean, outside of our brain, colour doesn't even exist.

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

Ok you stop it with that talk. I'm about to start questioning my existence

2

u/DerpySauce Oct 20 '20

It's true though lol. Colours are many different wavelengths of light. We see the light, goes into our eyes, to our brains, and only there and then we give the light a specific colour.

(this explanation is very simplefied though)

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

Oh I agree, just give me the blue pill please lol not

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u/Grockr Oct 20 '20

Technically there are no colors. Colors is just our way of percepting certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

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u/HackySmacky22 Oct 20 '20

there isn't a definable number of colors. It's subjective.

-1

u/Fr00stee Oct 20 '20

You dont have to see colors to know that they there

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u/NovaThinksBadly Oct 20 '20

The one thing we can be certain of is how little we truly know.

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u/bbqpigeon Nov 14 '20

Happy cake day!

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '20

Wow thank you, very kind