WHY ARE TIGERS ORANGE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back everybody. Today, we're going to be looking at
tigers and why are they orange? So a tiger's brilliant
orange coat seems like the opposite of camouflage to human eyes, right,
because this is a pretty striking coloration and is actually
a masterpiece, but it's not designed for us. The secret

(00:23):
lies on how different animals see color. Actually, humans are trichromats,
possessing three types of cone cells that allow us to
distinguish between red, green, and blue wavelengths. This gives us
the rich color vision that makes tigers appear viverally orange
against green foliage. However, most of the animals tigers hunt, deer,

(00:47):
wild boar, and others are dicromats. They only have two
types of cone cells, sensitive to blue and green wavelengths,
but lacking red sensitive cones. Without this red sensitivity, these
prey animals can't distinguish red and orange from green and brown.
So to a deer's eyes, a tiger's orange fur blends
seamlessly with the surrounding vegetation, appearing greenish or brown rather

(01:11):
than the bright orange that we perceived. This makes tigers
nearly invisible to their prey, even in broad daylight. So
evolution didn't design tiger stripes for human observers, is optimize
them for the visual systems of the animals tigers actually
need to hunt. The bottom line, it's not all about us.