Animals are living color. Wasps buzz with painted warnings. Birds shimmer their iridescent desires. Fish hide from predators with body colors that dapple like light across a rippling pond. And all this color on all these creatures happened because other creatures could see it.

The natural world is so showy, it’s no wonder scientists have been fascinated with animal color for centuries. Even today, the questions how animals see, create, and use color are among the most compelling in biology.

Until the last few years, they were also at least partially unanswerable—because color researchers are only human, which means they can’t see the rich, vivid colors that other animals do. But now new technologies, like portable hyperspectral scanners and cameras small enough to fit on a bird’s head, are helping biologists see the unseen. And as described in a new Science paper, it's a whole new world.

Visions of Life

The basics: Photons strike a surface—a rock, a plant, another animal—and that surface absorbs some photons, reflects others, refracts still others, all according to the molecular arrangement of pigments and structures. Some of those photons find their way into an animal’s eye, where specialized cells transmit the signals of those photons to the animal’s brain, which decodes them as colors and shapes.

It's the brain that determines whether the colorful thing is a distinct and interesting form, different from the photons from the trees, sand, sky, lake, and so on it received at the same time. If it’s successful, it has to decide whether this colorful thing is food, a potential mate, or maybe a predator. “The biology of color is all about these complex cascades of events,” says Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University and co-author of the paper.

In the beginning, there was light and there was dark. That is, basic greyscale vision most likely evolved first, because animals that could anticipate the dawn or skitter away from a shadow are animals that live to breed. And the first eye-like structures—flat patches of photosensitive cells—probably didn't resolve much more than that. It wasn't enough. “The problem with using just light and dark is that the information is quite noisy, and one problem that comes up is determining where one object stops and another one starts. ” says Innes Cuthill, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Bristol and coauthor of the new review.

Color adds context. And context on a scene is an evolutionary advantage. So, just like with smart phones, better resolution and brighter colors became competitive enterprises. For the resolution bit, the patch light-sensing cells evolved over millions of years into a proper eye—first by recessing into a cup, then a cavity, and eventually a fluid-filled spheroid capped with a lens. For color, look deeper at those light-sensing cells. Wedged into their surfaces are proteins called opsins. Every time they get hit with a photon—a quantum piece of light itself—they transduce that signal into an electrical zap to the rudimentary animal's rudimentary brain. The original light/dark opsin mutated into spin-offs that could detect specific ranges of wavelengths. Color vision was so important that it evolved independently multiple times in the animal kingdom—in mollusks, arthropods, and vertebrates.