10/02/2022
What colours can cats actually see? And what colours do they like best?
What you see as a rainbow of red, orange, green, green, blue and purple is just a mosaic of blue, grey and green to your cat?
What colours can cats actually see? And what colours do they like best?
👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇
What is the difference between our eyes and a cat's eyes?
· Different functions
We are omnivores. In addition to hunting, our ancestors also had to gather a lot of plants and berries, and their activities were mainly concentrated during the day, when the light was bright. For humans, therefore, the ability to recognise food by its colour was very important.
Cats living in the wild, on the other hand, catch prey mainly in the late afternoon and are less likely to need to identify prey by colour, so the focus of vision is mainly on night vision and catching moving objects.
The main carrying functions are different, resulting in a great difference in colour vision between us and our cats.
· Different optic cells
Both we and cats have two types of photoreceptor cells: cone cells and rod cells.
The cone cells are mainly responsible for perceiving strong light and colour; the rod cells are mainly responsible for perceiving weak light stimuli.
We humans usually have three types of cone cells, which can recognise the various colours of the three primary colours combined, and the wavelength range of visible light is approximately 780-400 nm, whereas cats have only two types of optic vertebral cells (some researchers have suggested that there may be a third, but it is rare) and the wavelength range of visible light is only approximately 450 nm to 556 nm.
This means that cats may only be able to distinguish between longer wavelengths of red on the basis of brightness, and may not be able to see red in the true sense of the word. (Cats can, however, distinguish between "red" and "green")
Also, due to differences in the number of optic cone cells.
➤ Cat retinal cone cells: 26,000 per mm2
➤ Human retinal cone cells: 146,000 per mm2
The result is that the colour seen in the cat's eye is also very different from the colour seen in our eyes, and the saturation is much lower in the cat's eye.
· What does colour look like in a cat's eye?
Researchers speculate that the colours we see in our eyes may look like p1 to a cat's eyes. (cr:ZoneA)
The difference between the same scene, in your eyes and your cat's eyes, may look like p2. (cr:Catalyst)
The absence of longer wavelength colours such as orange and red; and the lower saturation of blues and greens; are the most significant differences in colour vision between us and our cats.
· The cat's eye has a bit more to offer
While it seems a shame that cats can't see red, researchers speculate that cats also seem to see something that we can't - ultraviolet light.
Ron Douglas, a biologist at City University London, examined the eyes of various animals and found that the lenses of hedgehogs, dogs, cats, ferrets and other animals can transmit ultraviolet light.
However, scientists do not yet know what colour the ultraviolet light will show through a cat's lens (after all, we can't see it with our own eyes). What the world looks like to a kitten's eye is still to be discovered by scientists.