Cat eyes are beautiful. They are so beautiful and attractive that their name was given to an ornamental stone, and women even came up with a special make-up to make their eyes look like a cat's. But how exactly they work, what kind of picture are our pets compared to humans, most can only guess. Meanwhile, the picture of the world of man and cat is not so different.
Color spectrum
For a long time, it was believed that the world for cats is like a black and white movie and they do not distinguish colors at all. In fact, and fortunately for furry pets, this is not entirely true.
As you know, in order for the brain to form an image of what a living creature sees, the light must pass through many nerve endings in the eyeball, these endings are divided into cones and rods. The cones are responsible for distinguishing colors. There are three types of cones in the human eye that help distinguish three different colors - red, blue, and green. Mixing and variants of these colors - and there is the entire color scheme of the surrounding world. Unlike humans, cats have only blue and green cones in their arsenal, and they cannot distinguish the entire red range, just like colors containing red. This means that neither red, nor orange, nor purple, nor pink are available to the cat's eye. Cats distinguish colors, but the world is not as colorful as humans do. However, this is not too big an omission for them.
Despite the fact that in some respects the vision of cats is inferior to that of a human, their hearing and scent are developed many times better.
Clarity of vision
The picture that the cat sees is comparable to the picture of a person with severe myopia. This is why cats are often unable to distinguish between objects in front of their noses. However, for orientation in space, they use vibrises, which are often mistakenly called a cat's whiskers. They, like antennas, help them estimate the distance to a particular object. The hair of cats also serves this purpose - antenna hairs are located throughout the body of furry pets.
The night vision
It is widely believed that cats see in the dark. In fact, if the cat is closed in a completely dark room without any light sources, of course, it will not see anything either. But at the same time for a cat, to see the environment, only 1/6 of the amount of light that a person needs is enough. This helps cats to hunt at night, even if the light comes only from the moon.
The so-called "mirror" on the back wall of the retina helps cats see better in the dark. It is thanks to him that the cat's eyes flicker so mysteriously in the semi-darkness.
Unusual, vertical pupils help cats to see at dusk. In the light, they taper to thin threads, because cat's eyes are much more sensitive to light and the bright sun can damage them. But in the dark, the pupils become much wider than that of a person, and allow the maximum amount of light to pass through.
