...Sara J. Walton; Aimee J. Silla; John A. Endler; Phillip G. Byrne ABSTRACT Ontogenetic colour change occurs in a diversity of vertebrate taxa and may be closely linked to dietary changes throughout development. In various species, red, orange and yellow colouration can be enhanced by the consumption...

...Lucas Wilkins; Daniel Osorio ABSTRACT Humans and other animals often use colour to recognise objects regardless of their context – as a measure of material properties rather than of their contrast with a background. Most work on visual communication signals is, however, concerned with colour...

...Lucas Wilkins; N. Justin Marshall; Sönke Johnsen; D. Osorio ABSTRACT Colour vision and colour signals are important to aquatic animals, but light scattering and absorption by water distorts spectral stimuli. To investigate the performance of colour vision in water, and to suggest how photoreceptor...

...Adrian G. Dyer Summary Vision is one of the most important modalities for the remote perception of biologically important stimuli. Insects like honeybees and bumblebees use their colour and spatial vision to solve tasks, such as navigation, or to recognise rewarding flowers during foraging. Bee...

...Anna Balkenius; Christian Balkenius SUMMARY Naïve hawkmoths ( Manduca sexta ) learn from a single trial to approach and attempt to feed from an artificial flower of an innately unpreferred green colour even when a distractor flower with a preferred yellow colour is present. In some of the animals...

...Brian E. Dalton; Thomas W. Cronin; N. Justin Marshall; Karen L. Carleton SUMMARY The extent of animal colouration is determined by an interplay between natural and sexual selection. Both forces probably shape colouration in the speciose, rock-dwelling cichlids of Lake Malawi. Sexual selection...

...Deseada Parejo; Nadia Silva SUMMARY The extent to which the expression of melanin-based plumage colouration in birds is genetically or environmentally determined is controversial. Here, we performed a between-nest design supplementation with either the sulphur amino acid dl -methionine...

... cannot change their colour coat rapidly within seconds, minutes or hours by a `physiological' colour change, which is typical of some shrimps or squids. Instead, they display a `morphological' change of pigmentation, which involves quantitative changes of the chromatophores and qualitative changes...

...Alberto Ugolini; Silvia Somigli; Luca Mercatelli SUMMARY The use of the landscape in the zonal recovery of Talitrus saltator (Montagu) was demonstrated in the past using natural and artificial landscapes. Here we evaluate the importance of colour in the landscape orientation of sandhoppers. Adult...

...Richard O. Prum; Rodolfo Torres SUMMARY Structural colours of avian skin have long been hypothesized to be produced by incoherent (Rayleigh/Tyndall) scattering. We investigated the colour,anatomy, nanostructure and biophysics of structurally coloured skin,ramphotheca and podotheca from 31 species...

...D. Osorio; A. D. Ham SUMMARY Bird plumage is coloured both by pigments and by spectrally selective interference in the light reflected from feather barbs. These barbs are composites of high- and low-refractive-index materials, and light is reflected at refractive index boundaries. The spatial...

... Heliconius melpomene , the small white Pieris rapae and the small copper Lycaena phlaeas . The colour of the eye shine is determined mainly by the reflectance spectrum of the tapetal mirror and the transmittance spectrum of the photoreceptor screening pigments, if present near the light-guiding rhabdom...

... statistical method for comparing groups of spectra in a manner that is independent of assumptions about the visual system of the receiver. In addition, they can be used to give confidence intervals to derived measures of colour such as quantum catch by photoreceptors. *Author for correspondence (e...

...Leo J. Fleishman; Matthew Persons ABSTRACT Anoline lizards communicate with visual displays in which they open and close a colourful throat fan called the dewlap. We used a visual fixation reflex as an assay to test the effects of stimulus versus background chromatic and brightness contrast...

...-UV, Px-B, Px-L2 and Px-L3, respectively. Fig. 4. In situ hybridization in serial sections of the same region of the eye (not A and C). Identical ommatidia are marked by coloured symbols. (A) Oblique section labelled with the Px-UV probe. The distal tier (d) is labelled, whereas the proximal...

...D. Osorio; M. Vorobyev; C. D. Jones ABSTRACT The colour vision of domestic chicks ( Gallus gallus ) was investigated by training them to small food containers decorated with tilings of grey and coloured rectangles. Chicks learn to recognise the colour quickly and accurately. Chicks have four types...

...Michiyo Kinoshita; Naoko Shimada; Kentaro Arikawa ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates that foraging summer-form females of the Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly Papilio xuthus have colour vision. The butterflies were trained to feed on sucrose solution placed on a disk of a particular colour...

...Andrew R. Parker ABSTRACT Diffraction gratings were believed to be a rare cause of colour in nature. However, surface gratings, which include diffraction gratings and Bragg gratings, appear to occur in many forms within a diversity of animals. Structural colours in general have implications...

... the net degree of polarization, the theoretical maximum value being 100 % at the Brewster angle for the horizontal E-vector component and approximately 30 % at flat viewing angles for the vertical E-vector component. We have made video polarimetric measurements of differently coloured fruits...

...J. B. Messenger; J. A. Miyan ABSTRACT This paper presents the first direct demonstration in a living cephalopod of neural activity associated with chromatic behaviour. It has long been known that colour change in these molluscs is unique in that it is brought about by chromatophores controlled...