Radiolab - Rippin’ the Rainbow an Even Newer One

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

One of our most popular episodes of all time was our Colors episode, where we introduced you to a sea creature that could see a rainbow far beyond what humans can experience. Peacock mantis shrimps are as extraordinary as they are strange and boast what may well be the most complicated visual system in the world. They each have 16 photoreceptors compared to our measly three. But recently researchers in Australia put the mantis shrimps’ eyes to the test only to discover that sure, they can SEE lots of colors, but that doesn't mean they can tell them apart. In fact, when two colors are close together - like yellow and yellow-y green - they can’t seem to tell them apart at all.   MORE ON COLORS: There was a time -- between the flickery black-and-white films of yore and the hi-def color-corrected movies we watch today -- when color was in flux. Check out this blog post on how colors made it to the big screen from our director of research, Latif Nasser.  Our original episode was produced by Tim Howard and Pat Walters. This update was produced by Amanda Aronczyk. Special thanks to Chris Martin of Creative Aquarium Nation, Phil Weissman, David Gebel and Kate Hinds for lending us their colorful garments. Also thanks to Michael Kerschner, Elisa Nikoloulias and the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, as well as Chase Culpon and The Greene Space team. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Hi, I'm Robert Crulwich. Radio Lab is supported by Casper, and they're experts who make quality mattresses that cradle your body in all the right places. Get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash radio lab and using code radio lab at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm Robert Crulwich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible. As we explore more of how the world is saturated in color, from soft hues to violent stains, check out brain myth. Exploded. Lessons from neuroscience available at Audible. Explore the myriad topics of neuroscience through 24 lectures about myths of the brain. Go to audible.com slash radio lab or text Radio Lab to 500 for a free 30-day trial and a free

audio book. Hey, I'm Becca Bressler. I'm the production manager here at Radio Lab. And I'm here to tell you about a new WNYC Studios podcast called COT. That's C-A-U-G-H-T-COT. Do you remember when you were a kid or a teenager and you made a bad decision and you said to yourself, if I just get away with it this one time, I'll never do it again? Well, our colleagues at WNIC Studios are launching a new series about kids who aren't so lucky. Cot tells the stories of teenagers who make these thoughtless, impulsive decisions and as a result get sucked into a punitive juvenile justice system that changes their lives. You can find Cot in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Be sure to check it out and subscribe. Wait, you're listening. Okay. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

That's hilarious. So with them, I was dismissed. I was only dismissed from the day. I was dismissed from, I'm not even supposed to come back tomorrow. Everybody's so elated, and I was kind of mope. And they said, what's wrong with you? I said, well, I like jury duty. Hmm. So you're gone all day tomorrow?

No, I'm not. You're around tomorrow? I'm drowned tomorrow. Oh, my God. Okay. So if we want to do this tomorrow, we could, or if we want to patch things. Yeah, we could, oh, that's good. That's good to know.

Okay, so, Robert. Let me see where, where do we start. Well, I think we start where we left off, right? Right. So where we left off, we thought we had simply the most fabulous animal color-wise in the world. The Champion of Rainbows. Of Champion of Rainbows. This is Radio Lab, by the way, Chad.

Robert. So seven-ish years ago, we did a show about colors. We asked a very simple question. Who? Among us, Earthlings sees the best rainbow. We crowned a champion, and we're going to reevaluate that coronation right now, as one does, as time passes and science advances. So we're going to – here's what I think we should do. Okay.

I think we should play the original segment. Yes. Because it is delightful. You hear the crowning of the champion, and then we should reevaluate whether the champion deserves to be crowned. Okay. And the early segment, it started with Robert asking a question to a cognitive scientist by the name of Mark Schengese. Well, here's a question. If a dog and a human and a crow were to be staring at a rainbow, would they be seeing very different things? Yes.

Now, this question that Robert just kind of tossed out during an interview, like about how different creatures would see the rainbow, this ended up taking us down a little wormhole. And we ended up actually getting a choir to help us ill. illustrate what we learned. But just to set a baseline, your normal rainbow goes like this, starting bottom up. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, Roy G. Biff. Roy G. Biff. Yeah, I don't know why people put the eye in there, but that's it. If you didn't have the indigo, you couldn't say it, though. It would be Roy G. Biv. That's why you need the eye, I think, is to say the Roy G. Bivv.

