Current Event; The Bigger the Eyes, the Faster the Beast, Study Finds

        Everyone know that cats, like cheetahs and lions, are one of the fastest animals on Earth. However, no one really wondered why. Study's show that their eyes are what helps with their speed, mainly because it helps with the detail vision, and the vision in dim light.
     With this in mind, studies show that animals with larger eyes allow them to run faster. Because animals need better vision in order to run, larger eyes benefit acuity and sensitivity, allowing them to run faster.
     So if you look closely into fast animals, such as horses, they have large eyes, so it gives them the better vision to avoid collision into other objects when moving quickly.
     Scientists then wanted to figure out what influences the eye size. So they collected measurements of eye size, body size, and speed in running from fifty animals. They then found that eighty-nine percent of the animal's eye size variation was due to the body mass and their maximum running speed. However, body size always influences eye size. So "an elephant is always going to have bigger eyes than a mouse." Then, the researchers adjusted for body size and then found that when looking at maximum running speed in isolation, or when you keep the body mass constant, speed is still greatly related to the eye size. Therefore, speed in animals depend on their eye size.
     However, this theory and observation does not apply to humans. So "at least in the case of humans, it's safe to conclude that fast running was not the selective factor that led to the evolution our large eyes."
     I personally never thought about something like this. I knew that certain animals were faster than others, but I never tried to relate it to eye size. This information is beneficial to me, because now I understand why certain animals have certain characteristics. This information can also benefit scientists in the future, mainly because if we were to discover a different animal, or learn more about different species of animals, knowing this will help, even if it's a small detail.


Sources:
http://www.livescience.com/20062-eye-size-running-speed.html
http://www.rachelinafrica.com/
http://animalszooguru.blogspot.com/2009/04/beautiful-white-horses-wallpapers.html