Mantis Shrimp Eyes Reach Into the Deep Red, Lab Tests Show

A research group has measured mantis shrimp visual pigments one at a time and reports that three of them respond to light beyond 600 nanometers, well into the red end of the spectrum. The work appeared Oct. 14, 2026, in Science Advances.

The authors say that mantis shrimp eyes hold an unmatched variety of visual pigments, and that whether the animals can use them for broad color detection had remained unclear. The paper reports that 17 of these pigments, called rhodopsins, take part in color sensing, most of them in a narrow band of rows across the middle of the eye.

Camille Brouillon and Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin and colleagues produced each pigment separately and measured which wavelengths it absorbed. The authors report that two mid-wavelength pigments take up blue light most readily and that most of the long-wavelength ones absorb in the green range.

The authors also report that several of the blue and red pigments switch back and forth under light, with the blue ones shifting in the opposite direction to the red. They attribute that to how retinal, the light-absorbing molecule each pigment carries, binds inside the protein, and describe the switching as a flexibility not previously recognized in these eyes.

The paper concludes that each row of the eye gets its own color sensitivity from colored filters combined with the separately tuned pigments behind them, which extends the animals' vision into the far red.

The work was done at Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Liège, the University of Manchester, the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie in Berlin.