The mantis shrimp has 16 color receptors and still loses to you
Ed Yong spent years exploring how animals perceive the world. The mantis shrimp was one of the most spectacular and most counterintuitive stops on that journey.
Humans have three types of color receptor in the eye; the mantis shrimp has sixteen. The assumption, for decades, was that this must produce some dazzling inner world of color discrimination far beyond human experience.
A 2014 behavioral study by Hanne Thoen and Justin Marshall at the University of Queensland shattered that assumption. When tested on tasks that require distinguishing between similar colors, mantis shrimp performed worse than humans and many other animals. Their 16 receptor classes, it turned out, are not comparing signals with each other the way human cones do — they appear to act more like individual scanners, each tuned to a specific wavelength.
Ed Yong, in An Immense World, uses the mantis shrimp to illustrate a core argument: more hardware does not mean richer experience. The animal's visual system evolved for rapid predatory decisions in shifting light, not for the slow contemplative color-matching that human vision enables.
The shrimp identifies colors the way a barcode reader works — fast, categorical, efficient — rather than the way an artist mixes paint. It may never see a sunset the way we do. But it can process the polarization of light in ways we cannot, and it can detect ultraviolet wavelengths that are invisible to us entirely.
Every animal, Yong argues, lives inside its own sensory world. The shrimp's is not richer than ours — it is simply different in ways we are still learning to ask about.