Mantis shrimp can see a kind of red light most animals cannot

Human eyes have three visual pigments, the light-catching molecules that let us see colour. Mantis shrimp have about 30, and how their vision works has long been a mystery. Researchers from ULiège in Belgium and Humboldt University in Berlin have now analysed these pigments one by one for the first time. They discovered that some detect red light that very few animals can perceive, and that these pigments act like switches that light can turn on and off again. The study, published in Science Advances, could be useful for optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control living cells.