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the amazing mantis shrimp (see Figure 6) is thought to see the world in more colors than any other animal: some species of mantis shrimp have over 8 different photoreceptors (cones)

Mantis shrimp actually have quite poor color vision despite their exotic equipment.

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1245824?sid...

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Author here: Yup - that's a great paper (published just after the Frontiers piece). There >are< some other organisms that have more than three photoreceptors and seem to use them for 'proper' color vision though: many birds and fish (and perhaps some women).

While this probably means the mantis shrimp only really sees 12 colors instead of millions (one per photoreceptor type), the article notes that this may result in substantially faster color recognition, i.e. trading off fidelity for latency.

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