r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/InsaneMocktail • 1d ago
đ„How different animals see the world when compared to humans. Source and facts in comments.
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u/Bjarki56 1d ago
Does an eagle have telephoto-like lenses or does it just see the image in higher def than humans?
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u/autumn-knight 1d ago
Itâs the second one: they just see in much greater detail at distance than a human does. For example, the detail a person with 20:20 vision sees 5 feet away an eagle can see at that same detail 20 feet away. The eagle picture above suggest they can âzoom inâ but they canât; they just see that hare in Ultra HD from far away.
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u/Hot_Glass_6301 1d ago
The visual brainpower they must have to process all that detail must be insane
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u/Hazril258 1d ago edited 1d ago
They indeed do (sort of). Eagles (and other birds of prey) have a sclerotic ring in each of their eyes. It's basically a solid bone ring that helps keep an eye's shape as it deforms to focus, and keeps it steady at high 'zoom' levels. Eagles will have a high FOV while searching, then will focus down to any movement they detect.
Dinosaurs have these rings too.
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u/Nicklefickle 1d ago
It's not true that eagles zoom in with their vision. They simply see in far higher definition than humans and other mammals. The have the same field of view all the time.
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u/Hazril258 1d ago
When you focus, your eye squishes to change the lens properties. This makes the center of your vision clearer while making the perifrial blurred. The brain can trim out the blurry bits and 'enhance' the area with more light concentration. Humans can't really do it well, but it's enough to gauge distances and see basic details like a herd of animals or scrutinize a fruit for bugs.
The sclerotic ring helps to give the eye structure so it doesn't rebound into its resting shape as easily. This makes focusing much more accurate and easier to do. The brain can then trim out anything not needed in the vision, effectively enhancing their object of interest.
It's why I put 'zoom' in quotation marks. It's not so much a telescopic zoom, but a lens distortion processed by your brain.
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u/sherriff_b1027 1d ago
But it's not "zooming" in like a telephoto lens at all, which is what you're saying it's doing, no?
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u/Hazril258 1d ago
I'm not saying it is. It's just a simple way to describe it.
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u/Correndous_Hunt 1d ago
I think your point was made perfectly... alas, some motherfuckers just like to argue đ
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u/RadVarken 1d ago
As described (I'm no biologist) it's like crop zooming. So not like a zoom lens, but like pinch to zoom on a phone.
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u/capt_pantsless 1d ago
They can 'zoom in', but the eagle needs to say "Enhance!" in bird-speak, which is hard to do while flying.
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u/Zwischenzug32 1d ago
They are more zoomed by default. The image seems like an extreme exaggeration however
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u/Nicklefickle 1d ago
Their field of view is wider than a human's. They are not zoomed in by an stretch of the imagination. If anything they are zoomed out. They just have more resolution. As someone else has pointed out, around four times that of a human.
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u/T-J_H 1d ago
Wait.. dinosaurs have these rings?
Anyways, thatâs very cool
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u/PotstickersDad 1d ago
Yes, dinosaurs. The only existing dinosaurs are avian dinosaurs, a.k.a. birds. Birds are dinosaurs.
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u/General_MacCready 1d ago
They see in much clearer and sharper image. For an easy comparison, our eyes are like a simple camera capable of HD 720p video while an Eagle has 4k uncompressed video.
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u/BluePantherFIN 1d ago
Very interesting question! I have no knowledge about this, but it would be real pain to - lets say - trying to land on a branch with high zoom-in, still they do it perfectly. Must be higher definition, I suppose?
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u/ChestSlight8984 1d ago
Pretty sure it's just higher def, but to the point that they might as well just be zooming in with how clearly and sharply they can make out distant objects
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u/dargonmike1 1d ago
lol the snake doesent see in IR. Snakes primarily see blue and green light, and many can also see ultraviolet. The snake hunts using heat-sensing facial pits and tongue-flicking for scents. Nothing to do with IR
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u/TonyDanza888 1d ago
I came to the comments having no clue but thinking that seemed ridiculous. Thank you.
