Bees
Like humans, bees are trichromats; however, their three photoreceptors are sensitive to yellow, blue, and ultraviolet light. Their ability to see ultraviolet light allows them to spot patterns on flower petals that guide them to nectar; they perceive so much of the ultraviolet range that enables them to see more than one color of ultraviolet.
In addition to the ability to see ultraviolet light, bees have compound eyes, which consist of thousands of lenses, unlike humans who have only one lens. Each lens in the bee’s eyes produces one pixel; as a result, they have extremely low-resolution vision that makes everything look blurry.
Birds
Birds are tetrachromats; their four-type con cells enable them to see red, green, blue, and ultraviolet. Hunting birds such as eagles have sharper vision than humans; they can easily spot their prey from great distances away.
Owls have eyes as big as ours with huge pupils that capture lots of light; however, they are nighttime animals, which means that they see clearly at night when the world is dark for us.
Bats
People assume that bats are blind, but this is totally wrong. All bat species can see pretty well, although their vision is not as good as most night-hunting animals. They are sensitive to changing light levels and this is the main cue that they use to sense when it is nighttime.
To avoid predators, find their way home, and hunt their prey, bats depend on echolocation. They broadcast high-pitched sonar signals and listen for the echoes of sound waves bouncing off objects they are looking for, or obstacles in their path. Bats’ brains then process the auditory information within those echoes as visual maps.
Bats tailor their signal to get the information they want; such as targeting prey, locating a predator, or finding their roost. Since bats also have perfectly good vision, what they see can sometimes interfere with what they hear. For example, a captive bat in a darkened room might fly into a window as it sees light coming through pane as an escape route, although echolocation sonar tells it there is an obstacle in the way.
References
http://nautil.us/
http://www.eyes-and-vision.com/
http://www.iflscience.com/
http://www.colormatters.com/
http://phys.org/
http://io9.com/
http://news.discovery.com/
Cover photo by Freepik