Like, when I hear “Eagles can see *blank* x as well as a human. How accurate is that? And isn’t that very subjective and variable across the entire species?
HOW DO WE KNOW?
In: Biology
We examine the eyes of dead animals and learn about things like their focal length, their concentration of optical nerve fibers, what *kinds* of nerve fibers. We see the rods and cones and we use what we know of our own experience with cameras and optics (and our own eyes) to create a mathematical model of how *their* eye works.
Sometimes we’re able to test our guess and sometimes not. Sometimes we just see evidence of their vision, like when we see a hawk stoop and snatch a field mouse when it was on the horizon only moments ago.
Sometimes our model is complete conjecture. We’re kind of guessing how some prehistoric animals eyes worked because we haven’t got one to dissect.
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