RESEARCH ARTICLE


Do Hummingbirds See in Ultraviolet?



M Curé*, 1, A.G Palacios2
1 Departamento de Física y Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile
2 Centro de Neurociencia de Valparaíso, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile


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© Curé and Palacios; Licensee Bentham Open.

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Departamento de Física y Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile. Gran Bretaña 1111, Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile; E-mail: michel.cure@uv.cl


Abstract

We present a numerical model to fit the electroretinogram (ERG), a gross evoked eye visual potential, that originate in the retina through photons absorption by photoreceptors and then involve the contribution form others retinal neurons. We use the ERG measured in a hummingbird, to evaluate the most likely retinal mechanism - cones visual pigments and oil-droplets - that participate in their high dimensional tetra or pentachromatic color hyperspace. The model - a nonlinear fit - appears to be a very useful tool to predict the underlying contribution visual mechanism for a variety of retinal preparation.

Keywords: Color vision, electroretinogram, non lineal model.