gregbowman wrote:Color kills the deal.
hondac95 wrote:unless you are doing cover ops a bright color is easier to spot when camping/backpacking.
Some of us do purchase items purposefully . . . and covert ops have nothing to do with it . . . your average deer, for instance, will see this blue as a "red flag" so to speak.
Deer are essentially red-green color blind like some humans. Their color vision is limited to the short (blue) and middle (green) wavelength colors. As a result, deer likely can distinguish blue from red, but not green from red, or orange from red. Therefore, it appears that a hunter would be equally suited wearing green, red, or orange clothing but perhaps slightly disadvantaged wearing blue.
For a more detailed explanation: deer are dichromats, meaning that the color-detecting cone cells in their retinas contain two visual pigments, blue-sensitive and green-sensitive. (Normal humans are trichromats, with three visual pigments.) Deer would be able to discriminate shades of blue and blue-green from other colors but would have trouble distinguishing colors in the green-to-red range. Reds would look black or dark gray, and some greens would be indistinguishable from white. This would be very similar to the color vision deficiency in humans known as protanopia.
In deer and other nocturnal to crepuscular animals, the cone cells are greatly outnumbered by rod cells that give them "black and white" vision. With the help of the reflective tapetum lucidum layer that produces that eerie "eyeshine" in a car's headlights, their night vision is far superior to ours. (We're not only night-blind compared to deer but colorblind compared to many other animals. Most birds have four types of visual pigments, Australian lungfish have five, and mantis shrimps have more than ten.)
As evolutionary biologists usually explain it, it all starts with our distant mammalian ancestors, who were little guys that came out mainly at night to stay out of the way of predators such as dinosaurs. They descended from reptiles that would have had good color vision, but at some point they lost all but two of the genes that code for visual pigments. Think of this as a cost-saving measure - it cut out the less useful color-detecting cells and made more room in the retina for the more useful night-vision cells.
Once the dinos were out of the way, the early mammals radiated to fill many niches, both diurnal and nocturnal. In most of those niches, including large herbivores such as deer, the long lost visual pigments weren't missed much. When our Old World primate ancestors took to the trees, a few mutants that produced a new kind of yellow/red-sensitive pigment had an advantage in detecting the ripest fruits and most succulent (and least toxic) young leaves. They survived better and produced more offspring than their red-blind (dichromat) relatives and became the founders of our family line.
COLOR KILLS THE DEAL.
