Interesting article in PLOS Biology

[Adrian]

An interesting paper in the  current issue of PLOS Biology:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002444

 

I haven't had time to read it fully yet, but the illustrations look good!

[nfoto]

The authors obviously are not botanists ... the description of the Rudbeckia is totally wrong and factually erroneous. Perhaps I read the article later, but that observation was a bit off-putting for me.

[Andrea B.]

It is an interesting paper. And videos! 

 

I do wish such emulations of animal vision used a more realistic false color key. It always seems strange to me that for Bees, UV-signatures are illustrated using reds/magentas which bees cannot detect. It is possible to make color edits to videos these days, so they could do better. (Well, it has been possible to color edit videos for quite a long time, actually.) 

 

Even using a UV+Blue+Green filter would provide a better emulation of Bee colors.

 

Granted, illustrating reflected UV as a color requires some imagination/experimentation. My little experiments and efforts in this area have been fun. (And at least please me.)((They will remain unknown except to UVP members!!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Birna, I was not sure what you were objecting to in the paper regarding R. hirta ??

 

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[Alaun]

This is the same paper:

 

[nfoto]

They call the ligulate ray florets 'petals' and ignore the disk flowers, just saying the latter are basal (sic) parts of the 'petals'. Ouch. Grade F in Botany.

 

Reading such nonsense, I immediately wonder whether this kind of ignorance applies elsewhere in the paper.

[Andrea B.]

Well, not everyone can be a good botanist. But I hear you. You never have let me get away with that kind of incorrect terminology!! 

 

I think they made a good effort towards "animal view" videos. The beamsplitter set up is kinda cool.

 

BTW, the bibliography in that paper is interesting. I followed a couple of links there. One link led to a paper with LOTS of flower photos made by using a UV, Blue, and Green stack. I'll go find the link and post it here --> LINK.

The PDF can be downloaded to view the photographs.

 

another interesting link:  LINK

 

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Yes, Alaun, we did indeed have a post about that paper from Stephan. 

(And I see that I made the *same* comment about using red in bee-vision emulations. La !!)

[OlDoinyo]

The camera setup is suspiciously similar to that used by J.W. Wong for his earlier IRG photos (concurrent 2-exposure method.)

[Andy Perrin]

I don’t know about “suspiciously” — using a beamsplitter seems like the obvious way to implement this, so it doesn’t seem strange to me that multiple groups could independently develop similar setups.