That, by the way, is Tom Cronin? I'm what's called a visual ecologist. Mark suggested we give him a call. He told us that humans see seven colors in the rainbow. In the case of the dog Very different rainbow It's going to start off Blue he'll be able to see blue just fine So it would see a rainbow starting with blue

Same blue we see And then grating off into green Same green as us And then disappearing The rainbow would end there With a tiny bit of yellow thrown in That's it? Yeah so the rainbow will only be about half as thick as ours

Wow That's a sucky rainbow dog Yeah That's why when God promised that he would never deliver another daylors. He made the promise in a rainbow. The dog's just totally unimpressed. And what is it about the dog eye that makes it see this way?

It doesn't have red sensitive photoreceptors, no red sensitive cones. The weird thing is that the difference between dogs and us, cone-wise, is just one. They have cones tuned to blue and green, so do we. But we have this one extra. Red, which doesn't really seem like a big difference. I mean, it's just one cone. But... To have three is so much better than two.

That's Jay Knight's vision scientist. Because of this kind of multiplicative thing. Red can get mixed with blue. Which makes purple. Or red can get mixed with yellow. To make orange. And green can mix with blue. To get teal or turquoise.

And that's how we get about a hundred different shades of color that we can see. So by adding one photopigment, instead of adding just one more color, you actually add about 98 colors or so. All right, let's move on. So now we have a crow, unless you'd like to change the bird. Well, the crow is not so interesting because it's pretty much like us. Oh. So let's take something like a sparrow.

All right. Sparrows have ultraviolet vision. What do they see? So they see the rainbow starts before our rainbow starts, where we just see sky. It would see an ultraviolet color. And then it would see the violet. then it would see the blue and the greens and the oranges

and the yellow first and the orange and then the red and probably would see further into the red than us because they have a more red sensitive red receptor than we have so we see a much broader rainbow

we'd start earlier and it would end later so should we assume that we've now that this bow is the champion that's as high as it gets if you're talking about vertebrae Brits. No, I'm talking about anything that has a heart and a mind and a... Once you leave the vertebrates, then all bets are off.

You've got... Many animals have much better color vision than the vertebrates. Oh, really? Like what? Butterflies are a great example. Butterflies have five or six kinds of color receptors. We only have three, remember. Butterflies see more colors than we do?

Yeah. So if a butterfly were looking at a rainbow... I never thought we did here. Well, they do, I'm sure. I mean, butterflies are out there. when the rainbow is out. But we'll see colors we have no names for between the blues and the greens

and the greens and the yellows. So it would go from ultraviolet. It would see that. Yep. Then it would see violet. And then blue. And then blue, blue, green. Yep.

And green, green, blue-blie or whatever. Right. And then orange and red and all that. Yeah. They have very complicated eyes. Huh. Okay, so just to recap. All right.

Here's the dog. Here's us, humans. Now the sparrow. A little bit more bass, a little bit more high-end, so to speak. And finally, the butterfly. Which is, you know, not so far above the sparrow, but it's got more mids in there. So I'm now thinking butterflies get the crown. Yeah, but then if you go under coral reefs, you come across these animals called mantis shrimps.

What are they called meta? Like a praying mantis. Oh, mantis shrimp. The shrimp catches prey using an arm like a prey. Mattis has. Maddis' shrimps are mostly pretty small

about the size of a finger. Some get to be as big as your forearm. They're big, big animals. I'm actually looking this up right here. Oh my God,

they're so colorful. No, they are colorful, though. Here, look at this. Oh, my God, they're just like a, it's like they're electric colored. Yeah, they're like turquoise or something.

Iridescent. And their eyes are like little cartoon eyes. They're gigantic. Yeah. They have two really big eyes right on the front. And you said that dogs

have two cones. We have three. How much does the butterfly have again? Butterfly is five. Depends on the butterfly. Manistrams have 16. 16? Oh, my God.

16 kinds of receptors. What would the rainbow look like to them? Could they even see it? Manus shrimp would see the rainbow fine because they live in very shallow water and so the water is pretty clear, almost like air. They would start the rainbow way, way, way inside where we see violet.

They would see an extraordinarily deep ultraviolet. And then they would go on through several kinds of ultraviolet, probably five or six kinds of ultraviolet. And then they would get to violet, which is now they're reaching our colors, and go through violet and violet blue and blue and blue-green. Where they have those green-green, blue-blue blues as well? Yep. And then they would go out and do the reds. So they would be about as red as us when they got to the red end.

