I own horses and have understood that their eyes are "upside down" in that they can see the horizon very very clearly but use their whiskers and sense of smell to identify the grass they cannot see but are eating 16 hours a day with their heads down. As PREY animals that makes sense and I'm familiar with that precise distance vision as mu horses see stuff I cannot identity immediately. When my horses head goes up and his ears are focused into the distance, I pay close attention! Their eyes don't look like ours or reptiles either. We are predators as a species, they are prey as a species. It's really amazing to have develop a bond of trust and friendship with these polar opposites. Maybe a deeper dig would be in order? This is a topic worthy of more specific and amazing detail. ❤
Along with bad depth perception! Horses have trouble seeing how deep something is. It's why crossing simple puddles or holes can scare them so much, as those things can look more like bottomless pits to a horse. And to a prey animal that relies so much on their legs, they can't afford to hurt or break one
@@user-yq2rz4ls2z I used to ride at a ranch that had a family of jackrabbits that hung out around the arena, and the horse could sense the rabbits hiding in the bushes. Their sense of smell is also helpful for figuring out what’s going on.
@@user-yq2rz4ls2z i agree but mine also notices things that i would consider to be purely visual. for example noticing that a side of the dressage court got blown onto it's side even though we're five hundred feet away (probably, i'm bad at estimating distance)
These horse clips are hillarious. I never knew horses could be as entertaining as cats and dogs. Now I can go to sleep knowing that I've learned something today.
I want to make a follow-up video to this diving into their specific eye anatomy more, and I'll see if I can create a horse vision simulation for that too!
Once my brother in law saved up his Marlboro points and got a telescope. We were on my dad's cattle ranch. He asked me to help him setup his telescope so later that evening he and my sister could look through it. I said where should I point it he said wherever you want. I pointed it way over the pasture towards the neighbors woods. They were 3 to 5 miles down the road. I looked through it and jumped back there was an eyeball filling the whole view. He looked through it and asked how I did that. He thought I was pranking him and I thought he was pranking me. He looked on the front lense and was baffled how I did it. He looked again and it blinked and he jumped back. It turns out the neighbors had horses standing in the woods and we setup the telescope zoomed in perfectly on one of there eyes. We couldn't believe it the odds of setting up a telescope perfectly focused on a horse eye miles away. This video just reminded me of it.
Horses also dont have great binocular vision and as a result poor depth perception, which is why they get freaked out by bodies of water if they can't see the bottom.
I was all set to watch this when I got distracted in the first 10 seconds by a very familiar set of ears! Sure enough, Elisa Wallace' Riot Gear was in the description! He's sorely missed, Rest in Peace, Rye Bread!
@@joycee5493joyce Your Comment is Ironically NOT Grammatically Correct!😂that would be “pronounce it wrongly”/ incorrectly! And THAT Drives me Crazy!🙈
Horse eyes, like most mammal eyes also can rotate in the skull to keep the horizon level in the background. It's just very noticeable in horses because their eyes can be from 5-6ft up to less than 1ft from the ground, depending on whether the horse is looking around or grazing.
I believe that the horses retina is "ramp like" such that it can focus for close up and for in the distance. This is what is happening when they suddenly jerk their head up. What about a "look" at the octopus eye?
The horizontal slit becomes almost vertical when the horse grazes. So, the animal, even with the head lowered to the ground, distinguishes better the vertical silhouettes of the predators moving horizontally.
@CG-rr6yx No, their eyes rotate when their head's down to graze. Many other herbivores' eyes do the same. There's a study published in Science Advances about pupil shapes that goes into it, but YT doesn't like me posting direct links
It's not connected to the size of the eyeballs! The types of rods and cones (light-detecting cells) on an animals retinas determine what range of wavelengths they're sensitive to
Scientists can tell how different animals see by either studying the structure of their eyes (looking for the number and layout of their rods and cones), and by doing tests like electroretinography where they sense their brain activity as they look at different visual stimuli
Their vision is pretty similar, but donkeys actually have a wider field of view than horses! Donkeys can see their hind feet when they're looking forward
Elephant eyes are actually smaller than horse eyes even though elephants are bigger animals! Elephant eyes are about 1.5 inches in diameter on average while horse eyes are about 2 inches in diameter on average
Horses may not see details well at a distance but it's like jurassic parks' Trex, they can spot movement in the distance really well. I would argue the great night vision part. Their dark vision seems pretty similar to our own.
