confused flatfish noises
confused flatfish noises
122 comments
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I think that's specific to mammals. Just off the top of my head...
Invertebrates? No. All out
Fish? No. Also a Hammerhead would've really sold this comic lol.
Birds? No. Though, even on the side they do often have a tilt toward frontal in a lot of predatory birds. It could be argued...
Reptiles? No.
Amphibians? No. There's no even trying to place rules on that optical chaos.
Mammals? Yeah, pretty much. Can't think of an outlier but I'm sure there's plenty of obvious ones.
Edit' Ah, there we go. Of course marine mammals are an exception. But back in land, as too are llamas. Makes you wonder...what are the llamas plotting?
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whales and dolphins are mammals, and they have eyes on the side. Don't think anything preys on them (at least for the full-grown ones, pretty sure baby whales are preyed on)
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Sperm whales are apex(orcas will target calves but they stay the hell away from bulls) but they don't hunt their monstrous cephalopod prey(which in any sane ecosystem would be apex themselves) with eyes.
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They want your sweater back.....
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I remember there used to be a goat on some island (now extinct) that didn't have any predators so it evolved forward facing eyes
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There's also evidence that people tried to domesticate them, their hooves were trimmed.
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Invertebrates? No. All out
I invite you to meet the awesome jumping spider, whose eyes are very especially needed set up to be forward-facing for depth perception for their jumps, and who hunt other spiders, as well as the wolf spider, who are also a hunting (as opposed to web) spider.
In fact, you can use the chart of spider eye layouts to pretty much identify whether you're looking at a spider who builds webs and waits or a spider who hunts:
Anyone with two big forward-facing eyes is probably looking around for their next meal; the rest are building a web, trapdoor, or taking some other approach.
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Also crabs. I mean, their eyes are often on stalks and more mobile than mammalian eyes, and they're compound, so they have a very wide field of view, but they're still often basically in front, and they do apparently provide depth cues for hunting thanks to this.
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/31/6933
It also occurred to me to look up about dragonflies, and it seems they mostly hunt dorsally (which is a pretty viable option if you're flying). BUT I found this article about Damselflies, which notes that they rely on binocular overlap and line up their prey in front of them. Which is pretty cool.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982219316641
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Huntsman is also a hunting spider
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Had a bunch of wolf spiders in the last shop i worked at as a welder. They have eye shine like cats and alligators. It was always easy to tell the wolf spiders from black widows even behind a dusty welding machine because you can see the little wolf spider eyes looking back at you.
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Those are some wild gamepad layouts
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Birds? No. Though, even on the side they do often have a tilt toward frontal in a lot of predatory birds. It could be argued...
Birds of prey absolutely have their eyes positioned on the front of their heads. It's most obvious in owls, since they have the largest eyes and wider faces, but all of them have front-facing eyes for binocular vision.
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Bats also have forward facing eyes I think (correct me on this please!), but most of them aren't carnivorous. They eat fruits and bugs and stuff.
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Besides humans, aren't most apes prey animals?
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What do you mean by prey animals? Animals that prey on others or are you calling them prey themselves? And just because an animal is a predator doesn't mean there aren't larger predators that will kill and eat them. Ultimately most apes are omnivores who eat fruit and berries, along with leaves and other shit, but will eat meat and have been known to prey on animals, yet it's not their main source of food. They're not apex predators but they aren't actively prey.
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I don't think anything is preying upon gorillas, the biggest predators for chimps are chimps and humans, though young ones are taken by birds too
Humans in the wild are prey to crocodile, big cats, bears, wolves and young ones from an even longer list
Humans and chimpanzees are definitely predators. Humans who lived through the recent ice age outside the tropics were pure carnivores as no edible plants grow on glaciers; all the big animals and most of the dangerous ones went extinct just after humans got to an area
Bonobos eat fruit. Not much eats them
The apes are all pretty good at defending themselves and are their own worst enemy
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including humans.
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Convergent evolution has more to do with environment and trophic structure than it has to do with lineage. Any animal that can produce a complex eye can have similar evolutionary pressure given similar environments unless there's some other stronger pressure.
Animals low to the ground or water often have slitted eyes (including goats who spend a of time with their heads down)
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Maybe it doesn't apply ocean animals. Like they would want to see both above and below for their environment, but I'd also think for predators it would be slightly more front facing
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A lot of non mammals other organs to help them perceive. Even aquatic mammals like whales have echolocation. That's probably why the front facing rule doesn't apply universally to all animals.
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Aye-Ayes and Tarsiers have very forward facing eyes, yet eat mostly gruvs in trees.