But only in the reds? Yeah. What a rainbow that must be. Yeah. They have the most complicated visual system of any animals by a factor of two or more. Wait, wait, wait, but he said any. Do you mean that unequivocally, any? Yeah, no other animal that we know of has a visual system within 50% as complicated.

All right, Mantis. But, you know, on the other hand, their brains are tiny, so who knows what it turns into. They may not have the ability to perceive the beauty of the rainbow in the way they... No, I don't, I don't know. Vanistrams are into violence. They're not really into beauty. They go around and kill things. I mean, really, that's what they do.

That's one reason they're so fascinating. They love to go around and kill things. What do they kill? Crabbs, other manish shrimps, shrimps, octopuses. They'll kill octopuses? Yeah, small ones. A good-sized manish shrimp can break the wall of an aquarium. Well, really?

Yeah, there's ones in California that can break aquarium walls if they hit it hard. Oh, my God. So you have a pugnacious Muhammad Ali sea-going animal with incredibly great visual sense. Special thanks to Jim Briggs, our engineer, for the choir session, which was a blast. To Mark Shangizi for setting us off in this direction. To Michael Kirshner and the Young New Yorker's Chorus.

And John McLeay and the Grace Church Choral Society and those folks from the collegiate corral, Medesoff choirs, who joined us. And to Alex Ambrose of WQXR for getting everybody together. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, so here we are back in the present, 2018. That was how we left it. seven-ish years ago.

And now we take a second somewhat more sober look at this edible. Yes. It's glorious achievement. Well, actually, we get to actually look at it. Like, I get to, I, in fact, well, you know what? You met one. I did. I met the champ.

And we shared a moment that I certainly will never forget. That's amazing. That's coming up after the break. This is Amy Lantinga from Boston. in Massachusetts, Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hi, this is Robert Crulwich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible. As we continue to rip the rainbow to pieces in this episode of colors, check out Brain Myths Exploded. Lessons from Neuroscience

available at Audible. To start building a more accurate understanding of current breakthroughs in neuroscience, you have to start by shattering popular brain myths. Through 24 different lectures, you can explore the myriad topics in neuroscience like memory, dreams, consciousness, and more. The result is an eye-opening adventure

into the latest understanding of why the brain works the way it does. Go to audible.com slash radio lab or text Radio Lab to 500-500 for a free 30-day trial, and a free audiobook. Hi, I'm Robert Krollwitch. Radio Lab is supported by Casper. Do you know that you spend one-third of your life sleeping?

With Casper, you can make the most of your sleep on an outrageously comfortable mattress. Casper offers affordable prices, hassle-free returns, free shipping in the United States and Canada, plus you can be sure of your purchase with Casper's 100-night risk-free trial. And right now, get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash radio lab

and using code radio lab at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Ibumrod. I'm Robert Crilich. Okay, so we did the thing about the mantis shrimp. And partially because of us, partially because I think just the world was ready,

the mantis shrimp has become a little bit of a celebrity animal. It's become quite a popular little crustacea. It's been celebrated in cartoon. Yes, it has. Yes, it has. It's had its moments. It has had its moment. Well, and deservedly so.

When you think about what, you know, when you think about what its rods and cones apparently are able to appreciate. Yeah. You know, you just want to close your eyes and imagine whatever it is that animal might be seeing. Which is what we tried to do seven years ago. But as happens, the science keeps going. And one of the things that happened recently in the last few years is that the people who study the mantis shrimp, they have released more knowledge about what it might. be seeing, and we're going to update you on that right now.

But first, can I just tell you something? Yeah. I actually got to meet a mantis shrimpiculp just very, very recently. In Brooklyn, as I recall. In Coney Island. Yes. Oh, yeah. I have dreamt of this moment, I must say.

So the mantis is in one of these tanks? Yeah, one of these saltwater tanks. Producer Amanda Naranjik and I, we found a fish store in Coney Island. Warmer. Warmer. Yeah, I can. That actually had a real live mantis. Oh, hello.

Whoa. It looks exactly as I imagined it. It's so... Wow, they're so cool. You've sort of tucked away in an aquarium in the corner of this sort of dimly lit shop. The shop is run by this guy. Chris Martin from Creative Equimination.

Hi, Chris. Excellent. And this is your store? Yes. Okay. And how long have you been here? Four years. Chris sells all kinds of fish.

Tons of brittle starfish, urchin, different kinds of clownfish. We have designer clownfish. Have you ever heard of designer clownfish? Have you heard of this? Like apparently these fashion designers are designing new clownfish. So like you have a Gucci clownfish or a Louis Vuitton clownfish. Stop.

