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| "Forgotten": China marker, collage, digital. |
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Click: Gladys Knight, Neither One of Us.
2GN2S
Animal Eye Shapes Different Lifestyles
Top row, from left: cuttlefish, lion, goat.
Bottom row, from left: domestic cat, horse, gecko.
Look at a house cat's eyes and see pupils that look like vertical slits. A tiger has round pupils, like humans do.
And the eyes of other animals, goats and horses, have slits that are horizontal. Scientists have now done the first comprehensive study of these three kinds of pupils. The shape of the animal's pupil, it turns out, is related to the animal's size and whether it's a predator or prey.
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| bird eye |
The pupil is the hole that lets light in, and it comes in lots of different shapes. "There are some weird ones out there," says Martin Banks, a vision scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Cuttlefish have pupils that look like the letter "W," and dolphins have pupils shaped like crescents. Some frogs have heart-shaped pupils, while geckos have pupils that look like pinholes arranged in a vertical line.
There is a strong link between the shape of an animal's pupil and its way of life. In the journal Science Advances, the scientists report that there's a strong link between the shape of an animal's pupil and its way of life.
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| An Akhal-Teke horse, from Turkmenistan, has horizontal slits for pupils, while the Mediterranean house gecko has vertical slits that look like a series of pinholes. |
"If you have a vertical slit, you're very likely to be an ambush predator," says Banks. That's the kind of animal who lies in wait and then leaps out to kill. He says these predators need to accurately judge the distance to their prey, and the vertical slit has optical features that make it ideal for that.
To keep some sanity while the restoration (that was complete yesterday, all clean, painted walls, has been cut into today since the plumber who was here to fix my heater, found a leak from above the heater!) so I have played making some oddball cards. I didn't think to make them step by step, but I'll take photos for you.
Just because ...
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| Red-wing Fairy Wren |
Sunday's Smiles ...
