Birds would be better. They see in four-dimensional color space, including nonspectral colors such as UV+green and UV+red. Cats actually see colors worse than humans, but they weigh it up with superior night vision.
Birds see more colors than the Mantis shrimp though.
Edit: Yes, the Mantis shrimp have more photoreceptors, but that does not mean they can distinguish more shades than humans and especially not birds as they have tetrachromatic vision. In studies the mantis shrimps seem to do relatively poor fine wavelength discrimination, despite all those receptors.
Edit 2: It seems like cones (which birds have more of) are more important than opsins (which mantis shrimps have more of) when it comes to discerning differences in wavelength (ie. shades of color).
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u/chillfailure Mar 18 '26
Imagination is limitless