Predatory Vision

To be a predator is to be a carnivore (or at least an omnivore)—predators eat meat. To eat, predators need to catch their dinner first. It’s hard to catch things you can’t see very well, so most predators have excellent vision. But not only do predators have great distance vision, they also have a good stereoscopic vision—they see in depth. A lion jumping on an antelope has to be able to judge the distance and speed of its moving target. To achieve three dimensional vision, the eyes have to be positioned in the front of the head so that the field of view for each eye overlaps, creating a view of the same object from two separate positions. By analyzing how much shift there is in position of an object from the point of view of each eye, the brain can determine how far away that object is located in space—closer objects shift more than objects far away.