Skip Navigation

If any animal bite could give you super powers, what animal do you want to be bitten by and which super power do you hope to get?

139

You're viewing a single thread.

139 comments
  • A predatory bird, which would give me extra cones and rods to see more colors / spectrum as well as possibly telescopic vision.

    A shark, so I can swim better and breathe underwater. Then maybe I won’t be so afraid of large bodies of water.

    • If you want cool eyes, go with the Mantis Shrimp tbh, they've got like 7 or 8 different cone cells for everything from ultraviolet to infrared. IIRC scientists don't think their brains are powerful enough to fully use all that info at once, but I feel like connecting that to a brain that's like 1000x as powerful would fix that.

      I'd hope you'd just get the extra cone cells and not compund eyes tho, compound eyes would be Difficult for a human to adopt to, since our visual cortices evolved to process two high resolution visual streams and not like,, 100 shitty visual streams.

      I think you could just plug an eye with extra cone types directly into a human brain tho, there are people born with tetrachromia (4th cone cell that extends a bit into the ultraviolet iirc), and they can utilize information from the extra cone cells perfectly fine.

      Afaik, the human eye lens absorbs most UV light, so people with tetrachromia can't actually see much UV, but it does give them way more precise color vision overall, because instead of infering colors based on 4 values (red, green, blue, and overall brightness), you're adding a 5th value for violet, which makes colors that look similar to baseline humans easier to tell apart. There are people with no lens on their eyes (either a birth defect or they had to be removed) who can fully see UV radiation tho, I don't even think it requires tetrachromia, the blue cone cells are very slightly sensitive to UV if none of it is absorbed by the lens.

You've viewed 139 comments.