Bergeron Zachary T, Fuller Rebecca C
Am Nat. 2018 Feb;191(2):269-276. doi: 10.1086/695282. Epub 2017 Dec 1.
Assessing variation in animal coloration is difficult, as animals differ in their visual system properties. This has led some to propose that human vision can never be used to evaluate coloration, yet many studies have a long history of relying on human vision. To reconcile these views, we compared the reflectance spectra of preserved avian plumage elements with two measures that are human biased: RGB values from digital photographs and the corresponding reflectance spectra from a field guide. We measured 73 plumage elements across 14 bird species. The field guide reflectance spectra were drastically different from that of the actual birds, particularly for blue elements. However, principal component analyses on all three data sets indicated remarkably similar data structure. We conclude that human vision can detect much of the variation in coloration in the visible range, providing fodder for subsequent studies in ecology, evolution, behavior, and visual ecology.
评估动物体色的变化是困难的，因为动物的视觉系统特性存在差异。这使得一些人提出人类视觉永远不能用于评估体色，但许多研究长期以来一直依赖人类视觉。为了调和这些观点，我们将保存的鸟类羽毛元素的反射光谱与两种受人类偏见影响的测量方法进行了比较：数码照片中的RGB值和野外指南中的相应反射光谱。我们测量了14种鸟类的73个羽毛元素。野外指南中的反射光谱与实际鸟类的反射光谱有很大不同，尤其是蓝色元素。然而，对所有三个数据集进行的主成分分析表明数据结构非常相似。我们得出结论，人类视觉能够检测出可见范围内体色的大部分变化，为后续的生态学、进化、行为学和视觉生态学研究提供了素材。
