SEMINAR 2024-11-01

R. Clifton Bailey Statistics Seminar Series

Animal Color Vision: Implications, Applications, and Future Directions 

Dr. Daniel Hanley 

Department of Biology 

George Mason University 

 

Friday, November 1st, 2024 

11:00 A.M. – 12:00 P.M. Eastern Time 

Nguyen Engineering Building, Room 1109 

4511 Patriot Circle, Fairfax, VA 

 

The seminar talk is also live-streamed. Please register to receive the link.  

Abstract

The world is filled with colors and our ability to accurately perceive those colors can spell the difference between survival and death. Thus, understanding how animals perform color discrimination tasks is incredibly important. In this seminar, Hanley will share the implications of animal color vision and showcase advances in quantifying animal-perceived colors. While many birds are considered good parents, this is not unanimous. In fact, some birds are total deadbeats, making no nest, providing no care, and leaving their young in other birds’ nests! These birds are known as avian brood parasites, and the common cuckoo is most infamous parasite. Cuckoos, must dupe unwitting foster parents, known as hosts, into caring for their young. In turn, hosts face life altering costs if they fail to detect the cuckoo’s trickery; when the young cuckoo emerges, it murders all of the host’s offspring. Thus, many hosts have evolved the ability to recognize and remove these counterfeit eggs. In many cases this has spurred, now textbook examples of, coevolutionary arms races where hosts adapt keen recognition abilities that select for more mimetic parasitic eggs, which selects for ever-keener recognition and levels of egg mimicry. For ~300 years we have assumed that mimicry is driven by this history of coevolutionary struggle. Hanley will share new data that calls this classic view into question, and provides new insight into the role of perception and color evolution. Finally, Hanley will share new advances in how we quantify animal-perceived colors through multispectral videography. His lab has developed new cameras systems that provide the first opportunity to capture animal-perceived colors in motion. He will provide the audience with overview of the system and the next steps in this emergent field. While we can now accurately capture animal-perceived colors in motion, we do not yet have the computational or statistical tools necessary to analyze these colors. Together through the case-study and technology-showcase, Hanley will provide the audience with an overview of animal color vision, an explanation about why accurate color discrimination matters, an introduction to novel methods for capturing perception, as well as areas for future investigation. 

About the Speaker

Dr. Daniel Hanley is an Assistant Professor of Biology at George Mason University. He studies visual perception, cognition, and decision-making in wild birds. By quantifying the diversity of colors found in nature (particularly birds’ eggs), his laboratory addresses fundamental questions about how selection pressures shape the evolution of phenotypes, and how those phenotypes govern species interactions. His work has been published in more than 50 peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Ecology & Evolution, PLoS Biology, Proceedings of the Royal Society, the American Naturalist, and Biology Letters and is frequently highlighted by the popular press (e.g., Audubon, the BBC, and Science magazine). His lab, the Hanley Color Lab, is highly inter-disciplinary involving collaborations between seemingly disparate fields such as biology and art, physics, chemistry, math, and statistics.

Event Organizers

Ben Seiyon Lee

Jonathan L. Auerbach