You Thought Your Eyes Were Big! Check Out These Animals!

I recently read that the bigger your eyes are, the more likely you are to be looked at with compassion. This particular author noted studies that found that babies have extremely large eyes in proportion to their growing head size to help their caretakers respond better to their needs empathetically.

But, as I was sitting outside during one of this summer’s first nice weather weekends, I noticed something else with big eyes. A dragonfly!

Have you ever seen how large the eyes are on one of these little insects? The dragonfly’s eyes cover almost his entire head so he looks like he has a helmet on. Dragonflies have incredible aerial vision and an almost 360 view because of how their eyes wrap around their little heads. Researchers have found that their eyes have 30,000 visual units and each contains a lens. In other words — these guys can detect colors, light, and movement in a way that’s incomparable to how human eyes work.

Another animal with disproportionately sized eyes caught my attention during a movie my children were watching called Madagascar. If you’ve seen it, you may remember one of the main characters, a lemur named King Julian. Well, Julian had a little friend that had huge eyes who he frequently used these big peepers for, what we would consider, the puppy dog, pouty look.

This animal is actually called a tarsier. It’s about the size of a squirrel but its eyes allow it to do some incredible things. The tarsier is a predator primate, so it catches lizards, bugs, and even birds as its prey. The tarsier’s eyes are the biggest of any mammal in relation to his head and body size. His only disadvantage is that his eyes are stuck straight in his sockets. You and I, of course, can turn our eyes to see left and right. This animal makes up for that lack of mobility with a neck that can do a 180-degree pivot quickly to see where he needs to see.

If our eyes were as big as a tarsier’s eyes– they would be like grapefruits on our head. Eyes that big would get noticed-no make up necessary.

Next time you are at a zoo or even watching a show with animals, you may also want to take note of how different species were designed with different eye sizes. Nature is amazing!