Yeah, definitely. Actually, I should call designer clownfish. Just a little weird fish fact. Anyhow, back to the mantis. It was in the corner of the shop in this aquarium of reinforced glass. We actually got someone from Sri Lanka. This mantiship cave from Sri Lanka? Yeah.

This is one of the stranger creatures I've ever seen. And have you ever seen one of these things up close? They're very, very st. stunningly color. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. The color is just, I mean, astounding. Yeah, these are called peacock because they're particularly colorful.

So the particular guy that we saw, he was hiding in a tube in the middle of the aquarium. This was a peacock mantis shrimp, as they're called. So if you can imagine, like, they're big, first of all. They're like seven inches or so. So it's a big creature. And if you can imagine the head of a hermit crab painted like a peacock, stuck on the bright green slithering body of a miniature dragon. That's what it looks like.

I mean, they're the weirdest-looking things that you've ever seen. Oh, God, you can really see its eyes like swiveling in all different directions. And they have these really big, googly eyes. Yeah, they have beautiful eyes. Well, we're looking at a peacock manistram. It's sitting in a Lusite tube, and it's looking out at the world. It's treating the tube like it's its home borough, which it would have it was in the wild. It's basically looking for something to eat.

Okay, so the voice you just heard, that's Tom Cronin, our mantis expert from the last segment. He's your salesperson? No, he's an expert. He's an expert. I mean, he sells science. He drove down from Baltimore to meet us. And remember when he was telling us in the last segment a while ago that the mantis are these violent little bastards? They love to go around and kill things.

Yes. He was not kidding. I just want to describe this to you before we talk about the vision. All right, we're staring at peacock mantis shrimp, huddled in the tube in an aquarium. And Chris is about to feed it. What kind of, what's the poor little blue thing that you're about to put in? We're actually going to feed him a damsel fish.

At a certain point, Chris drops in this little blue fish, looks a little bit like dory from that movie. So here it goes. Drops it into the mantis tank. Oh, oh, the fish is in. And now the fish is sensibly hiding in the back. Fish is hiding behind the tube as the fish should. The little dory fish swim around for like,

I don't know, five minutes trying to find a way out. The whole time the mantis was like icy calm chilling in its tube and then... Oh, is it coming out? Is it coming out? It launched out of its tube and then... Ah! It's crazy. Just whee-pow!

Wow, that was just so sudden! You can hear the snap as it hit it. I mean, it made Amanda a nice scream. We just... It was shocking. You know, because they have these claws on the front of their body that they used to punch their prey, and you can literally hear the snap

from across the room. Wow. And then he, and this was sad. He then took a lap and then came back and just, oh, oh, oh. Just punched the fish a few more times. Oh, wow. That's a hard ending for the damnsail fish. It's been hit three or four times now.

It's one of those, like, nature moments where you're sort of amazed, but you also sort of want to cry. But so, so, okay, let's talk about his vision. You know, he's back in his hovel and he's just cleaning his eyes now. after it killed the fish, it went back to its tube and started kind of like scrubbing its eyeballs with its little brushes. It's so crazy. He's doing his eye thing, which is the important thing. Because it knows that it's got the best eyes in the house. He was like, did you see what I did to that fish?

Now check out my eyes. And as for what those eyes see, our notion of that has totally changed over the last few years. So for that, I'm going to bring in another marine biologist that Amanda talked to. Do you mind introducing yourself? No, to who? To me, like my name is Professor Marshall and this is what I do for a living. And you want me to do that now? Now is good.

Now is good. Okay. Yeah. So, hello, my name's Justin Marshall. I'm a marine biologist and neuroscientist working on the Great Barry Reef in Australia. Just for context, he, Justin is the guy who basically put the mantis on the map. He was the first guy, his lab was the first lap to notice that they saw color at all. Oh, yeah.

I mean, that was cool. That was at the University of Sussex. It's about 1995-96. Apparently, he had a colleague from West Africa who was wearing this particular dress. She had this wonderfully colorful, traditional dress on. She walks into his lab where he's got all the aquariums. And immediately, all the mantis shrimp rushed to the top of the aquarium. They were like, hey, Lee.

She walked in and the shrimps went wild. What does that mean? They started waving their appendages and they show off all their colors. Now that I know a little bit about mantis shrimps, I know exactly what they were saying to her, which would be entirely inappropriate. Oh, they were turned on as far as you get on. Yeah, they were all aroused. They were saying, hello, colorful thing.

