From the New York Times on the latest efforts to perfect hunting camoflauge:
At Dr. Neitz’s laboratory, he tests some animals’ vision by training them to press touch screens, but the deer weren’t quite ready for the computer age. He and researchers at the University of Georgia showed them three cards at a time and rewarded them with food pellets when they picked out the right pattern by pushing a button with their noses.
“We can measure in animals anything you can measure in a human being and every bit as accurate,” Dr. Neitz says. “The difference is that a vision test that might take 10 minutes in a human can take six months.” The research revealed that deer vision is a little blurrier than human vision — about 20/40 — and that deer see the world roughly like a human with red-green colorblindness. Their eyes have only two color receptors (unlike the three in the human eye). Fortunately for hunters, they have a hard time seeing blaze orange.
But they’re more sensitive than humans to light at the blue end of the spectrum. And thanks to the eyes on either side of the head, they can see a field of vision covering 270 degrees.
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