© Ian Glover/FlickrRockhopper Penguin
How is it that an eagle can snatch a rabbit off the ground from hundreds of feet in the air and we can not even grab a glass off a table without knocking it over? It's because they see the world differently from us.
Thankfully, a
recent scientific research has revealed an astonishing world of vision diversity across the animal kingdom.
The dragonfly brain works so fast that it sees movements in slow motion, snakes pick up infrared thermal signals from hot objects, thus detecting their prey, while horses and zebras have their eyes pointed to the side, which allowing them to have a peripheral vision and to avoid the dangers when necessary.
© Klaus Schmidt
In the graph above, you can see the human spectral range compared to the one of a bird. As birds are tetrachromats, they see four colors: UV, blue, green and red, whereas we are trichromats and can only see three colors: blue, green, red. (UV light has no color and the bright pink was only chosen for visual representation.)
© Cynthia Tedore
© Joel Sartore
In 2007, using a spectrophotometer, scientists were able to analyze the colors of 166 species of songbirds in North America that did not appear to have any physical differences between the two genders. What they discovered was that even though male and female birds seem identical to the human eye, their colors differ greatly from the UV spectrum.
© Dr Klaus Schmitt
Tedore, C., Nilsson, D. Avian UV vision enhances leaf surface contrasts in forest environments.
Nat Commun 10, 238 (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-08142-5
Reader Comments
That must have been a super rare hybrid between a 300 foot long-legged crane and an eagle.
LOOK: It's shocking! [Link] (Not joking.)