Puffins are small, funny-looking sea birds with colorful bills, but until a random idea struck ornithologist Jamie Dunning, no one knew just how colorful they were.
A related bird had a bill that fluoresced in ultraviolet light, and Dunning wondered if the same was true for puffins. While taking a break from regular research, he shone a UV light on a dead puffin and saw the same sort of effect. At the time the story was written, no tests had been done on live puffins to see if the effect was somehow limited to birds that had bloody well passed on. Special eyeshades had to be designed to protect their eyes from the UV light.
The interesting thing, Dunning notes, is that the fluorescing beaks are seen by humans only in UV light but are probably visible to puffins in regular sunlight. Not lit up like a Led Zeppelin poster, but still as some color we don't have a name for or a way to visualize. Bird eyes see light in a mixture of four colors instead of three, meaning that it's pretty much impossible for us to imagine what the world looks like to them. Except that newly-drycleaned suits strongly resemble targets.
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