Why are tigers orange?

The colors and patterns of an animal can be used to help them stand out to mates or to warn of their toxicity. Tiger's ability to remain invisible to their prey determines whether they catch dinner or not. Why are tigers orange?

It is a good question, considering that orange is a color used for items that need to be ultra visible. tigers are relatively easy to spot in environments with orange.

We have what is called trichromatic color vision. Light from the outside world hits a thin layer in the back of the eye called the retina. rods and cones are light-restraints used in the retina. Rods only sense light and darkness, not color, and they are mostly used in dim light. Most humans have cones for blue, green and red. Our vision is called trichromatic because we can see three primary colors. Apes and monkeys share this vision.

The color blue is rare in nature.

Dogs, cats, horses and deer have dichromatic color vision. Their eyes only have cones for blue and green. Humans who only get information from their blue and green cones are considered color-blind. It is likely that the same thing will happen for dichromatic animals.

Deer are the main prey of the tiger, and their dichromatic vision means they don't see the tiger as orange, but as green. The tiger is much harder to spot when it is crouching in the grass or prowling behind a bush.

Although green tigers would be even harder to spot, evolution just doesn't work with the ingredients necessary to make green fur.

The biomolecular structure of the animal makes it easier to produce brown and oranges than it is to produce green, according to John Fennell, a lecturer at the Bristol Veterinary School in the United Kingdom. Thatalga grows in its fur. There are no green furry animals.

Artificial intelligence has been used to determine the ideal patterns for hiding. His studies were shown on the program "Animals Behaving Badly".

There was an image in trichromat color, so a normal color image, and she did an experiment to show how effective the particular camouflage would be if you were a dichromat. It took the presenter a long time to find the tiger when she wore the dichromatic glasses.

The ability to see orange is a trait that prey animals have evolved to have.

In an evolutionary arms race, an improvement in visual perception would provide the prey with better visual systems in the first instance. The tiger doesn't know it's orange because it is a dichromat.

The evolutionary arms race doesn't exist for that color because the tiger has evolved over the course of evolution to have a camouflage system.

It was originally published on Live Science.