How they see
How does a mouse see the world?
Sees ultraviolet in near-darkness
Fine detail all but dissolves for a mouse, which would fail almost any eye chart. Its world is soft-focus and near-monochrome, lit for the night, yet it takes in something we cannot: ultraviolet light. In the wild that can turn the scent-marks of predators and rivals into glowing signposts smeared across the ground.
See through their eyes
Human ≈ 60 cpd (20/10)
How sharp is a mouse's vision?
Its eyes resolve about 0.5 cycles per degree (20/1200), while a human reaches around 60 cpd (20/10). Its field of view spans about 280°.
How does a mouse see a human?
Its eyes resolve about 0.5 cycles per degree against your 60, so a face has to be roughly 120 times closer for it to pick out the detail you do. Your outline and your movement read clearly; your expression does not.
Colour comparison
How each colour shifts when seen through this animal's eyes, using the same colour model as the app. Tones a screen can't emit (such as ultraviolet) are shown as an approximation.
What colours can a mouse see?
Green + ultraviolet dichromacy. Very poor spatial detail but sensitive to UV patterns invisible to us.
Photoreceptors
Dichromat with a UV-sensitive cone, strongly rod-dominated
Cone peak sensitivities
- UV (S)360 nm
- M (green)508 nm
How does a mouse see in the dark?
Nocturnal, rod-dominated retina; excellent in near-darkness.
How does a mouse's vision compare to a human's?
A mouse's acuity, roughly 20/1200, is a tiny fraction of your 20/20. Its retina is another matter: built for the near-darkness where yours founders, with a short-wavelength cone that reaches into the ultraviolet, a band closed to you entirely.
What is special about a mouse's vision?
- Sees ultraviolet
- Extremely low acuity
- Built for night
What the research shows
Jacobs, Neitz & Deegan (1991) reported in Nature that rodents can carry a cone class peaking in the ultraviolet: in mice near 360 nm, alongside a middle-wave cone near 508 nm, with rats showing nearly the same pair at about 359 and 510 nm. Later anatomy made the tidy two-cone picture more complicated. Many mouse cones express both opsins, and their balance changes across the retina: the lower retina, which looks at the sky, leans towards ultraviolet, and the upper retina, which looks at the ground, towards green, as described by Baden et al. (2013). Rods make up roughly 97% of the photoreceptors, and a lens that transmits ultraviolet lets those short wavelengths reach the retina at all.
Acuity was measured behaviourally by Prusky, West & Douglas (2000): the common laboratory strain C57BL/6 reached only about 0.5 cpd, while rats reached about 1 cpd. The page uses the mouse value, 0.5 cpd, roughly 20/1200. Flicker estimates depend even more on method, with behavioural tests giving about 14 Hz while the retina itself responds faster. On screen, two things are out of reach. A phone camera does not record ultraviolet, so any UV cue is derived from visible light as a proxy, and a filter applied evenly across the frame cannot reproduce the sky-versus-ground split built into the mouse's own retina.
Guides: Animals that see ultraviolet · Which animal has the best eyesight? · All guides
Scientific sources
- Jacobs, Neitz & Deegan (1991)
- Jacobs & Williams (2007)
- Prusky, West & Douglas (2000)
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