Do lions have color vision?
Yes they do, but it is not as good as ours, as their eyes are much better adapted for night vision. Mammal eyes “see” light in two different ways. Special cells in the eye called cones regulate color vision, and cells called rods determine black/white vision. Our eyes maximize the number of cones, so we have good color vision – we can distinguish scores of shades from yellow through orange to red. This is important to us because we are diurnal (day-active). But at night, all colors fade from our eyes, we can only see in black and white –and we don’t have very good night vision. Lions are nocturnal (night-active), and because there is only so much room in the eye for color and black/white cells, they emphasize the latter. In addition, lion pupils (the dark part of the eye) can enlarge to a much greater extent than ours. Look at any picture of a lion taken during the day – the pupil is tiny. At night, the pupil is huge, and can admit a great deal more light than our pupils. Finally, lion
