ATBC 2008 - Color Vision Test

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation

'CALL FOR GUINEA PIGS' for ATBC2009

Color vision in Tropical Biology and Conservation

At our ATBC 2004 meeting in Miami, FL, I discussed how color vision may affect our studies and results, and possibly biases our conclusions.

Please, contribute (even if you do not attend ATBC meetings) to a scientific study. Follow the test guidelines on-line, do the test and fill the questionary form (xls). Then, please, email it to me (anonymously or not) at pmforget@yahoo.fr with 'colorvision' in subject. Thank you.

Suggested tests

Test # 1

Test # 2

Additional test for children

Subsidiary questioning: most of impressionist painters were male. How has that affected art? Are we all equal when admiring those paintings? Tell me your preference. Questionary form (xls).

About color vision and colorblindness

http://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/
http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
http://tjshome.com/colorblind.php

During our ATBC2008 meeting in Suriname, many of you probably missed the red howler monkeys in the green canopy, the red Pachira aquatica flowers on the banks of the Guianan rivers and/or the red ibis birds perched on the green foliage of the Rhizophora mangroves. You might also had problems reading colorful slides with yellow, green, red symbols or blue text during some power point presentations. If you have problems when reading the slides of this presentation pdf, that means that you really have some color vision deficiencies, even if you are not completely colorblind. How many of us had difficulties when reading colorful graphs and tables during oral and poster presentations? The International Colour Vision Society is well established and has bi-annual meetings. It is well known that color vision of non-human Primates differs among continents, and there are sex-related differences in chromatic sensitivity in Neotropical forests. More rarely do we consider these facts among scientists in the field, in laboratories or during conferences. I propose that you perform a cross-continental color vision test, which might help us to improve our work in the field, as well as the quality of the presentations at our Annual ATBC meetings (as well as other society meetings).

I conducted preliminary tests with my colleagues. Out of 14 females who considered themselves to have normal vision, four (28 %) had slight to serious red-green deficiencies. Four out of 8 males had problems (50 %), 2 being slightly red-green deficient, and 2 being colorblind (they both knew it), though none were 100 % Daltonians. Maybe our scientific community is not a random sample of the population. Indeed, selection occurs against colorblind persons who are not able to have a job as a pilot of an airplane, certain types of drivers or technicians (they all need to see colors correctly), for instance. How does this affect our science if a student who has to census flower, fruit or red-colored animals in the canopy, or colored piprids in the understory, is colorblind?

Thus, as ATBC Past-President (2009), I wish to address this important issue in our research field during the ATBC 2009 meeting in Marburg. Indeed, as most of you (with the exception of Daltonians) may know, life is colorful, but we may not equally enjoy the spectrum - females being more favored than males in that respect - when watching and studying the biology and behavior of colorful tropical organisms. I thus want to present a test of our community of tropical biologists, botanists, zoologists, or ecologists, in order to present results of a cross-continental analysis at the meeting, and to learn lessons from that exceptional on-line experience.

Questionary form (xls).

Abstract for ATBC2009 Meeting in Marburg, Germany.

A test of color vision within a non-random scientific community; consequences for studies in tropical biology and conservation

by Pierre-Michel Forget (2008 ATBC President)

Colorblind persons are more frequent than is commonly believed in a normal human population. Though dichromatics, who only see in black and white (as in old television and movies), is relatively rare, on the contrary, nearly one out of twelve males (8 %) and one out of 200 females (0.38 %) have some color perception problems. Under special circumstances, such as at low light levels and at dark, or in the shaded understory of a tropical forest, some people may have an anomalous trichromacy, i.e. they may have difficulties to see red, green or blue (very rare), or unable to locate them on a colored background, which is often green in the tropics. Given that these persons are obligatorily eliminated from getting a job as a certain type of driver, pilot, or technician in airlines, train, army, firemen, for instance, one may assume that the number of such persons with red-green anomaly is larger in other disciplines, in ecological science especially. Thus, because the tropics are, by definition, colorful, and that most of the animals and plants harbor brilliant colors, one may ask whether results in tropical biology may not be, to some degree, biased because one rarely thinks of such color vision deficiency among students. For instance, a field census of primates such as red-howler monkeys in a tall rainforest would not give the same result if it were done by a normal-vision female or by a red-green deficient male. This may also hold for the inventory of colored birds such as manakins in the understory of a neotropical forest, or census of fruiting plants at different stages of maturation, from green, to yellow, orange and red, even using binoculars to look at developing fruit into the canopy. I propose to perform a general test of our community using colorblindness tests that are available on-line and which are based on the powerful test of Ishihara. Results will be of general interest to the entire scientific community, not only the tropical one.