SEVEN DEADLY COLOURS

REFERENCE: PARKER, A. (2006) Seven Deadly Colours: The Genius of Nature’s Palette and how it Eluded Darwin.

The Free Press, London 286 pp.

INTRODUCTION
Darwin worried a great deal about the evolution of the eye. He struggled to imagine the eye
as a system developing stages and fretted that this one issue would derail his idea that the
world of nature was formed by the cumulative tiny actions of natural selection. We now
know that this was a groundless worry and this section of work attempts to make sense of
some of the bewildering detail that we now know about the arms-race between eyes and
colour or colour-form adaptations in animals and plants. As a Life Science candidate you are
encouraged to make an effort to get the book and to read it. Your teachers will try to ensure
that a copy is lodged in the library for you to take out over the course of the year.

Vision is the dominant sense for all organisms is a world which is shaped by senses. Be
aware that human beings have their sense of reality shaped by their senses and none more
so than the eye. It is possible and it happens every day that the eye and the brain collude to
change our sense of reality. They do this so seamlessly that yyou would never know. You
and I fall for the illusion every time. Eyes give every creature who has them a great
evolutionary advantage (it helps to see your enemies first and it helps to see your food first
too). They cost the organisms that have them a lot though. They cost energy to make and
run, they cost energy to wire up and they have a requirement for brain capacity that
changes the developmental track of the animal as it grows.

Eyes that form images have evolved in only six of the phyla of organisms that live on earth.
But they have made a major difference to the success of those groups. Those phyla
represent 95% of all the animals living on the planet. So, if you consider it you suddenly and
rather illuminatingly realise that most predators find their prey by sight and most prey use
their eyes to avoid being eaten. In addition, colour and texture can be used to void
predation and to sneak up on your next meal. Colour can also be used to send sexual
messages and to signal satisfaction, irritation or dominance. So the understanding of the
biology around colour plays a major role in the understanding of all sorts of different
biological sciences.

Let us do a quick refresher about light. Newton discovered that light (white light) can be
split into a series of coloured light fractions. He used a PRISM to do this. Those of you that
do science will be familiar with that concept. Probably because of his fascination with the
symmetry of music, Newton divided the “rainbow” into seven colours but of course there
are only six (Indigo, although a good name for a Blue Great Dane, is not a distinguishable
colour). What Newton did not know was that there are other parts to light that he simply
could not test for or discover.
The sun continuously emits pulses of electromagnetic radiation or varying cycle or wave
lengths. A wave is best understood as a displacement of a medium (imagine flicking a rope,
the displacement travels down the rope until the energy of that caused the displacement is
dissipated or spent). Light is a paired wave, one wave is electrical in nature and the other is
magnetic in nature. The two waves are identical in nature, move and the same speed but
are orientated at 90⁰ to each other. The sun releases a range of energies and they have
different strengths or magnitudes. High energy waves have a SHORT wavelength and low
energy waves have LONG wavelengths. Short wavelength light is BLUE and long wavelength
light is RED.

This fact should immediately shed light on the reason why ULTRAVIOLET light damages
tissue so easily. The ultra short wavelengths of light mean that the light is capable of
punching out bases in tour DNA as it passes through your body. It is also intense enough to
burn the skin if exposure is too lengthy. This happens because the energy of the light is
being transferred into the skin that it hits.

Note that NO light has colour as an inherent physical property. Colour is purely a product of
the eye. It is the receptors in the eye that determine our sense of colour and NOT the light.
Light is by definition ONLY energy. Our eye and the brain that sorts out the information tht
the eye receives is what will determine our perception of colour. All babies learn to see
colour in the same way. By that I mean, all babies everywhere in the world regardless of
culture. We all learn to see the same three colours first (black, white, red). Green usually
follows next and then the others in a less well defined order.

We have in our RETINA (the image capturing layer in the eye) three receptor types that
collect and send information re the wavelengths of light. They are the BLUE, GREEN and RED
SENSORS. These specialised cells are called CONES. The blue ones see light between 400 and
500 nm (collecting most effectively at 425nm). The green ones detect wavelengths between
455 and 605nm (collecting most effectively at 530 nm) and the red ones between 485 and
700. This third type collects most efficiently at 560nm and at this wavelength light is
translated as yellow. The longer wavelengths are translated as red. This information neatly
explains the CMOS of cameras. Modern digital cameras that do not rely on the exposure of a
film, use three (and lately four) chips that record colour. They are often listed in camera
specifications as an RGB system. You now know that that stands for “red, green, blue”.

We are going to follow the format of the book as we examine this lovely section of biology.
In the book the author discusses examples of each colour and the uses it is put to. We will
follow the same format.

1. ULTRAVIOLET
a. THE PROBLEM
The problem that we want to solve is why Kestrels hover above the road
edges in the UK and how do they see voles. Voles are brown and they are
 camoflauged against the brown of the leaves and the leaf litter in which the
move.
b. THE CONSIDERATIONS
c. THE SOLUTION
2. VIOLET
3. BLUE
4. GREEN
5. YELLOW
6. ORANGE
7. RED