Does the size of a creature, or the size of its eye, affect what can be seen by the “naked eye”? For example, can ants see things we consider microscopic? are ants microscopic to elephants?
In: Biology
No. Light works the same regardless of size. And the wavelength of light ultimately sets a hard limit on vision acuity. Smaller than that you can not possibly make out any details, so microscopic organisms that can see usually have very weak vision that can only make out light levels in general or maybe some vague shapes.
The other hard limit is the number of photo receptors in the eye. Smaller organisms also have less detailed vision in general because small eyes can’t have as many photo receptors. Not enough space. Some insects are able to make up for this to some extent by just having incredibly large eyes compared to the size of their bodies.
Elephants have fairly good vision, but not as good as humans. But the reason their vision is not as good as humans is not because they are bigger, but because they are less visually oriented and more smell oriented. The largest ape that ever lived was significantly larger than a human and almost certainly had visual acuity quite comparable to ours, and could see things about as small as we could.
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