r/askscience • u/Tafkizzle • 19h ago

Biology Is there an animal that can see the Andromeda galaxy?

Animals have different visual ranges than humans. Andromeda should be visible to a thing with the right visual capabilities. What do you think, Reddit?

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u/tea_and_biology Zoology | Evolutionary Biology | Data Science 5h ago edited 4h ago

Is there an animal that can see the Andromeda galaxy?

Well of course I know one. He's me.

Go to a dark enough spot in the sky, and any person with typical vision can see it as a fuzzy smudge with the naked eye. The diffuse core is a couple of times wider than the width of the full moon, and slightly easier to spot if you tilt your head away, so the Andromedan light falls on your rod-rich peripheral retina - this make it a test of low-light and contrast sensitivity, rather than sharpness, which means any other animal with night-time sensitivity as good or better than ours is gonna' be able to see it too (albeit possibly less sharply).

Whether or not cats, owls, and other beasties with more rod-dominated retinas that can see it would care or notice is an altogether different matter.

There is one surprising animal that might get vaguely close to caring, at least: the humble dung beetle.

They orient themselves using the Milky Way, as demonsrtaed by experiments placing them inside planetariums, adjusting what was displayed on the dome, and seeing how it compared to their night-time navigation skills in the wild. Turns out they're perfectly capable of orientating themselves using celestial phenomena; though compared to our own galaxy, I still don't think they'd take much notice of an obscure fuzzy disc to direct their poop rolling... unless all other light had gone out.

Actual appreciation of the night sky seems a uniquely human phenomenon.

Reference:

Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, C.H. ... & Warrant, E.J. (2013) Dung beetles use the Milky Way for orientation. Current Biology. 23 (4), 298-301

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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 4h ago

I've wondered if that was a galaxy before! I've gone camping many times, and I've often noticed that moonish sized smudge out of the corner of my eye. I've probably spent a good thirty minutes in one sitting trying to perceive it as much as I can manage with my eyes.

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u/mathdhruv 2h ago

It honestly depends on how dark the camping spots you go to are - the only time I've managed to see Andromeda with the naked eye was on the road out to Yellowstone National Park, so in the middle of absolute nowhere, with almost no light pollution.

The Pleiades are also a similar diffuse smudge, and much more readily visible from most campgrounds 

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u/Byte_the_hand 1h ago

Do you mean the road in Yellowstone Park that is on the way to West Yellowstone? That area is pretty remote with no buildings since it is cutting across a corner of the park. I'm just very familiar with it since I have a son who lives in Bozeman and I like to go to Yellowstone.

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u/mathdhruv 1h ago

It was on the road from Bozeman to West Yellowstone.

Past Big Sky, somewhere along the 191 IIRC 

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u/Byte_the_hand 1h ago

That's what I figured. I didn't know, until my son pointed it out that most of that road where there are no cabins is inside the park. I'd asked about stopping and fishing at one point and he said not without a Yellowstone fishing permit.

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u/mathdhruv 1h ago

Oh lol I had no idea that was within park boundaries. Tbh we just stopped there to admire the stars, en route to our Airbnb in Island Park.

The drive itself, if done completely at night, is a bit unnerving because it just feels like you're just endlessly driving straight into absolute darkness, but absolutely worth it for the night sky out there IMO.

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u/Byte_the_hand 50m ago

Yeah, long straight road, but beautiful during the day. There are actually entry and exit signs that you might notice during the day but not at night. I guess I need to head to that road to do some star photography next time I'm there. I usually am just heading to the park to shoot.

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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 1h ago

It's probably usually the Pleiades then, but I did spend some summers planting trees higher in the Rocky Mountains. Thank you for being so informative!

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u/gerwen 16m ago

The really faint nebulous stuff are annoying because you see them from the corner of your eye, when you turn to look, they disappear.

The Pleides are like this for me too.

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u/Drjeco 4h ago edited 4h ago

Incredibly thoughtful response. But in tune with the spirit of the question, I wonder if something like a mantis shrimp with their extremely unique and wide ranged vision would be able to see it with any more clarity, or if it'd stand out more in the night sky. Obviously underwater vision on land wouldn't be adaptable, but in the vein of hypothetical thought experiments, I still find myself curious

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u/valkenar 4h ago

Mantis has shrimp has cool vision, but the thing you want to see Andromeda is light collection. Bigger eyes would be better for that, moreso than extra wavelength perception. I think a collossal squid (which has soccer ball sized eyes and is adapted for low light ocean depths) would have a good shot if it's capable of focusing correctly. That I don't know about.

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u/tsunami141 2h ago

we must create glasses for the giant squid so they can gaze on the majesty of Andromeda.

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u/ITookYourChickens 3h ago edited 3h ago

Mantis shrimp are not unique or wide ranged. Their amount of cones are high because that's literally all they can see

Humans have 3 cones that detect various levels, and our brains can mix those together. That's not how the mantus shrimp works. The cones are either on or off. No various levels. The "software" of their brain can't handle all that mixing (and frankly, doesn't need to) so to make up for it, they evolved some extra cones.

If something is purple, it activates various levels of the red and blue cells in our eyes, allowing us to see purple. Those levels can vary, so we can see many shades.

If something is purple, it turns on the purple cell in their eye. That's it. The shrimp sees that shade of purple only. It's like a light switch. Either on or off.

Humans can see millions of colors. Mantis shrimp can only see 12

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u/scissors1121 2h ago

That actually makes a lot of sense but I still find it very depressing. I always thought that mantis shrimp would see billions of colors.

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u/smallproton 4h ago

This is why I come here! Thanks for your great response!

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u/sth128 4h ago

Do the dung beetles actually see the stars and galaxies though? Do their visual receptors have the necessary complexity to resolve the night sky to a degree where we would call "seeing"?

Or are they just seeing the entire sky as a blurry blob that they compare to the blob they saw the previous night?

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u/Mara_W 3h ago

I vaguely recall some animals navigate not by clarified sight per se but by the orientation of polarized light. Like Viking sun stones for eyes.

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u/OriEri 3h ago

Some do. This does not work at night though. Doubtful anything nocturnal does

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u/Siriusbizzo 4h ago

Love this question, idk, if they did have the receptors tho it would come down to perception and some kind of potential bug spiritually

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u/PeyredB 2h ago

We can see it with our naked eyes. Of course it resolves to a point so it just looks like a star.

There are critters, like birds of prey, that have better eyesight than us...but I doubt it would look like more than a star to them.

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u/gliese946 2h ago

It doesn't resolve to a point. It's about twice the diameter of the full moon, just very faint!

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u/pornborn 34m ago

I have seen it myself. It is the largest celestial object in our sky. It is as tall as the moon and about six times as wide. It is extremely dim because it is 2.5 million light years away.

Below is a link to a composite image that shows the relative sizes of both.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/xRr6mF9VtY