Ed Yong
speaker
354 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 Sep
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And if you can see ultraviolet, you can see patterns on the feathers of birds that, again, our eyes miss.
Here in the US, the American robin has a famously red breast.
Males and females both have red breasts.
The sexes are a little bit hard to tell apart in this bird.
But to us, the birds have no problem because the male's breast blazes with ultraviolet as well as red.
The female's does not.
So robins can easily tell each other apart.
And then that's just ultraviolet as color in and of itself.
You can also blend ultraviolet with other colors.
So...
Most people have eyes with three kinds of color-sensing cells, let's call them.
They're called cone cells.
They're the ones responsible for our color vision.
And my dog has only two.
So his rainbow is much more limited than mine.
Birds have four.
So their rainbows are just so much more expansive.
A typical bird can probably see about 100 times more colors than what we can perceive, which is just stunning to me because so many birds are already just shockingly colorful and beautiful.
Take the most colorful bird that you can imagine and
And now try and imagine that that bird has, you know, maybe a hundred times more colors on it to another bird than what you are currently seeing.
Showing 121–140 of 354 · page 7 of 18
← Previous
Next →