What does it mean when wildlife biologists say that “an eagle can see a rabbit in a field from miles away”? Does this imply that their vision is automatically more zoomed in? Do they have better than 20/20 vision, or is their vision simply clearer?

Question

What does it mean when wildlife biologists say that “an eagle can see a rabbit in a field from miles away”? Does this imply that their vision is automatically more zoomed in? Do they have better than 20/20 vision, or is their vision simply clearer?

In: Biology

Answer 1

It’s not really about “zoom.” It’s about detail, or to put it in digital terms, “resolution.”

I’m making these figures up, but basically if your natural vision is 1080p, an eagle has 16K super-duper-holy-shit HD vision. To you, that rabbit 200 yards away is *at most* a single pixel (probably even less), which isn’t enough information to register it to you as “rabbit.” But that eagle can see the ears, the tail, the legs, even the eyes of that rabbit, so it *definitely* knows what it’s looking at.