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It states in Characteristics that polar bears are dichromats and lack the cones for green. This was changed sometime since last August, but I haven’t figured out the revision history interface to figure out when.
Mammalian dichromats have cones sensitive to more-or-less blue and more-or-less green, but lack cones sensitive to more-or-less red. If polar bears lacked green-sensitive cones, they would be monochromats, so this is likely vandalism.
The previous text mentioned blue-violet and yellow-green, but lacking a reference, I think it is best simply to specify that they are dichromats, which is linked. Applying human color terms to peak sensitivities in nanometers is somewhat subjective, and unless the specific peaks for polar bears, or at least for Ursidae, have been measured, it’s less than useful.
I’d fix it, but I haven’t done much editing in many years, and I don’t want to just jump into a semi-protected article, especially when the bulk of recent edits have been by a small group of editors. Curtis Clark (talk) 21:06, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The source says that polar bears have L (for yellow but I think this is an error, it should be red) and S cone cells (for blue-violet) and that "humans have an additional cone in the middle that is most sensitive to green, giving us trichromatic vision". LittleJerry (talk) 19:54, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found this reference by Peichl. It states that polar bears have L- and S-cones. They don't have M-cones. This seems to be a feature of semi-aquatic mammals including river otters and pygmy hippotamuses. Axl¤[Talk]18:09, 25 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd second this. We have literally hundreds of thousands of underdeveloped taxon articles that could use some love and would be improved tremendously by a student editor. This in't one of those. I understand that new editors like trying to improve high-traffic articles, but I'd recommend others like warthog, stork, or pangolin as examples of articles that do need some work. AryKun (talk) 14:50, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've complained about this in the past too, with no one listening; there is no need for these assignments to include featured articles, which they can barely improve, but instead often make worse. A general complaint about this should probably be raised in a more central venue where it can be seen by all. FunkMonk (talk) 16:19, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Right now the Dashboard emails students when they assign an FA or GA and ask them to pick a less well-developed article. Sage is working on tool to prevent this at the point where the students assign themselves articles (see this post) which hopefully will be active before too long. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:47, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The first study observes only 4 male polar bears and so I fail to see how it could say anything about male dominance. The chapter cited is heavily focused on maternal behaviour; what little it says about intersexual interactions consists of talking about hard these are to study and mentioning males forming large aggregations on land, which is mentioned in the article. Your disdain for Russian research aside, you also don't have any reasons for thinking that the 2005 study cited is unreliable. You really think that people are trying to be sexist by talking about how male polar bears twice the size of female ones are dominant over them? AryKun (talk) 11:00, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
level-4 vital article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Done --Kuhni74 (talk) 17:21, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
