Image Gallery: Animal Vision

 

Illustration of a bird fovea. Note the deepness of the fovea and the slanted sides which cause the retinal image to be enlarged. It should be noted that birds have huge eyes relative to their size. Because of their high altitude and ability to see fast moving objects, birds require very high spatial and temporal resolution.
Diagram showing a cone from a bird's eye. This particular cone has an colored oil droplet which changes the color of the light striking the photopigment.
Photograph of the head of an Aeschna dragonfly. Each eye has 28,000 facets, the most of any animal.
Diagram of a superposition type compound eye. This kind of compound eye allow light to travel through several facts before striking the light sensitive rhabdom. This increases the sensitivity to light at a sacrifice of spatial resolution.
Humorous drawing showing the size of a compound eye that would be required to have the same spatial resolution as a human eye.
Resolution of eye (in degrees) compared to body height for a number of species. Note that humans have about the best resolution of all species, although there are a few scattered resports that certain hawks, eagles or falcons may have significantly better resolution.
Diagram outlining the four basic types of eye.
Illustration of a possible evolutionary path for the development of the basic eye types.
Photomicrograph of a stained macaque retina, showing the cone structure.
Visual pigments differ among species, where the differences typically show up in the point of maximum sensitivity lambda_max. This plot shows for several hundred species the distribution of lambda_max for the rod visual pigment rhodopsin. Note that there are several clusters which seem to be more common than others. The value of lambda_max for humans is 498 nm.
Image gallery Dennis Kunkel's image gallery. Lots of excellent photographs of various insects, arachnids, and other animals, many showing excellent shots of the eyes.