Study
A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp
Thoen, Hanne H.; How, Martin J.; Chiou, Tsyr-Huei; Marshall, Justin
Science, 2014
Mantis shrimp were trained to attack a fibre-optic target of one wavelength, then tested against pairs of wavelengths separated by progressively smaller intervals, measuring the smallest difference they could reliably distinguish.
- Studied in
- Haptosquilla trispinosa
- Sample size
- mantis shrimp trained in a two-choice wavelength discrimination task
The animals discriminated wavelengths differing by roughly 15–25 nanometres and failed below that — far coarser than humans, who discriminate differences of a few nanometres across much of the spectrum, despite the shrimp having twelve photoreceptor classes to a human’s three.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Mantis shrimp do not compare receptor outputs to compute colour in the way vertebrates do; they appear to recognise a wavelength by which receptor it excites, trading discrimination for speed.
How NatureHQ reads it
The single most useful result for correcting a popular misconception, and it corrects it in the most interesting possible direction. "Twelve colour receptors" was reported for years as though it implied vision beyond imagining; measured, the animal is worse at telling colours apart than a person. The reason is that colour discrimination comes from *comparing* channels, and comparing twelve channels is computationally expensive — so the shrimp appears to skip the comparison and read the wavelength off directly. Fewer distinctions, arrived at faster, in an animal whose strike is measured in milliseconds.
- One species, in a trained task with a small number of individuals.
- A discrimination threshold measures one aspect of colour vision, not everything the system does.
- How the twelve channels are actually used remains an interpretation rather than a demonstrated mechanism.
Asking the animal with twelve colour receptors to tell two colours apart
Mantis shrimp have twelve classes of colour receptor to a human’s three. Does that mean they see finer colour differences?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Animal senses
Pictures captioned "what a bee sees" are translations into human colour of something a human eye cannot receive. They can be accurate about the information and cannot be accurate about the experience.
Animal senses
Mantis shrimp have twelve classes of colour receptor and can tell colours apart less finely than a human with three. Counting receptors does not measure colour vision.
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).
doi.org/10.1126/science.1245824
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-02.