5 Canadian creatures with amazing eyesight

Eagles have the best eyesight in the animal world: they have 20/5 vision. That is to say, something that looks sharp to us from five feet away looks equally sharp to an eagle from 20 feet away. An eagle’s eyesight is so keen that this bird of prey can spot a mouse on the ground while soaring 1.5 km high in the sky. Eagle-eyed is right.

Dragonflies not only have 360 degree vision, they see in slow motion. Well, not really. But they see faster than we do. People see 60 images per second; a dragonfly can see 200 images per second. This means that they’re able to gather more information than we can, in a shorter amount of time than we can. So useful!

Owls take top prize in the night vision category. An owl only needs one one hundredth of the amount of light that a human needs to see clearly. Owls have about 30 times more rods (responsible for vision in low light) than cones (responsible for colour vision). So while they might not experience the world in glorious technicolour the way that we do, owls are excellent at navigating—and hunting—in the dark.

Caribou (a.k.a. reindeer) in the Arctic spend their winters in 24-hour darkness. When the cold season descends, their eyes change colour from gold to blue. Why? The colour change is a secondary effect; a layer of cells behind the animal’s retinas changes in order to let in more light, making the eye 1,000 times more sensitive, and therefore, better able to see in dark conditions. No wonder Santa tasks these animals with pulling his sleigh.

While their vision isn’t as sharp as ours, butterflies beat us in other ways when it comes to eyesight. They have a larger field of vision, and they’re better than us at spotting fast-moving objects. Research also shows that butterflies have stronger colour vision than us, thanks to the amount of photoreceptors—cells responsible for light detection—in their eyes. Makes sense: when you’re a pollinator, it pays to be able to detect brightly coloured blooms in the spring.