40 min to adjust to sudden changes in brightness? So it would be nice if you could gradually change the light level in a barn when it's morning or night. :)
That 40 min change really just matters when taking them in and out of the barn! Because when it's day time it could be much less bright inside the barn
That small, triangular blind spot resulting from their nose and wide-set eyes is what I'm referring to here! It extends about 3-4 feet in front of them
@Vision-Vibes oh man the story is absolutely horrendous. Mother Horseeyes is some crazy story that popped up on reddit over a bunch of different subs, all telling a wild story of, I don't even know how to describe it. It's almsot like some SCP stuff but on a whole different level. Has ties with the US government and CIA tests like MK Ultra, but also weird shit like flesh tunnels that go to, somewhere. If you're at all interested, Fredrick Knudsen made a great "Down the rabbit hole" video about it. It's definitely an interesting video about a quite wild story. Edit: he also has a full reading of it.
@@Vision-Vibes I had to check twice. I would have never guessed you have "only" 1500 subs with this good quality! (still a big number if you think about it)
You put in some embarrassing video clips. If I were a horse I would be ashamed right now. I'm from Switzerland and we have mandatory military service. I chose a unit where we use horses to transport materials through the mountains where the cars don't go. I was fascinated by the eye of the horse. Perhaps you can answer my question. What are those weird things standing up in the horse eye. If I remember corerctly, it can even go across the pupil. And what purpose does it serve?
Those structures are known as "corpora nigra", which translates from the latin to "black bodies", and they perform a simlar function to your eyebrows - namely, reducing glare - but inside the eyeball, rather than external.
Our brains and those of most other animals are similarly split too, with our left eye being connected to our brain's right hemisphere and the right eye connected to the left hemisphere
What kind of BADDIE ANIMAL would prey on a very heavy, almost amazing pereferal vision, great speed, best friends with the most dangerous animal on Earth (humans), strong legs for kicking BADDIE? WHAT KIND OF BADDIE WOULD PREY ON A HORSE?
Very cool! It would be super useful if there was a series on different species of fish because it would help those of us who make hooks to design them to better target specific species.
I bear them no ill will but I don't trust them after the Welsh Mountain Pony my sister had when we were kids. They are permanently hysterical and I don't mean funny.
Scientists can tell how different animals see by either studying the structure of their eyes (looking for the number and layout of their rods and cones), and by doing tests like electroretinography where they sense their brain activity as they look at different visual stimuli
What do you mean, what's with it? It's a perfectly normal horse eye, seen close up. The "ruffles" you're seeing (which I'd bet is what you're thinking is weird) are known to horse anatomists as "corpora nigra", which translates from the latin to "black bodies", and they perform a similar (though not quite identical) shading function as your eyebrows (not the lashes) and/or the black streaks a football player smears under his eyes, only they're inside the eyeball.
True, for these videos I have to decide how in depth to go because a lot of people just want some quick highlights, but some people like you want a deeper dive. I'm planning a follow-up to this one going into the specific anatomy of horse eyes in more detail
Cones and Rods are different. Horses have 2 types of cone, humans have three: Red, Green and Blue. Rods are purely detail in black and white and don't detect color.
I feel that attributing any part of the natural world to any being’s design takes away from the true beauty and wonder of what nature truly is: an extremely fascinating set of intertwined systems emerging from the countless interactions of smaller systems. Part of what makes nature so amazing to me is that it is distinctly unplanned; what we see is the result of a handful of basic types of interactions occurring on an extremely large scale. It’s cooler in some ways than if someone made it that way, and no less impressive.
@@EMLtheViewer it’s not unplanned at all. It’s all preprogrammed in their DNA. How do you think we go from a banana to humans, in terms of the language of DNA?
Attributing impossible assumptions and accidents to an ALMIGHTY CREATOR’s super-intelligent design takes away from the complexity and completion of nature and everything in it. Every part of it is irreducibly complex.
@@KevinAbyss "Pupil dilation is controlled by the iris dilator muscle. The dilator muscle consists of fibers that are oriented radially, and connect the exterior of the iris with the interior. When the dilator muscle contracts, it pulls the interior of the iris outward, thus increasing the size of the pupil." Mathôt S. Pupillometry: Psychology, Physiology, and Function. J Cogn. 2018 Feb 21;1(1):16. doi: 10.5334/joc.18. PMID: 31517190; PMCID: PMC6634360.