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The same facial expression I make one week into the month when looking at my cheque account.
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I think we can therefore safely conclude that the shark is also looking at your cheque account.
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Pls respond.
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hello, yes, this is shark!
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Yes Sharky?
CAN I PLEASE MOVE? I'M SUFFOCATING!
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Obligate ram breathing is kind of mind-blowing. They have to swim to flow water through their gills because their gills have no muscles to flap like most fish have.
Only a few sharks are obligate ram breathers, though. Many species are able to take breaks from swimming.
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Last time I saw this kind of comment/meme someone pointed out that dragons are usually depicted with eyes on the sides of their head. What hunts them, I wonder
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That's like how in dnd lore the tarrasque, basically the biggest, scariest monster, is always depicted with big spikes on its back. Animals evolve spikes like that to ward off predators. That means something at least used to hunt tarrasques
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Actually they develop in its juvenile state when they are vulnerable to more mundane predators but are then retained for sexual selection in adulthood.
There is only one tarrasque in existence, resulting in it taking its sexual frustration out on level 20 adventuring parties and parties that keep making fun of the lore- uh, history- of the world they grew up in.
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Human.
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Adventurers...
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Bigger dragons.
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Are we the baddies?
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Horny donkeys
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...hobbits...
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The Hobbits just piss them off, then humans have to deal with it..
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It's not the question if the eyes on the side or in the front, it's about the capability to be able to focusing on a stereoscopic vision to be able to calculate the distances to the prey or not. Side eyes increase the field of vision, which can be advantageous for fleeing animals, but does not exclude that predators can also use it to strategically locate themselves better in the environment. But it is true that animals with frontal vision are generally predatory.
Well....
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They also have to orient themselves in a truely 3D landscape, unlike terrestrial predators who hunt on basically a 2D plane.
Birds of prey (with the exception of owls) also don't have front-facing eyes, probably for similar reasons* (and they're stereoscopic vision also works a bit different I think with very different points of focus).*see comments below
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There are lots of reasons to have binocular frontal vision. Redundancy, differing info for optic flow, sensitivity, reducing the frontal blind spot, compensating for retinal blind spots, higher frontal resulution, seeing around things, depth perception...
Most of there are good for predators, but predation isn't the only reason to have them.
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That's if sight is your primary sense for hunting / evasion, right?
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Is it actually possible for a fish-like animal to have eyes at the front (i.e. an animal with a hydrodynamic shape that spends all its time underwater)?
I feel like that's really difficult for evolution to achieve, especially because the mouth has to go somewhere at the front too. I mean, look at where the lights of a high-speed train are placed and their shape.
Intuitively it feels easier to just put the eyes on the side. Plus it feels like there's a lower risk of damaging them when bumping into something.
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Is it actually possible for a fish-like animal to have eyes at the front
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was gonna snark "me before coffee" but tbh this is also me after coffee too
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Barreleyes get sorta close. They look up but can look forward too.
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I don't remember what it's called but I'm pretty sure there is one I saw once and it was kind of terrifying looking.
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Sharks see with their jaws, though.
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Is this the guy who got his bike stolen
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I see what you did there... and also there.
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Axe-u-a-lee...
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Arilou Lalee'lay?
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Being a predator is not a property, its a relation. X is a predator of Y... but not of Z, and is a prey of V and not of W.
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Nobody gunna complain Blåhaj has an issue?
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Are apes considered predators? I kind of thought they were just neither.
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By far the most dangerous predator on Earth is humans, we eat each other, anything that moves, kill for fun, build machines to do it for us, design what we eat to be easier to kill, and have you dealt with women? We're a scary bunch.
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Gorilla are pure herbivores, chimpanzees are predators which mostly eat plants, I don't know about Bonobos, all that's talked about them is their seed life, and homo varies from pure carnivore (in cold places, those with few edible plants) to scavenger to omnivore (especially in the tropics and places with fruit) depending on environment
Homo, of course, has been lying to itself about what food best sustains it, we can't live happily on the excess grain we've been producing for the last 10k years
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Jumping or climbing animals are an exception on the other side.
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Turtles are kind of in between with their wedge-shaped heads. They need the awareness to hide from predators, but some of them are also predators themselves or they at least snap at fruits and veggies to eat them.
Here's my tortoise doing his best disappointed-in-you baby yoda:
And here's the yellow belly slider locking target on to some shrimp.
But it sounds like the rules aren't as consistent in the water, judging from other comments. Even something like an alligator snapping turtle's eyes are no further forward than these pics.
122 comments