Reading and writing fill in the blanks
Fast-moving animals – especially small ones, creatures that fly and top ocean predators – time more quickly than others. That is, they can process more frames per second than slow-moving animals lower in the food chain, such as starfish, according to a comparison of more than 100 species. “We already know that different animals perceive time differently from us,” says Kevin Healy at the University of Galway in Ireland, who the results at a meeting of the British Ecological Society on 20 December. But he wanted to find out, “If you’re a predator, do you have faster eyes than if you’re an herbivore?” He and his colleagues began by reviewing previously published research on the flicker fusion test, a common measure of the rate at which animals perceive the of time. During the test, researchers increase the frequency of a flashing light until an animal sees it as a continuous glow, indicated by the reaction of light receptors in the animal’s retina.