What should we do? So Justin was the guy that basically proved. Okay, these animals have color vision. Like they see color. He confirmed that with this experiment with colored containers. With mantis shrimps, you can get them to go and just beat the living daylights out of a thing that's colorful because they love to smash things. Tony out, that was all background. Here's the new information.

Recently, Justin and his lab decided to ask a new question. He decided to say, all right, these are all right, these are all these are. All of these shrimp, they have so many rods and cones in their eyes. And by the way, he would say there were 12 rods and cones in their eyes, not 16, which is still four times what we have. Right. So it's a lot. All right, they've got all these rods and cones.

How well do they use them? I wonder what that means. How well do they use it? They have them. They must use them for something. Well, it's sort of like if you're a scientist, you can't just assume that they see things the way that we see things. I mean, you kind of have to make sure. Of course not.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, his simple question to start off was, how well do they see different shades of the same color? Huh. It's like the kind of thing that we do at the grocery store all the time. So, you know, if you go pick a banana from a store, even if you pick one that's just gone yellow, it's still a little bit green. You know, like, is it too green, not yellow enough, too yellow?

You know, you use your eyes to make the call. Right. You wonder, can the shrimp do that? Can this animal distinguish between this shade of red and that shade of red, this blue and that blue? Can they make those fine distinctions? I assume so. Yeah, because they got all the rods and crows.

Collins, right? I mean, they wouldn't have all those things in their eyes if they weren't putting them to some extraordinary use, and the obvious use would be more blue or more green. More yellow, sure, exactly. But he wanted to be sure. So what you do is you say, all right, mantis shrimp, I'm going to give you food from this yellow thing. So what he did basically is that he would show the shrimp a yellow light, give him some food. Yellow light, food, yellow light, food, they quickly learn that yellow means food. Cool. So then he shows the shrimp a blue light where there is no food, and naturally. It learns to ignore that very quickly because the food's at the yellow, it's not at the blue.

Right. Most animals can do this. But then what he did is he sort of mixed it up. He would gradually make the blue side, the non-food side, a little more yellow. Very gradually. He would shift the color. From blue, through to blue-green, through to green. Then greeny yellow, just to see if the shrimp could tell the difference between yellow,

which means food, and yellow-green, which doesn't mean food. That's what we did, and we expected the mantis shrimp to have far better distinction at that sort of level and were surprised to find that it was the worst animal on the planet so far tested. No. No. Are you exaggerating? No. Not at all.

Our champion of the rainbow was the worst creature ever tested. The worst. So, in other words, nature gives them a panoply of choice and then they can't tell the difference? What's the point of that? There's something wrong with this

theory. I know. It's kind of tragic. If I'm been Benjamin Moore, and I say, do you come to my paint store, I'm going to show you 50 shades of purple, and you can only see three, then what are you doing in there? Like, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah, they seem to have the equipment to see all the purple, all the colors, all the many, many shades. So they've got these amazing eyes, but they just don't seem to use them the way that we do. I don't understand that. Yeah. Okay, so...

This is where you need to start thinking about color and what colors are. I mean, according to Justin Marshall, the basic thing to understand is that you don't actually see color with you. your eyes. I mean, you're taking the light with your eyes, obviously, but then the color is perceived in your brain. And they have these little insect brains that don't seem to do color the way that our brains do. The way in which we see color is, if I see a thing, let's say somebody wearing a blue sweater walking down the street. Nice-looking lady or gentleman wearing a blue thing, and my blue photoreceptive in my eye gets really excited. So your brain's going to see that thing, blue? That's a blue sweater.

Right. Now, if that blue sweater had a little bit of red in it, the red photoreceptor would also buzz, but not as loudly. And it's actually the ratio of those excitations that gives my brain the sensation of color. Your brain will basically say, all right, got a lot of blue, a little bit of red, what could that be? Magenta. That's what you end up seeing. Like, your brain sort of paints the gap.

And that's how every animal on the planet sees color except for mantis shrimps. its brain doesn't seem that interested in painting gaps. So back in our segment when we said it sees a full, throated, wide, voiced spectrum of color, like just ecstatic, glorious vision. The best rainbow view of all creatures on Earth. That's what we said. That's what we said. More variety in the rainbow than we can or than anybody can.

