What animal has the best eyesight?
Imagine that you are a red tail hawk, which hovers in the sky. You scan the floor, looking for your next meal. You see a squirrel at hundreds of feet under you. His coat helps him blend into the ground, but his camouflage is not up to your sharp view.
Birds of prey – such as hawks, eagles and hawks – are known for their hyperfocal vision. But you may be wondering if these birds really go out in mind, or if other animals have an even more impressive view.
So what animal has the best vision?
In reality, there is no easy answer – but there are certainly stars.
“There is no perfect visual system,” Esteban Fernandz-JuricicProfessor of biological sciences at Purdue University, told Live Science. He explained that from an evolutionary point of view, the development of advanced visual systems is extraordinarily expensive. This is because eyes are a large component of the nervous system, which needs a lot of energy. To keep things effective, the evolution pushes animals to develop only the visual systems they need for their environment and their behavior.
Most detailed vision: Raptors
Rapaces such as eagles, hawks and hawks have the reputation of having a great vision, and this reputation is well deserved. These birds need to detect food from very distant distances – sometimes even kilometers. To do this, their visual systems have evolved to prioritize the extremely high resolution vision.
According to Thomas CroninProfessor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland, in the county of Baltimore, Raptor Vision is about three to five times more detailed than that of humans, so having eagle eyes would like to look through a pair of binoculars.
In relation: How do migratory birds know where they are going?
These birds have two adaptations which help them to see clearly. First, their eyes are larger compared to their body size. Second, they pack more photoreceptors – the specialized cells of the retina that detect light – in their eyes. Together, these features help the raptors to spot prey from afar.
Most colorful vision: a mantle shrimp
Regarding the vision of colors in the animal kingdom, there is a clear winner: the mantle shrimp. These invertebrates of extraterrestrial appearance live in shallow ocean waters, and they can see colors that we cannot even understand.
To understand how the shrimps mante see the world, it is important to know how color vision works. Humans have Three types of photoreceptor cells which detect different wavelengths of light, roughly corresponding to red, blue and green. Many vertebrates have four types of photoreceptors, which means that our color vision is worse than that of many other species.
“Most other animals have a better color vision than us,” said Justin MarshallProfessor Emeritus at the University of Queensland in Australia with a specialty in the structure and function and function of the brain of marine animals. “We are relatively daltonian monkeys.”
The mantle shrimp, however, have an even more amazing number of photoreceptors. According to Marshall, these crustaceans have 12 types of color photoreceptors. Some of these receptors are even set to detect light in the ultraviolet range, which probably makes the world of shrimps mante very different from ours. Mante’s shrimps also have special photoreceptors that can detect the polarization of light – a characteristic of the light waves which arise from the way in which sunlight is dispersed in the atmosphere of the earth.
But we don’t know exactly how the Mantis shrimp brain processes all this information. Their brain can regain patterns of color combinations rather than detecting individual photoreceptors.
“They probably don’t try to see four times more colors than us – they simply uncheck the information in a different way,” said Marshall.
The fastest vision: insects
Our vision can look like a continuous flow, but there is a limit to the speed with which our eyes and brains can process information. According to Cronin, humans see at a rate of about 60 frames per second. Our frightening friends, on the other hand, can pack much more visual information during the same period.
Most insect visual systems can capture hundreds of frames per second. It is so fast that fluorescent lights – that sparkle or below the perceptible rate for human vision – would look like stroboscopic lights.
“If a fly was to fly in a movie theater, it would just think that it looks at a very fast slideshow,” said Cronin.
This ultra-high speed vision is the reason why it is so difficult to crush a fly; They literally see us coming before us. The flies accomplish this because their body is so tiny that the electrical signals between their eyes and their brains have a much smaller distance to travel, which means that they treat visual entries much faster.
Compromises
All these specialized visual systems are impressive in their own way, but they also come with compromises. For example, mantis shrimps and insects have compound eyes, which are made up of distinct subunits. There are only so many subunits that can adapt, so the vision of these animals is much lower than ours, like a pixelated photo.
With these compromises in mind, human eyes are adequate, according to Cronin.
“People are a very good compromise,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be a mantle shrimp, because my brain would be the size of a pea. So I’m happy with what I have, to be honest.”
