yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Why Do Goat Eyes Rotate? | Explorer


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

To understand how some prey animals see differently than we do, let's play a game. Tilt your head and body to the side. What happens? Everything looks, uh, sideways. Kind of obvious.

Well, for one scientist, it turns out that this little problem of our eye not rotating very much in our head was the answer to an evolutionary puzzle no one had ever cracked. Dr. Marty Banks and Dr. William Sprig are taking us to the San Francisco Zoo. They are on the hunt to understand why some animals have different shaped pupils and how their pupil shape helps them survive.

The pupil is the actual hole in our eye that lets light bounce to receptors in the back of our eye. Those receptors then send signals to our brain to be processed. It's kind of like a camera that has an aperture where you can open and close it to let more or less light in while collecting pictures of different pupil shapes.

Marty noticed something that no one else had ever noticed before: the animals with horizontal elongated pupils. There were two things that they were exceedingly likely to have. One was eyes on the side of their head, and the other is that they were prey animals that graze. Typically, that is worried about other animals approaching on the ground to possibly attack them.

But what happens when the goats go to lower their heads to graze? Do these horizontal shaped pupils move? If they don't move, all the goat will see is the ground, and that wouldn't be very useful to see predators, would it? Our idea about the horizontal pupil is it should remain parallel to the ground. That way, they can see predators, and that way they can also see in front of them if they have to run from a predator.

Let's see what they do with the head up and the head down. If Marty's theory is correct, a goat's pupil will actually physically move when they put their head down like this. There we go; looks parallel to the ground. Yep, it's definitely horizontal. Looks like we see that movement in every one of these guys.

Mhm, and his colleagues discovered that goats do move their eyes to be parallel with the ground. These eyes are rotating through dozens of degrees. That's a big movement, bigger than we can do.

Oh yeah, rotating pupils in grazing animals seems obvious now, but actually, scientists had never really thought about it before. Marty and his colleagues started their research, and it was very surprising to me that had been part of the discussion sooner, even among ourselves. It's kind of embarrassing that we didn't think of it right off.

More Articles

View All
Why Robinhood Blocked Gamestop. (Full Explanation)
We made the decision, uh, in the morning to limit the buying of about 13 securities on our platform. So, to be clear, uh, customers could still sell those securities if they had positions in them, and they could also trade in the thousands of other securi…
Pattern when dividing by tenths and hundredths
Let’s see if we can figure out what 2 divided by 0.1 or 1⁄10 is. Pause this video and see if you can figure that out. All right, now let’s work through it together. There are a couple of ways that we can approach it. One way is to think about everything …
Advice for Students and Recent Graduates on Finding Jobs – Liz Wessel of WayUp
At what point did you know you wanted to start a company? Um, so my sophomore year of college, I was at Penn, and I actually started my first business at the end of sophomore year. I went to Stanford for a three-day boot camp called Basis Entrepreneurial…
United Kingdom vs Great Britain vs England primer
For someone who lives outside of the United Kingdom, the terms United Kingdom and Great Britain and England often feel interchangeable, and they feel like they’re referring to the same thing. But as we’ll see in this video, they aren’t referring to exactl…
Saddle points
In the last video, I talked about how if you’re trying to maximize or minimize a multivariable function, you can imagine its graph. In this case, this is just a two-variable function, and we’re looking at its graph. You want to find the spots where the ta…
Water Efficiency at Home | National Geographic
In the United States, we’re facing a national water shortage. Government-backed research shows that in a little over 50 years, half of the freshwater basins may not meet our demands. For this story, I’m in my home state of Florida. Here, the water crisis …