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The eyes say it all. They answer questions about a creature’s social scale, and its place in the pecking order. The geometry of the eye indicates whether an animal is the hunter, or the hunted – and how tall it walks.
Scientists from the Universities of California Berkeley and Durham in Britain have
discovered just how much they can learn from pupils. As every householder knows, when the domestic cat narrows its eyes to slits, it does so vertically. Sheep, deer and horses however have eyes with horizontally elongated pupils.
Martin Banks, professor of optometry at Berkeley and Gordon Love, director of the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation at Durham, have learned something else. So important is it for a grazing animal to keep an eye on the ground that when it drops its head, the pupil rotates by up to 50 degrees to stay horizontal.
“The first key visual requirement for these animals is to detect approaching predators, which usually come from the ground, so they need to see panoramically on the ground with minimal blind spots,” said Professor Banks. “The second critical requirement is that once they do detect a predator, they need to see where they are running. They have to see well enough out of the corner of their eye to run quickly and jump over things.”
The two scientists and their colleagues report in the journal Science Advances that they looked at the eyes of 214 closely-studied animals, all terrestrial vertebrates. These included Australian snakes, every species from the cat and dog families as well as hyenas and mongooses, and domestic grazing animals as well as tapirs and rhinoceroses. The challenge was to see if they could predict a relationship between an animal’s ecological niche and the shape formed by the pupil in its eye.
Read more here. (The Guardian UK)
Scientists from the Universities of California Berkeley and Durham in Britain have
discovered just how much they can learn from pupils. As every householder knows, when the domestic cat narrows its eyes to slits, it does so vertically. Sheep, deer and horses however have eyes with horizontally elongated pupils.
Martin Banks, professor of optometry at Berkeley and Gordon Love, director of the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation at Durham, have learned something else. So important is it for a grazing animal to keep an eye on the ground that when it drops its head, the pupil rotates by up to 50 degrees to stay horizontal.
“The first key visual requirement for these animals is to detect approaching predators, which usually come from the ground, so they need to see panoramically on the ground with minimal blind spots,” said Professor Banks. “The second critical requirement is that once they do detect a predator, they need to see where they are running. They have to see well enough out of the corner of their eye to run quickly and jump over things.”
The two scientists and their colleagues report in the journal Science Advances that they looked at the eyes of 214 closely-studied animals, all terrestrial vertebrates. These included Australian snakes, every species from the cat and dog families as well as hyenas and mongooses, and domestic grazing animals as well as tapirs and rhinoceroses. The challenge was to see if they could predict a relationship between an animal’s ecological niche and the shape formed by the pupil in its eye.
Read more here. (The Guardian UK)
