What makes animals see red? Detailed answer

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What makes animals see red? Detailed answer

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What makes animals see red?

The myth that red makes the bull angry has been around the world since at least 1580. It was then that the well-known novelist and playwright John Lily wrote: "He who appears before the Elephant should not be dressed in bright colors; as well as the one who appears before the Bull, in red."

Whether we like it or not, the fact remains that, like rats, hippos, owls, and anteaters, bulls are color blind. The bull does not rush to the red - he is infuriated by the menacing movements of the matador's cloak; the color only serves to please the crowd.

Dogs can distinguish between yellow and blue, but cannot distinguish between red and green. At traffic lights, guide dogs decide if they can cross the street by listening to the traffic noise. Hence the beeping signals at modern pedestrian crossings.

Chicken is a completely different matter.

Chicken workers know all too well what happens when a chick "sees red." As soon as a drop of blood appears on one of them, the rest immediately rush to the poor fellow and begin to peck as if possessed.

Such cannibalistic behavior - if left to chance - can lead to mass murder and a rapid decline in the number of poultry on a poultry farm.

The traditional solution to this problem is to cut chicken beaks with a hot knife: a blunt beak causes much less damage. However, in 1989, Animalence proposed a radically different way out of the situation: they launched red contact lenses for laying hens. The first results of the experiment seemed promising: as everything turned red, the hens fought less and, as soon as their activity dropped significantly, they ate less, continuing to carry the same number of eggs.

The egg-producing industry gives a very small percentage of profit - 1,6%. In total, there were 250 million laying hens in the United States at that time, of which 150 million were kept on fifty poultry farms. Red contact lenses promised a triple increase in profits.

Unfortunately, the process of "putting on" contact lenses turned out to be too time-consuming and troublesome. Deprived of oxygen, chicken eyes quickly degraded, causing suffering and pain to the birds. Under pressure from animal rights activists, Animalence had to abandon the production of its products.

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Why were dead souls recorded in the crew on the ships of the British Navy?

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the ships of the Royal Navy of Great Britain had the so-called "widowed sailors" - dead crew members who continued to be paid. This measure was introduced as a social guarantee - by hiring to serve in the navy instead of the merchant fleet, the sailors knew that their families would not be left to live in poverty in the event of the death of the breadwinner. The number of allowed "dead souls" varied according to the size of the vessel and could reach 18 people on ships of the first rank.

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Random news from the Archive

Super solar flare could destroy all electronics on Earth 08.01.2013

Adrian Melott (Adrian Melott) from the University of Kansas at Lawrence (USA) and his colleague Brian Thomas (Brian Thomas) from Washburn University in Topeka (USA) studied the "superflare" on the Sun in the 774th century AD, whose traces were recently found in annual rings of Japanese cedars. A solar superflare in 1859 turned out to be several times more powerful than the previous record holder, the "Carrington event" of XNUMX, capable of destroying all electronic devices and electrical networks on Earth, astronomers say in an article posted in the electronic library of Cornell University.

Flashes periodically occur on the Sun - explosive episodes of energy release in the form of visible light, heat and X-rays. It is believed that the most powerful outbreak occurred in 1859 during the so-called "Carrington event". During this powerful outbreak, approximately 10 yottojoules (1025) of energy were released, which is 20 times the energy released during the meteorite impact that destroyed dinosaurs and marine reptiles.

The discoverers of the ancient outbreak, Japanese physicists led by Fusa Miyake from the University of Nagoya (Japan), considered it a so-called "superflare", the power of which exceeded all known bursts of solar activity by several orders of magnitude. Melott and Thomas tried to calculate the exact amount of energy that could have been released during the superflare in 774. To do this, scientists calculated the proportion of radioactive carbon-14 in the annual rings of cedars and determined the amount of energy that was brought to Earth by a flash. Astronomers then tried to calculate the energy of the ejection on the Sun itself by changing the area of the flare and the proportion of its matter that reached our planet.

It turned out that the flash power was two orders of magnitude lower than the maximum values predicted by their colleagues. However, this does not deprive the 774 event of the status of a "superflare". According to researchers' calculations, about 774 yottojoules (200 * 2) of energy were released on the Sun during the burst of 1026, which is 20 times more than the power of the "Carrington event".

A similar cataclysm today would lead not only to the destruction of electronics on board satellites and the Earth's surface, but also to the appearance of other anomalies. Thus, the share of ozone at the boundaries of the stratosphere and troposphere would decrease by 20% in the first months after the outbreak and would remain low for several years.

According to Melott and Thomas, this would lead to a deterioration in the health of plants and animals around the world, and an increase in the incidence of skin cancer. However, a mass extinction of flora and fauna is unlikely, which adds another argument in favor of the realism of such outbreaks. According to the authors of the article, such "superflares" can occur once every 1250 years, which underlines the importance of observing the "health" of the Sun, given their catastrophic consequences for the infrastructure of modern civilization.

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