Frogs discovered unusual ability

Frogs are able to distinguish colors in the dark.

Scientists have stated that frogs and toads are able to distinguish colors in the dark and retain this ability even when people do not see anything.

The findings of scientists was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

In the study, scientists studied the strange feature of frogs associated with the device eyes. For some reason many species of frogs, toads and other amphibians have not one, but two types of sticks, and you don’t have cones. These sticks no other species of vertebrates.

The first experiments with these structures showed that they react to light with different force that led the authors to suggest that they may play the same role as the cones in the human eyes have different sensitivity to short and long wavelengths of light. As the scientists explain, the human brain compares the signals from these cones and calculates the color of an object according to the difference in their “testimony”.

The researchers put the frogs in a dark chamber and watched their behavior. It turned out that the frog continued to distinguish colors and be able to navigate them in search of a way out of the hole, even in cases when the lighting level was more than 10 times lower than the minimum brightness of the light to human eyes, when people can barely see.

At lower light frog lost color vision, but continued to see the world in monochrome tones. This skill was the more surprising then, when researchers analyzed the data and found that the eyes of the frogs had a sensitivity of light, almost equal to the theoretical maximum.

paradox