How does having a non-circular pupil affect the way an animal sees?
In: Biology
It doesn’t really. You can make an Iris of any shape and if it’s properly focused you won’t notice. The bokeh of unfocused light will take the shape of the iris however.
Predator animals (meat eaters) don’t run away as much, they chase! So when you’re chasing you need really good sight from far away. Like a hawk! This is why the pupils in their eyes are vertical. They can focus in (push hands together side to side to show the pupil being squished)
Plant-eaters, sometimes called prey animals need to see wide spaces. They never know where the meat eaters will come from to try to eat them! So the pupil for them is squished down like this (push hands top to bottom to show pupil being squished) so they can see all around them a lot better.
You and I, we are humans. See we have a circle pupil (draw a circle with finger in the air) because we are both a meat eater, and a plant eater. We need both to survive! So when we are running away, we have good sight of all around us, up and down. But when we are chasing animals or hunting, we also need a very good sight from far to be able to see the animal we want to catch.
Argh this post funny but where the answer at…goats eyes freak me right out, if I know the reason I may hate them less. Poor loves.
I’ve wondered this as well, do they have anamorphic vision?
One of my cats has the vertical pupil and the other doesnt, why would that be?
horses for example have slit pupils that provides them with natural polarizing filter which helps to spot predators in high grassland. downsite is that those eyes filter out any reflections on water. that’s why even shallow water puddles look like bottomless holes for them.
In elementary school we had a boy named Carlos, he had reddish hair and freckles skin. He also had eyes shaped like cat eyes. Some mean Kids called him “Carlos the cat eyed kid”. But I always wanted to ask him how the world looked, if he saw differently than me. I wonder how Carlos is today. I bet he is super handsome with his striking cat eyes,?which were actually super cool looking.
The shape of cuttlefish eyes may also help them “filter” light coming down through the water column to give the light reflecting off objects in front of them. I will try and find the article I read when not on the clock.
Edit: source
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698913000539
It’s six years old so entirely possible there is a newer understanding
Small predatory animals, like lizards, cats, and foxes, have slit pupils to see high and low for hunting. Mid sized, vegetarian animals that live on the plains have horizontal pupils on the sides of their heads to keep watch, such as goats and horses. Octopuses are the exception, being predatory and underwater. Most other animals have round pupils.
The way I understand it is like this: herd animals like goats etc have square pupils, because they need a wider range of view. The need to see what predators could threaten them.
Predators have vertical slit like pupils because it helps control the amount of light that enters the eye. That iris configuration can allow way more light into the eye, which helps these animals be nocturnal.
Animals with round pupils, like humans, need good vision at a range that is moderately far to close up. They need to avoid things like diffraction, and they don’t need to have the ability to allow a huge amount of light into the eye, because they are diurnal.
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