The helmeted gecko (Tarentola chazaliae) is a member of the gecko family native to the west coast of Africa.
The size of the adult helmeted gecko is about 4 inches (10 cm). The environment they live in is sandy and rocky desert with sparse vegetation. The gecko is mainly nocturnal. Helmeted geckos require a humid environment.
Helmeted geckos are the first vertebrates to be found to see color in very low levels of light and has the most acute nocturnal color vision.
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http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/199698/0
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http://bulinko.deviantart.com/art/Tarentola-chazaliea-426207108
#biodiversity #gecko #coolcritters
That's really interesting. I know that we don't see color at night because lower light is lower energy and it shifts colors toward the lower energy end of the spectrum dropping through red to infrared. There just isn't much energy light at the other colors. Does this gecko have different photo-receptors that respond to different sections of the infra-red spectrum? Or are they saying that somehow they see the same colors that we would see in the light, i.e. is grass green to them? Does the available radiation reflect and absorb off of the grass and deliver photons at the same energy to their retinas as the energy we refer to as green? I can't imagine what they are talking about. I'm just guessing.
ReplyDeleteNevermind. You can just read it here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1810110/pdf/15801611.pdf
ReplyDeleteWhat would have changed if they controlled for colour preference? This is a different issue than whether they can see limited colour at the high energy end of the band green -> blue -> ultraviolet. I think that the experiment determined that they can tell the difference between blue and grey, but I only think that. I wish they would have done more than one male and one female. This issue is that they assume that the geckos chose the blue predominantly because those crickets tasted better. If they also trained a group to prefer grey, and got analogous results we'd know if that assumption in the experiment was correct. I can't see that it would negate their results, but it would be different to know that they just like blue, or that they choose the colour that fed them good tasting crickets, and as the experiment is explained, we don't know that.
ReplyDeleteI remembered when I was in preparatory (High School) and everyone who was in this class had to dissect a frog. I took tremendous action and liberated the rats and frogs from the cruelty of these humans. I was then expelled from this school.
ReplyDeleteThat impudent tongue and silly smile is oddly familiar...
ReplyDelete