That was our thought. That was our thought. we might need to amend that. I mean, so they still see colors that we don't see, but they might not just be seeing as many colors as we thought. Like maybe their rainbow is more a series of rather focused, discreet bands of color with not a lot in between. I am very, very, well, that's actually extraordinarily puzzling.

They're given the equipment that we use to see various shades of color, and they don't use it to see shades of color? What do they use it to see? Well, they use it to, I mean, this is all speculative, but Tom Cronin was telling us in the fish shop that the science seems to be heading towards this idea that they use colors to communicate. And if that's the case, like, they don't need to see all the colors.

They just need to see the ones that mean something. At least in the ultraviolet, there's really good evidence now. It's not published, so I don't want to talk about it too much because it's not my work. But it looks like different parts of the UV have very different meanings. Like one part might mean fear. Don't go there.

Another might mean sex. I'd like to get to know more about this. Maybe another part means home. Who knows? It certainly varies species to species. We're talking about a whole range of at least 500 species. So to sort of blanket an explanation over that is a bit simple. But what you're saying is that instead of seeing rainbows, they're having a conversation with the color.

Yeah, maybe. So this is their vocabulary? That is, they have all these rods and cones so they can talk to the world, not that they can see the beauty of it. And this is complicated, but they can do polarized light. Oh, yeah, we can't do that. Which is so hard to explain. But apparently it's thought that some species can flash polarized light at each other as a way of communicating somehow. I'm not even going to try and explain that because I don't get it.

They are an unbelievably amazing and different system to any other animal on the planet. So you've got to ask yourself the question why. And I've been asking myself that question for 30 years. And I guess I'm a failure because I still haven't answered it. So you could call me a failed biologist. I don't think we would do that. I don't think we're going to do that. Not really.

Yeah, that seems not really true. If you had to distill the new information that you had that you have, how would you explain it? Like, the thing that we know now that we didn't know 10 years ago is this. They're ready fucking weird. You know, what I'm left with is at the end of the day, I mean, you know, yeah, it has eyes. We have eyes. We assume that its eyes do for it, what our eyes do for us. But apparently not.

And I don't think a choir is going to bridge this gap. That's what's called an umwelt. Like every animal in the world lives with its own senses in a world that is defined by those senses. And in a way, it's one of those tragic things that as try as you will, you will never know what a bat knows when it echolates. You will never know what a deer when it looks out. Because we know that deer don't see orange. That's why all the hunters wear bright orange and yellow.

They just don't see that range. Do they see more of something else? I don't know. Well, how do, what's it, umwelt? It's a great word. It is. It's the word that says that you are limited by what you can feel, touch, smell, see. Yeah.

On some level, I mean, I feel like that's a problem that exists even between people. You know what I mean? It's like, I have, I regularly have moments with my wife where I'm like, that's not blue. And she's like, yeah, it's totally blue. I have that too. I have that all the time. I sometimes wonder. I have no idea what you're a story.

seeing right now. I know. That's the lonely part. The un-loney part is that you can try. Yeah, that is, it is really fun to try. So we'll just keep trying. The original mantis shrimp episode was produced by Tim Howard and Pat Walters. And updated by our producer, Amanda Aroncheck.

Very special thanks to Chase Colpon for recording the choir the second time around. And to Chris Martin from a creative aquarium nation, Michael Kirsh. and the Young New Yorkers Chorus. And they have quite a range. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Crowich. Thanks for listening. Maria Matt Jack includes.

Cypressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gable, Ethel Houtte, Tracy Hunt, Matt Keelty, Robert Burrasser, Melissa O'Brien, and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda, Shima, Owey Hughes, and Jake Arles, One final note. After we wrapped up this episode, we learned that one of the members of our shrimp choir, a baritone by the name of Daniel Thompson, was one of the five people who died in the tragic helicopter accident that happened over the East River this past Sunday night. We at Radio Lab were devastated to hear this news, and we're sending our thoughts to his family and to the rest of the choir. and we would like to dedicate this episode to him. Hi, I'm Robert Krollwitch. Radio Lab is supported by Casper, and they're experts who make quality mattresses

that cradle your body in all the right places. Get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash radio lab and using code radio lab at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm Robert Crulwich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible, as we explore more of how the world is saturated in color

from soft hues to violent stains, check out brain myths exploded. Lessons from neuroscience available at Audible. Explore the myriad topics in neuroscience through 24 lectures about myths of the brain. Go to audible.com slash radio lab or text Radio Lab to 500-500 for a free 30-day trial

and a free audio book.