The effect of red lights? Must read!
- Thread starter Buphy
- Start date
Whoa, easy there Jacques Cousteau!
My post was just a vague recollection of something I read or heard or something to that effect, not an adamant answer......unlike yours, which I'm sure is based upon your own extensive research, right?
Lol i was not mean
I was just saying false lol. And yes, that is a fact.
Lol it was not meant to be snippy or mean.
I was just saying false lol. And yes, that is a fact.
Cool!
I did a little Googling and found this interesting read from a bird forum
"In 1997 I visited Barna Mia animal sanctuary in the Dryandra woodland WA. My guide supplied me a 50 watt halogen spotlight fitted with a deep red filter to watch at close range a bunch of rare native mammals including Western barred-bandicoots, Woylies, and Bilbies. To my dismay the animals behaved as if they were oblivious to the red light and their pupils remained fully dilated even when my spotlight was only a couple of metres away. More recently I found the same was true when watching Kiwis on Stewart Island in NZ. Some game parks in Africa also use red light exclusively for spotlighting at night.
My curiosity got the better of me as I had recently paid big money for an infrared viewer to watch owls nesting, only to discover you can view them more clearly without disturbance by using a cheap deep-red light and a pair of binocs. After a fair amount of Googling I discovered why.
There are two fundamental types of light receptors in the retina of the eye called Cones and Rods. Cones are active in bright light only and because we have three different types of cones, each sensitive to different spectral wavelengths, our brain can combine the signals to enable us to see colours.
Rods are far more sensitive to light than cones and they allow animals to see at night. Most animals including humans, have only one type of rod which has a peak spectral sensitivity near 505nm (cyan colour) and has virtually no sensitivity to light wavelengths greater than 650nm (deep red). The most important consequence of this for viewing nocturnal animals is that red light does not harm their night vision and they continue to function normally when illuminated with red light.
Humans have three types of cone cells which have peak sensitivities to blue light(S-cones), green light (M-cones) and red light (L-cones). It is our red sensitive L-cones that enable us to see red when we use red light at night. The retinas of most nocturnal animals however, do not have L-cones which means they are oblivious when we illuminate them using red light.
I have used red light when spotlighting for several years now and the main disadvantages are that I cannot distinguish colour and cannot identify different species by the colour of their eyeshine. When that happens I turn on the white light."
lol you are looking up different animals look up a fishes response to red light... This is a fish forum not a bird forum...
I realize that new guy. As I stated it was just an interesting read, but the science of eye structures relate. And for the record if you go back to reread my first post, I specifically stated "creatures" not just fish.
BTW, you never answered my question: is your answer based upon your own research....or any research you can actually provide?
http://www3.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/infrared-vision-in-a-cichlid-fish
This contains some interesting information.
This contains some interesting information.
Ok, I read it. This is about feeding stimuli which I did not "challenge", but rather I just stated that perhaps fish don't see red wavelengths as we do.
And from what I read, it appears there's a correlation but inconclusive.
"It is interesting that feeding behavior stimulated by a red environment cannot be attributed to responses exclusively mediated by vision. While fish also ingested pellets in the dark, possibly using chemical cues, test 2 of study 2 clearly showed a chemical effect. Fish were undoubtedly attracted by chemical cues, a fact supporting the hypothesis that red light might stimulate motivation for feeding, thus involving another sensory modality (chemical sense). This discards the theory that response of red-stimulated fish was an effect of vision, but instead is something more deeply in the organism, perhaps in the central nervous system."
