Animal vision...

Animal vision...  Our vision is so integral to our perception of the world that it's a bit jolting to realize that most animals see the world much differently than we do.  In some cases, they see fewer colors than we do, and this isn't so hard to imagine.  But some animals see with much greater clarity than we do (for instance, raptors at the center of their visual field), or they see different wavelengths (colors) than we do.  These differences are much harder to wrap our brains around.

This article has several human vs. animal images, like the flower at right which shows (on the left) what a bee sees versus (on the right) what a human sees.  The green is a false color, as the bee is actually perceiving ultraviolet light directly and presumably sees it as a completely new color that we can't see at all.  In the image's simulation that ultraviolet area is painted as green so that we can try to imagine it, and it does help.  One thing that image doesn't show, however, is how the bee's segmented eye affects its perception – and partly that's because we really don't know.

Still, just the idea that animal vision is so different than human vision is kind of weird, isn't it?