Please help me educate myself about piscine vision.
I need to research an article for a fishing magazine on vision and color perception in fish, so I’m looking for any scholarly source material you can recommend.
One assumes the large eyes of fish, in general, is an adaptation for lower light levels, but do they have other, more specific, vision adaptations that are less obvious? I’m especially interested in learning what is known about color vision.
The mighty peacock mantis shrimp with their multitude of color receptive cone types comes to mind when considering animal color vision, so I’m not assuming anything when it comes to fish - which is why I’m looking for scholarly material.
I realize that “fish” is a pretty broad term, but anything and everything about piscine vision will be helpful.
There’s the four-eyed fish, which can see well in air and water.
There’s also the archerfish, which identifies insects resting on plants a few feet above the water, and spits water at them to make them fall. The cool part is that this means the fish is able to account for refraction of light by the water: its visual path takes a dogleg as it crosses the water surface, but its projected water stream does not. I suppose this isn’t really a visual adaptation, but rather a mental adaptation that compensates for the visual distortion caused by refraction.
Is this a specific fishing article or a general one… because different types of fish range in how well they see and how dependant on sight they are. Depending on the fishes lifestyle and feeding behavior they can have excellent vision or pretty much rudimentary vision. Catfish and tarpon will rely on sight very differently. It also depends what kind of conditions the fish live in… color perception is affected by water conditions as well as depth. It really is a very broad topic, so you’d be best to identify what type of fish/fishing you’re talking about first.
One thing I do know is that teleost fish are tetrachromatic - they (can) have 4 types of receptors vs our 3 and most mammals’ 2. They can see UV and reef fishes can have UV patterns (cite).
I already understand all of this and purposely did not mention any of it.
I’m looking for ANY scholarly works on the vision of ANY species of fish. I’m not so foolish as to believe there is some sort of one size fits all answer and I want the broadest possible range of information I can get.
I’m looking for source material on how fish see. Period. No other factors matter at this point.
Thanks, MrDibble, exactly the sort of stuff I’m looking for!
One major issue for fish vision is that lenses depend on a difference in index of refraction. Our eyes have lenses with an index of refraction significantly different from air, so it’s not a problem for us… but there’s not so much difference between the index of eye-lenses and water. So in order for their lenses to be any use at all, fish eyes need to bulge out much more than our eyes do.
Then the best advice anyone can offer is to do a Google scholar search for “fish vision” and do your own screening if you don’t want help determining what species might be of interest to anglers or why color vision may or may not matter. One of the benefits of boards like this is that you might be talking to actual professionals who can help narrow down your search. Replies such as this tend to result in said people not caring to help you.
I’m sorry; I’m not trying to be rude or to demean the professionals here, I’m simply looking for scientific source material. I don’t see why that’s a problem or too broad to be reasonable. It’s a specific part of my research process. It may not be how you would approach this article, but then you’re not writing it. I’m simply trying to understand as much as I possibly can about how any and all fish see. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation, but you obviously disagree.
Naturally, I’ve done the Google thing, I was just hoping that someone in this crowd might have a friend or colleague working in the field, or may have come across recent work being done or knows a particular school where there are people doing this sort of research. Any crumbs, or pointers cheerfully accepted.
So, yeah, I’m aware that the Dope has experts and I was hoping some of them might be able to help me in my quest for a science based understanding of the principals of piscine vision. If fish eyes are organized in a particular way, like bulging, that’s exactly what I want to know.
I can see that tuna eyes and catfish eyes are different, but it what ways, exactly, are they different and how are they alike? Do tuna and catfish have the same numbers and types of cones? Do you know for sure or are you guessing? How much better can a tuna see into the distance than a catfish? If catfish are practically blind, then what can they see? How much of what we know about tuna vision can we extrapolate to fish with similar eyes? It seems to me that the more I know, the better off I am. Broad is good.
It’s fine if you want to criticize my approach, but I’m having fun learning as much as I can about fish and I was hoping for some pointers to more fun. No panties need get bunched in the process.