Unlikely. Mammal eyes are not built to detect infrared radiation. Deer and some other animals can see in very low light but they need some visibile light to resolve an image even if it’s just moonlight or starlight.
Snakes and some other animals have very sensitive non-optical heat sensing organs that can “see” infrared and even determine direction of the infrared source at some distance, but deer do not have these and these aren’t really “eyes” in the conventional lensed optical sense.
Unlikely. Mammal eyes are not built to detect infrared radiation. Deer and some other animals can see in very low light but they need some visible light to resolve an image even if it’s just moonlight or starlight.
Snakes and some other animals have very sensitive non-optical heat sensing organs that can “see” infrared and even determine direction of the infrared source at some distance, but deer do not have these and these aren’t really “eyes” in the conventional lensed optical sense.
I seriously doubt it. I will grant I have no scientific knowledge to back me up on this but I do not think any living creature on the planet can see in the infrared spectrum. I realize that some creatures have expanded visual capacity beyond humans but after watching God only knows how many hours of Animal Planet I have yet to hear of one that sees in the infrared.
As a guess I would bet that deer have less acute eyesight than humans and I wouldn’t be surprised to find they are color blind to some extent.
And this mammal, even in the visible part of the spectrum, can not read the OP. Can you guys? I wonder what got lost that might have been part of his reason for asking.
My book of questions from Outdoor Magazine tells of anecdotal evidence of deer actually sidestepping arrows shot at them, so I have my doubts about this “less acute eyesight” part.
Slight hijack:
Animals designed to function well in low light (nocturnal) generally have proportionally large eyes, and often a layer of reflective material in the eyeball (think ‘cats-eye’).
These large, reflective eyes seem to be generally attractive to humans, and may be one reason we tend to domesticate and make pets of this kind of animal. Like cats, horses, deer (think Bambi, “doe-eyed”), etc.
That sounds like the, “Big fish that got away story”, except for deer hunting.
The reaction time for the deer would have to be nothing short of stupendous. We’re talking about seeing the arrow, processing the information (identifying it as a threat), deciding on a course of action and signaling the muscles to move. Consider when it actually sees the arrow. Still in the hunter’s bow or after the arrow is already halfway to the deer (thus cutting it’s response time to save itself in half)?
While I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that deer have better reflexes than humans dodging arrows still stretches belief. I’d wager the hunter made a noise that alerted the animal just prior to shooting or it was just dumb luck that the deer moved in a way to avoid being hit.