How they see
How does a tiger see the world?
Orange coat that looks green to its prey
The tiger's blazing orange coat is one of nature's great optical tricks, and the trick is aimed at its prey, not at us. Deer, like the tiger itself, are red-blind, so to their eyes that vivid orange reads as a dull green that melts into the forest. The most conspicuous cat in the jungle is, to the animals it hunts, very nearly invisible.
See through their eyes
Human ≈ 60 cpd (20/10)
How sharp is a tiger's vision?
Its eyes resolve about 7 cycles per degree (20/86 (est.)), while a human reaches around 60 cpd (20/10). Its field of view spans about 200°.
How does a tiger see a human?
Its eyes resolve about 7 cycles per degree against your 60, so a face has to be roughly 9 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 tiger see?
Blue–yellow dichromacy. To a deer (also red-blind), a tiger’s orange looks greenish — camouflage in plain sight.
Photoreceptors
Dichromat (2 cone types), rod-rich with tapetum
Cone peak sensitivities
- S (blue)450 nm
- L (green)550 nm
How does a tiger see in the dark?
About six times better than humans in dim light.
How does a tiger's vision compare to a human's?
A tiger sees around 20/86 to your 20/20 and two colours to your three. In dim light it sees roughly six times better than you, which makes dawn, dusk and night its hunting hours.
What is special about a tiger's vision?
- Orange coat is camouflage to red-blind prey
- Excellent night vision
- Strong motion sense
What the research shows
Nobody has measured a tiger's cones directly. No species-specific microspectrophotometry exists, so its colour vision is inferred from the domestic cat and other felids: a short-wave cone near 450 nm and a long-wave cone near 555 nm, shown on this page as 550 nm. Jacobs (1993), surveying colour vision across mammals, supports treating cats as dichromats, although Loop et al. (1979) reported a weak third mechanism in the cat, so even the reference species is not entirely settled. The tiger inherits that uncertainty along with the values.
Acuity has not been measured in tigers either. Behavioural studies of domestic cats mostly fall between about 3 and 9 cpd, as Clark & Clark (2013) summarise, and the 7 cpd used here is an estimate placed within that range rather than a tiger measurement. The sixfold advantage in dim light is a widely repeated figure rather than a measured threshold, and the field of about 200 degrees, with a large frontal overlap, is estimated too. The camouflage effect of the orange coat follows from the prey's own red-blind cones; the sources here do not include a test of what a deer actually notices. A screen can show the collapse of orange towards green-grey reasonably well, since dichromacy is the most defensible kind of colour simulation, but it cannot reproduce the dim light in which a tiger actually hunts.
Guides: Are animals colour blind? · Which animal has the best eyesight? · All guides
Scientific sources
- Jacobs (1993)
- Fennell et al. (2019)
Download Animal Vision
Point your camera at anything and watch the world transform into this animal’s vision in real time.
