SteveZoutdoors

  This information is from the Deer-Forest Blog of Penn State University. Home   The Deer-Forest Blog    The eyes have it! SEPTEMBER 11, 2015 Deer have an arsenal of senses to outwit potential predators. Ears like radar dishes; a nose that can sniff out a needle in a haystack; and eyes that seemingly see the very air we breathe. All working in concert! But today we focus on those big, brown, beautiful eyes. Let’s start with the nuts and bolts. Deer have a much higher density of rods in the retina than cones. Rods are photoreceptors and therefore are more sensitive to light but are not sensitive to color. Cones provide color sensitivity and high resolution vision. Rods are more than one thousand times as sensitive as cones to light. Rod sensitivity is shifted toward shorter wavelengths (green) of the color spectrum peaking sharply in the blue and respond very little to red. Rods are also better motion sensors than cones. A deer’s eye is equipped with a membrane, the tapetum lucidum, whi