Can deer see in color? Do they see blaze orange and simply not associate it with danger?
As I understand it, cats and dogs were long considered to see only in B&W. But fairly recently tests have shown that they do see color, but they mostly don’t care. I’m wondering if deer are similar.
I’ve spent a coupla hours looking, but can’t seem to come up with a search phrase that finds what I’m looking for.
Same story with deer. They have limited color perception, but good motion perception.
There are two types of receptors in the eye: rods and cones. Rods help see in low light and are good for picking up motion. Cones help see in bright light and are good for distinguishing between colors. The human eye has many more rods than cones, but it has a central region called the fovea centralis that has a high density of cones. This is why humans (normally) can distinguish between colors. This page has some good info including a graph of rod/cone density.
Dogs, like deer, don’t have the concentration of cones that the human eye has. This page has some info on the difference between canine and human eye, including a color bar that show the difference in perception.
Thanks. That’s the sort of thing I’m looking for. That chart suggests that dogs have very poor red/orange/yellow acuity. As you might expect, I now wonder how the deer color perception compares to humans and dogs.