Many natural things fluoresce under UV light. Is fluorescence performing a biological function?

488 views

Many natural things fluoresce under UV light. Is fluorescence performing a biological function?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

Absolutely. It’s not the case that all creatures see the same region of the light spectrum. The way things look to humans isn’t the same as the way they look to dogs, birds, or bees. What humans call near UV is just an ordinary color to bees, and they absolutely incorporate that information into their behavior (bee-hivior?). There are plants that have specific invisible-to-humans bee attracting patterns, for example.