Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Commun Biol. 2022 Jun 23;5(1):576. doi: 10.1038/s42003-022-03518-2.
A color gamut quantitatively describes the diversity of a taxon's integumentary coloration as seen by a specific organismal visual system. We estimated the plumage color gamut of hummingbirds (Trochilidae), a family known for its diverse barbule structural coloration, using a tetrahedral avian color stimulus space and spectra from a taxonomically diverse sample of 114 species. The spectra sampled occupied 34.2% of the total diversity of colors perceivable by hummingbirds, which suggests constraints on their plumage color production. However, the size of the hummingbird color gamut is equivalent to, or greater than, the previous estimate of the gamut for all birds. Using the violet cone type visual system, our new data for hummingbirds increases the avian color gamut by 56%. Our results demonstrate that barbule structural color is the most evolvable plumage coloration mechanism, achieving unique, highly saturated colors with multi-reflectance peaks.
色域定量描述了特定生物体视觉系统所观察到的分类群的体被颜色的多样性。我们使用四面体鸟类颜色刺激空间和来自 114 个物种的分类多样化样本的光谱，估计了蜂鸟（Trochilidae）的羽毛色域。所采样的光谱占据了蜂鸟可感知颜色总多样性的 34.2%，这表明它们的羽毛颜色产生受到限制。然而，蜂鸟的色域大小与之前所有鸟类的色域估计值相当，甚至更大。使用紫锥细胞类型的视觉系统，我们对蜂鸟的新数据增加了 56%的鸟类颜色色域。我们的结果表明，羽小枝结构颜色是最具进化能力的羽毛颜色机制，可实现具有多反射峰的独特、高饱和度的颜色。
