It's easy to forget that not everyone has the same vision when you view the world in a certain way.
We mean that very literally. Different organisms have evolved to view the world differently, with eye structures and configurations designed for different kinds of existence.
The horizontal pupils of herbivores give them a panoramic view of their surroundings, which helps both to see predators coming, and to avoid obstacles as the animals make an escape. nocturnal predator have vertical pupils to maximize their night vision
Other kinds of eyes see in ways that we may not even think of. Jeepers are some of the strangest eyes in the animal kingdom.
Cuttlefish is a type of fish.
The cuttlefish is the only animal that has a pupil. It's shaped like a W, a trait biologists have determined helps the animals balance a vertically even field of light, which is common in the watery depths. That's just the beginning.
A cuttlefish has an eye. A. Martin is the photographer for the Moment/Getty Images.
Cuttlefish only have one type of photoreceptor, which means they can only see in one color. Cuttlefish and other cephalopods have strange pupils that allow them to see color in a different way by using the way light splits into a rainbow.
It can be a problem when the eyes don't focus the same colors onto the same point, turning the contrast of shade into a softer wash of different colors. The problem may have been solved by the Cuttlefish.
The wide pupils of cephalopods are prone to it because the effect is smaller. The blur is color-dependent, which means it could be a way for color-blind creatures to see colors. It's possible they can see colors we don't know. This could explain how they can coordinate their color to their environment.
Cuttlefish eyes are able to see the world in 3D as well as other cephalopods, and recently, scientists found that these eyes result in stereoscopic vision.
Birds
Birds have small eyes that can see much that we can't.
We have established that the only type of photoreceptor that cepsopods have is one. Humans have four, three cones and a rod, which means we have color sensitivities at three peak wavelengths. The rod is for low-light vision.
Birds have a rod, four cones, and a double cone for non-colored motion perception.
The Himalayan bluetail is migratory. The picture was taken by Nitat Termmee/Moment.
They could see magnetic fields with the help of aprotein in their eyes. For a long time, it wasn't clear how migratory birds were able to navigate so well. Scientists narrowed it down to a class of proteins called the blue light sensitive cryptochromes.
Birds' ability to perceive magnetic fields is dependent on blue light, suggesting that the sense may be vision-based. There is a chance that the blue magnetic filter is the result of a quantum quirk. Recent lab studies show how a magnetic field affects the quantum property of tHe electrons.
The four-eyed fish is also known as Anableps anableps.
The four-eyed fish has strange eyes. The CC BY-NC 2.0 is a work by Charles Peterson.
The beastie doesn't have four eyes, but it has two. Their main focus is on the surface of the water, where they spend most of their time preying on insects.
It is better to see the flying bugs in an aerial environment if your eyes are on top of your head. There is a portion of their organ that sits below the surface of the water, and this is where things get interesting: each of the two halves of the organ is divided into two parts, one above the waterline and the other below.
The fish can see above and below the water to watch for prey and predator. The thickness of the lens can be used to accommodate different media, such as aerial and aquatic.
The green and yellow light in the eye are different from the red light in the eye. This is thought to improve vision in murky waters since the fish live in muddy environments.
The most complex of all the eyes in the animal kingdom is a marine crustacean that spends its life in burrows in rocks and the ocean.
Humans have four eyes. Birds have six. The overachieving little wotsits have 16 in their compound peepers. What do they do with the light-sensitive cells? They can see it. They can see everything. Don't play hide-and-seek with a shrimp.
A peacock mantis shrimp.
We don't know why mantis shrimps need such complex visual organs, because it's hard for us to see what they're seeing. They have the usual color and ultraviolet light-sensitive cells. Some animals can see ultraviolet light. The shrimps? They can see different frequencies.
The orientation of the wave of propagating light can be seen by mantis shrimps. Cuttlefish can see linearly polarized light. The only animals that can see light in a circular way are the smiln shrimps.
Each eye can be moved independently. Each eye can see depth. Humans use binocular vision for depth perception. Shrimps only need one. They can see cancer before it starts.
We don't know what that is.
Chitons.
What are eyes made of? A structure made of cells. Except if you're a type of marine mollusk called a chiton.
West Indian fuzzy chitons. The Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 is owned by Hans Hillewaert.
These smallish creatures are protected by thick plates of armor as they move around on rocks. You might think that a creature with soft eyes would be able to sense the day-night cycle and watch for prey.
You would be wrong. Chiton have eyes, but they're made of mineral and embedded in their armor, which is a type of calcium carbonate known as aragonite.
The simple eyes of chitons, which litter the surface of their shells alongside hundreds of sensory organs known as aesthetes, consist of an aragonite lens covered by a cornea, and some sort of retina; to the surprise of scientists, these tiny primitive organs can actually resolve images.
We don't know how the visual information is processed by the brain, and that's what we don't know.
Chiton eyes. The dark spots are in the eyes. The Wyss Institute is at Harvard University.
They can help us understand some of the wild paths evolution has taken. The trilobites had mineral eyes and were made of calcite.
Understanding the complex eyes of extinct creatures can tell us a lot about how vision evolved on Earth.
