Birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects? Sure. But no mammals.
So I had to google it. Apparently, there is a sloth that moves around so slowly moss grows all over it and it doesn’t care. So it may appear green, but only in the sense that it wears it.
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This is an interesting question but I don’t think it is restricted to green. Isn’t the same true of purple, blue and red? I’m not talking about just reddish like human hair or a red panda but truly bright red like a cardinal. I would imagine it has something to do with our evolutionary history. Complete speculation here but laced with a few facts I picked up. I hear the common ancestor of mammals emerged around the time the dinosaurs became extinct and was basically a tiny rodent like a shrew. I wonder if as a small animal that can’t fly or swim it had to hide a lot and basically just came in shades of brown. So maybe any genes for other colors were lost before that common mammalian ancestor emerged and although mammals have lots of patterns they don’t have many colors.
Baboons have some bright reds and blues, but they are certainly the exception that proves the rule on mammal colors.
Best I’ve got is sloths. And they’re only green because algae grows on them. And I know it sounds like cheating because they aren’t intrinsically green but before you completely discount it there are animals that wouldn’t be the color they are in a different environment. For instance, flamingos are only pink because of the seafood they eat. If fed a different diet they can be almost white.
Yeah fair. I had painted glass fish in my aquarium at one point and discovered the “paint” came from feeding them dyed food and eventually faded away when I gave them normal food back at home. They are naturally transparent for the most part which, frankly, I thought was cooler. I did have a gourami that was legit green though, as far as I could tell.
Orion’s are demonstrably mammals, but unfortunately fictional.
You can’t prove that. Orions are real, do not slander the Word of the great prophet Roddenberry, Peace Be Upon Him.
I don’t know how relevant this is but I heard human eyes are very good at picking shades of green out. Maybe mammals are generally good at spotting greens and so hiding as a green thing doesn’t work as well. Just a guess though
From what other posters are saying, it may be the other way around? This is, most mammals cannot see green, so it doesn’t matter from a camouflage perspective among mammals. Humans (and primates in general) are an outlier in this repect.
Bird of prey can, though, so there’s that.
I thought veritasium explained in his night vision video that this wasn’t the case? I’m not sure though.
What about the Hulk???
Not a mammal, he hatched from a green egg
The ones from Dr Seuss
Wouldn’t that make him a monotreme?
Blue. And wales and dolphins do not count, they are not land mammals and they are barely blue.
What about a moldy sloth?
I guess you’ve never heard of parrots. Or snakes. Or fish. Or insects.
I’m guessing you misread the title as animals instead of mammals, and then didn’t read the actual post text
Damn. I never knew that these were mammals…
I think you read mammals as animal
I did. My bad.
You’ll get’em next time.
Alan Davis?
Blue whales
Whoody Who?
https://youtu.be/0MDQp3fG4OI?si=tiVqzoE0m4p8F2Iu
Sorry it’s a short, couldn’t find a proper clip
So I skimmed that and it seems the tldr is mammals have melanin (and I’m guessing the other animals don’t)
Great read! That explains a lot.
I’ve been deep diving a bit myself and found this article that explains another thing that’s puzzled me over the years. Some birds have crazy vibrant coloration that almost glistens, like peacock feathers. Outside of the zoo, I’ve noticed it a bit in common grackles. They look black on first glance, but when you study them closely, they have this kind of purple sheen around their heads. Apparently, it’s still melanin at work here, but it’s structured in a very special way.
Algae-covered sloths are about as close as you get.
Does it count if they are glowing bunnies?
Ha!! You really had to go down the “rabbit hole” for that one I bet! Awesome.
“yes uhh… We need to make bunnies that glow in the dark… for medicine… Yess.”
They’re out there but it’s been hard to document their existence since they blend in so well with their environment. This natural camouflage is a double-edged sword, however: they may be able to avoid getting eaten by predators but it also makes reproduction particularly challenging since they have a hard time finding one another to do it like the Discovery channel.
Even when a potential breeding pair are able to meet up, their coupling is far from guaranteed due to the abundance of other green orifices in their usual habitats. Grass-covered mole tunnels, mossy logs with holes in them and bee nests in leafy trees have all been accidental natural fleshlights for these poor creatures. Like they say, it’s not easy being green.
What about Shrek
He’s an onion
I remember reading an article in a Nickelodeon magazine when I was a kid about a cat that had a genetic defect that gave it green fur. It looked pretty cool.
Crazy. I had to look it up and I found some stuff, including this old web article from 2002 that talks about this cat. The cat’s name was, Miss Greeny, apparently.
There are multiple sources, but there is no wiki page and none of the sources seem well known, so I’m having a hard time figuring out if it’s legit, or just a really good hoax.
We might not be looking at them with the right eyes
Wow, that is fascinating!
Makes me wonder about the other direction, going into the near infrared as opposed to UV. I remember from a class in remote sensing that many plants are actually most reflective in that band (more so than in green, even). NIR air photos are often used by biologists to get an indication of the health of a forest. But I have no idea whether animals also reflect NIR? It may be that most animals cannot see in that band in the first place, so it would not offer any camouflage advantage.
