WANT TO SEE LIKE ME?

What does a bee see as it buzzes over a flower? What does a hungry bird see as it swoops toward a butterfly? People haven’t been able to see what animals see—until now. 

Daniel Hanley and a team of scientists built a special camera that lets humans view the world as animals do. Hanley is a scientist who studies how animals sense, or take in, information about their environment. 

An animal’s vision affects everything in its life, including how it eats, stays safe, and finds a mate. That’s why Hanley wanted to find out what the world looks like to an animal. It turns out that “animals see very differently from each other,” he says.

All animals with eyes—including humans—see thanks to photoreceptors. These tiny structures in the eye capture different types of light from the environment. Then the photoreceptors turn that light into signals that are sent to the brain. Human eyes have three kinds of color-sensing structures: one for red light, one for blue, and one for green. Our brains combine these colors into many different shades. Bees also have three photoreceptors like humans, but there’s a difference. They sense blue and green light, but they also sense ultraviolet (UV) light. This is a type of light humans can’t see. UV light makes bees see flowers as if they are glowing. Seeing this glow shows the insects that there’s nectar in the flower to eat.

But some animals have more photoreceptors than humans. Birds have four types. They see all the colors humans can. But they also sense UV light. This helps birds spot insects that are hidden from some animals, including humans. 

Scientists learned how different animals see by studying the structure of their eyes. But as a curious scientist, Hanley wanted to get an even better idea of how animals see the world. He and his team combined two video cameras. One camera sees visible light. The other detects UV light. A computer inside the camera combines the videos. It then changes the images into the colors animals see and removes the ones they can’t. This way, scientists can use the camera to view nature how different animals do.

Seeing the world through the eyes of animals could help scientists better understand the relationships between wildlife and their environment. “Everything we know about animal behavior has been based on how we see the world ourselves,” says Hanley. “Now we’re getting a whole new view.”