What Can Animals See That We Can’t

Your eyes detect less than 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. Everything else is invisible to you, but not to the rest of the animal kingdom. In this video, we explore the hidden visual worlds of animals and what they reveal about the limits of human perception: Reindeer that see ultraviolet light and treat power lines as blinding arcs of lightning Saharan silver ants that navigate using polarized light patterns in the sky Rattlesnakes that see the heat of their prey in total darkness Hummingbirds and other tetrachromats that perceive colors humans can’t imagine Cuttlefish that match colors they can’t technically see The mantis shrimp, with 16 types of photoreceptors and the ability to detect circular polarized light We also look at why humans ended up with only three color receptors, from the nocturnal bottleneck of our mammal ancestors to the lucky gene duplication that gave primates a third cone. Jakob von Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt suggests that every creature lives inside its own sensory bubble. Ours is just one of many. If you enjoyed this video, like, subscribe, and share it with someone curious about how the world really looks.