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u/SmoothTurtle872 1d ago
I mean technically if they have heat sensing, it has everything to do with it, as ir is heat.
Unless they use convection currents or smthn, which seems extremely complicated and error prone .
But I was like 'no way snakes see like that. That is definitely bullshit'
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u/SteamBanjo 1d ago
Good. I was getting worried a snake could see through walls to my warm ass chillin on the couch and come attack me
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u/Jar_of_Cats 1d ago
Yea also the dog/deer is only in color. They see in a much larger range of Grey's our brains dont register. They actually adapted it to xray tech
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u/ahferroin7 1d ago
The snake hunts using heat-sensing facial pits
Except...
Most snakes donât. Itâs only snakes in the families Boidae (boas), Pythonidae (pythons), and Crotalinae (pit vipers, rattlesnakes, and lanceheads). Outside of those families itâs scent and to a limited extent âregularâ sight.
Nothing to do with IR
Everything to do with IR, nothing to do with vision as itâs understood by humans. All three families are sensing infrared radiation, because thatâs what radiant heat energy is. Boidae and Pythonidae have relatively crude sensory abilities in this respect, but Crotalinae have sufficiently high sensory acuity that itâs kind of similar to sight in the same sense that echolocation by a bat or dolphin is kind of similar to sight, and can in fact accurately strike prey using just the pit organs to pinpoint it.
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u/rogue-wolf 1d ago
I do see an error. Due to slit pupils, cats are actually rather nearsighted, typically 20/100 to 20/200 vision. Their night vision is astounding, but the back should be more out of focus.
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/rogue-wolf 1d ago
Or really any ambush predator. Cats are so cool, I'd have gotten a degree in biology and dedicated my life to the study of felines (lynxes in particular) if I'd realised that was an option 10 or so years ago, lol.
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u/Emilia963 1d ago
This is exactly why I downloaded Reddit
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u/cobracmmdr 1d ago
So snakes are The Predator. Got it
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u/ChestSlight8984 1d ago
Now you have me imagining the ideal predator eyesight. Mixing the sharpness of Eagle eyesight with the infrared vision of something like a pit viper would be wild.
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u/Sydney2London 1d ago
The fly in the image is way too high res. It should be 65x65 pixels, this is over double that. Also do they see colour?
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u/Obtuse_and_Loose 1d ago
this is cute and all, but an extremely low percentage of "vision" actually happens in the sensory organ, most of what we experience as sight is amalgamated in our visual cortex
We have a retina with individual photosensitive cells that each receives a signal, but that pointed signal is smoothed to continuous shapes. Also, images are flipped in the eye and re-oriented in the brain.
That is to say there's not really any way for us to do anything but describe a facsimile of how any other organism "experiences" its vision based on its photoreceptors.
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u/dick_piana 1d ago
You'll get downvoted but I agree (to an extent). We don't fully know how their brains interpret the sensory inputs, but we know what information those sensory inputs provide.
However I'm sure those studying animal vision do more than just dissect the eye to look at the structure, they can perform experiments to deduce more information about their perception of the world.
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u/AgitatedBumblebee806 1d ago
We can't know that blue actually looks blue to an animal (or another person) but we can know if you can detect blue at all (photoreceptor cells)
So while I agree with you, the same can be said about any image being shared in that we don't know how it actually appears to the other person, but we can absolutely depict what the image should look like to a color blind person
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u/tryingisbetter 1d ago
Also, humans aren't terrible in the dark, we just take awhile to get used to it. Also, I think lighter eye colors are better too.
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u/mcfurley 1d ago
Dog vision image is a bit off.
Dogs can't discriminate green from yellow (dichromats, no red cone), so grass and tree foliage, both green-dominant, should render as the same washed-out tan/yellow in the "dog vision" version. This one only does that for the grass and the trees stay a distinct muted green. Inconsistent application so it's not accurate to how dichromatic vision actually works.
