Imagine you are a red-tailed hawk soaring through the sky. Scan the ground looking for your next meal. You will find hundreds of feet of squirrels beneath you. Its coat helps to blend into the ground, but its camouflage can’t compare to your sharp eyesight.
Birds of prey, such as the hawk, Eagles and Falcon, are known for their sophisticated vision. However, you may wonder if these birds really come up on top, or if other animals have even more impressive vision.
So which animals have the best vision?
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In reality, there are no easy answers, but certainly some outstanding ones.
“There’s no perfect visual system,” Esteban Fernandez Julic, a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University, told Live Science. He explained that from an evolutionary perspective, the development of advanced visual systems is extremely expensive. This is because the eyes are a large component of the nervous system and require a lot of energy. To keep things efficient, evolution drives animals to develop only the visual systems needed for their environment and behavior.
Most Detailed Vision: Raptor
Raptors like the Eagles, Hawks and Falcon have a reputation for having a great vision, and their reputation is well-earned. These birds need to detect food from very long distances. To do this, their visual system evolved and prioritized vision at very high resolution.
With Raptor Vision about 3-5 times more detailed than humans, having eagle eyes will feel like looking at binoculars, according to Thomas Cronin, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland in Laptimore County.
Related: How do you know where migratory birds go?
These birds have two adaptations that help them to see clearly. First, their eyes are larger than their body size. Second, they pack more photoreceptors (special cells in the retina that detect light) on the eyes. Taken together, these traits help the Raptor find prey from afar.
The most colorful vision: Mantis shrimp
When it comes to the colour vision of the Animal Kingdom, there is a clear winner: Mantis shrimp. These heterogeneously visible invertebrates live in shallow ocean waters and may be able to see colors that we cannot even understand.
To understand how Mantis Shrimp sees the world, it is important to know how color vision works. Humans have three types of photoreceptor cells that detect light of different wavelengths, roughly corresponding to red, blue and green. Many vertebrates have four types of vertebrates. In other words, our chromatic vision is worse than many other chromatic vision.
“Most other animals have better vision than us,” said Justin Marshall, professor emeritus at the University of Queensland in Australia, who specializes in the structure and function of the eyes and brains of marine animals. “We are relatively fair-skinned monkeys.”
However, Mantis shrimp has an even more incredible number of photoreceptors. According to Marshall, these crustaceans boast 12 different coloured photoreceptors. Some of these receptors are tuned to detect light in the ultraviolet range, perhaps making the Mantis shrimp world look very different from us. Mantis Shrimp also has special photoreceptors that can detect polarization of light. This is a characteristic of light waves that originate from the way sunlight is scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere.
However, it is not clear how Mantis Shrimp’s brain processes all this information. Their brains may be picking up patterns of color combinations rather than detecting individual inputs from photoreceptors.
“They probably aren’t trying to see four times the colours we have. They’re just deciphering the information differently,” Marshall explained.
Fastest vision: Insects
Our vision may feel like a continuous stream, but there are limits to how quickly the eyes and brain can process information. According to Cronin, humans are seen at a rate of about 60 frames per second. On the other hand, our creepy crazy friends can pack much more visual information in the same period.
Most insect visual systems can capture hundreds of frames per second. It is so fast that fluorescent lights flicker below the perceptible speed of human vision and look like strobe lights.
“If the fly flies to the cinema, you’d think it’s a really fast slideshow,” Cronin explained.
This ultra-fast vision is the reason why it’s so difficult to hit fly. They literally see us coming before we do. The fly achieves this. Because their bodies are so small, the electrical signals between the eyes and the brain have a much smaller distance to travel, which makes them process visual input more quickly.
trade off
All of these professional visual systems are impressive in their own way, but also come with compromises. For example, both the shrimp and insects of Mantis have a complex art, which consists of distinct subunits. Because there are so many subunits that can be adapted, these animals have much lower resolution than ours, as in pixelated photographs.
With these trade-offs in mind, the human eye is appropriate, according to Cronin.
“People are pretty good compromises,” he said. “Because my brain is a small peas, so I’m happy with what I have.”
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