Conversation

moved to @mabelz@mk.absturztau.be

HELP ​kittenwhat i just realized something while thinking about orcs. animals often have the color of their surroundings to camouflage themselves better. for example, wise polar bears, blue whales, green parrots and so on.

plants and nature are predominantly green. but are there also green mammals?
acatconfused

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@Mabelz Algae grows on sloths, so they’re often called green, but I am not sure if that counts

-Nim

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@Mabelz these guys would like to have a word with you
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@Mabelz I can't think of any, but I found some comments on it :) https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1357,00.html
apparently its becauswe the green is hard to produce with the skin or fur
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@Mabelz > Our skin doesn’t have the right structure or pigment forms to cause diffraction or reflection of incident light into green, as we see in peacock feathers or beetle wing covers. Our cells metabolise chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants, so we have no opportunity to concentrate it in our skin.
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@Mabelz nope but the reason is most mammals have fur, which cannot be green. there is no green pigment for hair.

that said some animals make themself green. for example the sloth shown here has algea in their fur.

btw most carnivours has shitty color vision. so camouflaging by color is useless. the shape and texture is far more important. hunters more often try to camouflage by color since herbivours have usually better color vision. especially if they need to detect tasty food.

btw polar bears are black to increase their body heat. their fur is colorless but hollow. the light gets reflected so many times they "appear" white. if u take a single hair there is no white pigment
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Rev. Bussy Body of The Church of America MLM and Shooting Club

@Mabelz i don't think anything in mammals can evolve into green pigment anytime soon

i wonder if it would be possible for mammal hair to develop iridescence but from what i know about how mammal hair follicles work that's probably out of the question as well (barring many millions of years of basically evolving into feathers)
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Rev. Bussy Body of The Church of America MLM and Shooting Club

@grillchen @Mabelz
> shitty color vision
also of note: tigers are fully camouflaged against their normal, non-human prey https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/snqs81/tigers_generally_appear_orange_to_humans_because/
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@lucy@netzsphaere.xyz but they are not mammals

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@Mabelz im retarded, yes.
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@Mabelz I actually looked into this a few years ago. The reason has to do with melanin and it's quantum properties. There is melanin in your irises, but it's actually the microstructures of melanin interacting with light that gives color, which is how you can have eye color change from hour to hour.

Skin is too large scale for those to happen, so you get pink-beige-red-brown-black spectrum. There are two melanin types, a red-skewing one and a black-skewing one.

Fur is also too large scale for microstructures. Feathers, absolutely; most colors you see there are due to microstructures not pigment.

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