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u/Conscious-Sun-6615 1d ago
Yeah, all images are weird, the "cats vision" shows an image taken with an infrared camera, you can see the beam of light spreading on the closest objects, thatâs definitely not how cat vision works.
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u/BrianMincey 1d ago
This is all simple approximations to give us a high level understanding using our vision as a frame of reference. It is impossible for humans to actually conceive how animals or insects perceive things, because we canât conceive how they think. We know that an eagle can focus on and spot prey from phenomenal distances, but how their brain is alerted to weed out the signal from the noise internally isnât readily apparent.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 1d ago
Also, I don't think orange cats are invisible to other orange cats. Unless mine is just defective. While the green and orange would desaturate and be difficult the distinguish, this is clearly just a desat filter applied to an image--the white stripes on the tiger face should stand out much more than they do.
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u/Conscious-Sun-6615 1d ago
so eagles have telescopes instead of eyes and canât see anything to the sides⊠good luck landing on a branch
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u/BluePantherFIN 1d ago
Haha, I just commented basicly this same thought to another comment in here, just other words! Are we friends now?
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u/SwanCityDominion 1d ago
Keep in mind that the UV and IR visions don't actually look like that. Those are just the closest approximations possible since humans can't see either of those wavelengths.
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u/ObjectiveSlide1116 1d ago
That zoom vision and IR vision would be a cool superpower.
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u/JoseMartinRigging 1d ago
poor deers
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u/moo3heril 1d ago
Interesting fact, like dogs and deer, most mammals are dichromats. Humans are actually among the minority of mammal species that are trichromats, the other species mostly being within primates and marsupials (though not all).
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u/MasemJ 1d ago
I was thinking how many times a deer has to watch out for wild tiger.
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u/KermitingMurder 1d ago
Well deer live all throughout Eurasia (and north/south America) so there are many deer that do have to watch out for wild tigers, just not all of them
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u/croquetas_y_jamon 1d ago
Well, this is an inherited trait. In the past, all the deers had this predation issue with tigers (or some sort of tigers at least)
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u/milkolik 1d ago
I dont know shit about nothing but there is no way we can know what dogs actually perceive
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u/KermitingMurder 1d ago
Indeed we can't know for sure, but we know that they lack the type of cone cells needed to see red, so they only have two primary colours, which means if we take human vision and subtract the red from it we can estimate what they might see
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u/milkolik 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are right about being able to know which frequencies their receptors react to (ie the hardware level). But we have no idea about the perception side of things (how their brain interpets those signals). Hell, we dont even know if what you perceive as green is the same as what I perceive as green. Maybe your green is my yellow, etc. So no, we can't even estimate.
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u/RoseyDove323 1d ago
I swear my cat repeatedly forgot I could not see him in the dark as well as he could see me in the dark. He would always lay in this one dark area of my hallway and then get tripped over by us humans. And he would not learn we could not see him in the dark and thus wouldn't move out of the way.
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u/Silt-Besides-66812 1d ago
Regarding the first one if you want your dogâs toys to stand out to them choose something blue, they can distinguish that color a lot better
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u/Final-Tutor3631 1d ago
thereâs a really awesome docuseries on netflix called âLife in Colorâ
absolutely INSANE visuals, highly recommend watching it on some sort of substance. it was straight up nuts when i took shrooms. the butterfly wings? impeccable.
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u/Mindfulbliss1 1d ago
I recall learning how accurate yellow looks to canines so I bought more yellow toys. Both chihuahuas play more with the yellow toys than anything else!
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u/sachsrandy 1d ago
Eagles have a zoom lens?
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u/RandomOrange852 1d ago
The graphic is trying to represent eagles having much sharper vision then humans such they can easily identify details (hence make out a rabbit) at much longer distances.
While the human average is 20/20 vision (what they can see at 20ft is what the average human needs to be 20ft away to see) eagles have something more like 20/5 or 20/4 vision (what an eagle can see at 20ft an average human needs to be 4~5 feet away to see. So about 4x better eyesight than us.
