> The retina is one of the body’s most energetically expensive tissues.
I never knew, but it explains why when you close to fainting you lose your vision. Or when you are working at high heart rate close to your maximum. It works as a kind of a warning sign, than you are probably shouldn't try it that hard.
> The lack of blood vessels could also offer birds the advantage of better vision.
Now they are ready to reintroduce blood vessels back, but this time behind the retina.
Interesting title. These thoughts are before reading the article, use grains of salt as required.
I believe that birds brains are kind of uniquely advanced too. Lightweight (in terms of mass) structured differently to mammalian brains... I've heard a definition of sight as "a bit of the brain popping out for a look". I wonder if the same brain density tricks bird brains use are used in some parts of their vision system. This is all as my memory serves. Feel free to correct any mistakes in my understanding.
There's some very interesting work happening to understand their calls too. If (my) memory serves, there able to identify particular call types quite well now.
If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!
Fascinating to also think that birds are of course evolved dinosaurs. Raptors of the sky. It would be fascinating to link whats being looked at here with any kind of data that can be pulled from fossil evidence (though there might not be much...). I wonder which unique bird genetic traits were useful or super enhanced dinosaur traits.
...I think the strong but light bone structure was something inherited from the dinosaurs too? Fascinating creatures.
On the face of it, seems sensible that avian evolution has spent many genetic GPU cycles to generate advanced vision needed to fly and hunt from the air.... One wonders which "subroutines" have been reused from dino-days, as mentioned.
It is plausible that the original non-avian theropod dinosaurs which gave rise to avian theropod dinosaurs like modern birds were more vision-oriented predators than mammalian predators.
That would have favored eyes built for sharper vision at the expense of higher metabolic demands.
The different evolutionary track may come from the fact that theropods stood upright on two legs, so they could scan farther across the landscape. Also, they were active during the day. Early mammals, by contrast, were mostly nocturnal, so hearing and smell mattered more than sharp vision.
Interestingly, humans have some of the best vision in the animal kingdom and humans are both upright standing and diurnal, i.e. active in the daytime.
> The retina is one of the body’s most energetically expensive tissues.
I never knew, but it explains why when you close to fainting you lose your vision. Or when you are working at high heart rate close to your maximum. It works as a kind of a warning sign, than you are probably shouldn't try it that hard.
> The lack of blood vessels could also offer birds the advantage of better vision.
Now they are ready to reintroduce blood vessels back, but this time behind the retina.
Interesting title. These thoughts are before reading the article, use grains of salt as required.
I believe that birds brains are kind of uniquely advanced too. Lightweight (in terms of mass) structured differently to mammalian brains... I've heard a definition of sight as "a bit of the brain popping out for a look". I wonder if the same brain density tricks bird brains use are used in some parts of their vision system. This is all as my memory serves. Feel free to correct any mistakes in my understanding.
There's some very interesting work happening to understand their calls too. If (my) memory serves, there able to identify particular call types quite well now.
If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!
Fascinating to also think that birds are of course evolved dinosaurs. Raptors of the sky. It would be fascinating to link whats being looked at here with any kind of data that can be pulled from fossil evidence (though there might not be much...). I wonder which unique bird genetic traits were useful or super enhanced dinosaur traits.
...I think the strong but light bone structure was something inherited from the dinosaurs too? Fascinating creatures.
On the face of it, seems sensible that avian evolution has spent many genetic GPU cycles to generate advanced vision needed to fly and hunt from the air.... One wonders which "subroutines" have been reused from dino-days, as mentioned.
It is plausible that the original non-avian theropod dinosaurs which gave rise to avian theropod dinosaurs like modern birds were more vision-oriented predators than mammalian predators.
That would have favored eyes built for sharper vision at the expense of higher metabolic demands.
The different evolutionary track may come from the fact that theropods stood upright on two legs, so they could scan farther across the landscape. Also, they were active during the day. Early mammals, by contrast, were mostly nocturnal, so hearing and smell mattered more than sharp vision.
Interestingly, humans have some of the best vision in the animal kingdom and humans are both upright standing and diurnal, i.e. active in the daytime.