The eye is such an incredibly important part of life. It allows you to perceive the world around you in such a distinctive way, showing you color, life and emotion. Even though it is such a small and delicate part of the anatomy, it has become ingrained in world culture; you can find the eye everywhere from the literature and poetry of the greatest writers in history to the idiomatic expressions of everyday life.
Unfortunately unless your eyes are bothering you, most people tend not to dwell on them… which is a shame. The eye is a strange and wondrous part of across all biology that should be admired and respected. Here are a number of both common and strange factoids about human and non-human eyes to give you a little bit of extra insight – no pun intended – into one of the most fascinating and versatile parts of the body.
The creepy crawly things of the world all have special eyes – spiders have an astounding eight eyes and many bugs have compound eyes made of multiple photoreceptors. What you may not know is that the bee has a curiously odd number of eyes, five in all.
There are so many colors in the world, but how many can you actually see? The average human eye can see about ten million different colors.
Most eyes come in proportion to the size of the animal. To give you an idea of how big the giant squid is, the diameter of the cephalopod’s eye is about the same as that of a volleyball.
There are many ways that women physically differ from men and that often includes the eyes. There are some women who possess a genetic mutation that allows them to see millions of more colors than the average human eye.