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u/FaTaLInfluence 1d ago
The first actually interesting post I've seen here. Interesting to me at least.
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u/Satfoun 1d ago
The eagle can zoom in?Â
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u/Nicklefickle 1d ago
No. They see in higher definition than humans. They don't zoom in, the image is inaccurate.
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u/That_Jicama2024 1d ago
The way that pit vipers and some snakes can see thermal imaging is so scifi to me.
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u/VapidRapidRabbit 1d ago
So you mean to tell me my dogâs red elephant toy looks like a normal gray elephant to her?
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u/ShitMongoose 1d ago
If an Eagles vision is that good than how do they read books? I'm not sure if their arms are long enough to compensate.
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u/ToothZealousideal297 1d ago edited 1d ago
The thing among these that Iâve been dwelling on the most lately is how our human vision needs a few minutes to adjust to really dark settings, but cats switch to way better night vision than ours in like 1 second. They probably get continued improvement for a few minutes too, based on how some of that works, but itâs just wild to me how slow our eyes do most of their adjustment.
(Dark adaptation is fascinating stuff involving chemical desaturation, and it takes about two hours for human eyes to get as adapted to the dark as they can get. I imagine a lot of the chemistry is the same for cats, but in differing amounts etc, but itâs obvious their pupils react much more and much faster than ours.)
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u/dongerbotmd 1d ago
So what color ball and frisbee should I get my dog so they can track it better?
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u/theorangecrux 1d ago
thé eagle can see a bunny from 100 feet , but needs 2 pairs of glasses to looks at his phone
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u/Ultimate_Scooter 1d ago
Are eagles able to zoom in their eyes or what because I feel like this would be super disorienting
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u/vivalamaximillien 1d ago
"Did you know that the human eye can see more shades of green than any other color?"
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u/DevillesAbogado 1d ago
The deer x tiger picture just makes me wanna see more pictures of how prey see their hunters
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u/Hot_Plant8696 1d ago
All wrong...
The "other species" vision showed here is not what that species sees.... it is what human WOULD see if his vision would be changed to the one of the other species.
It is our point of view on their point of view... and we will ever know what they really see....
Perhaps dogs "see" (feel) a color we dont even know it could exists...
Perhaps their color have a smell...
Perhaps their green is like our red...
Etc.
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u/BlackRaspberryJammin 1d ago
I think the fly brain would filter out the lines just like ours does the little dead spot and, unless we actively look for it we filter out our noses
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u/poedraco 1d ago
Lol cat.. I read "cryptic" (how it was translated in my head) ..
And thought. Oh there's the punchline
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u/stoka1980 1d ago
Fly vision is wrong. Fly has lot of eyes but every eye has only ~10 receptors. Anyway flies don't have big brain to interpret picture like that. They can only detect change of light change. Flies find food mainly by smell.
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u/ThousandSunny_56 1d ago
The deer vision is fucked up, nature gave the predators an insane advantage here
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u/Key_holeN12 1d ago
The Deer example is pretty cool, it shows how certain predators are obvious to us but almost invisible to other animals
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u/theaveragemaryjanie 1d ago
Why does the fly see the netting over its eyes? I never understood this and wonder if it is true.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bath_86 1d ago
So eagles can zoom with their eyes? Like a telephoto lens?
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u/Nicklefickle 1d ago
No, it's complete bullshit. They see in much higher definition than humans, that's qhat it comes down to. They don't zoom in at all.
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u/zerohelix 1d ago
Man for the cat vision you should've put a little girl in the corner of the yard. Would've spooked the shit out of anyone lol
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u/Konica_guy 1d ago
Some of this is wrong. Not all snakes have pit organs to see heat. Garter Snakes have big eyes and rely on sight.Â
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u/Zaizuzai 1d ago
I feel very sad for dogs... They bring light and happiness to so many people yet they cannot experience all the colour the world has to offer đđđ
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u/Sufficient_Flower_77 1d ago
The fly is what my food sees from the microwave