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confused flatfish noises
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The same facial expression I make one week into the month when looking at my cheque account.
I think we can therefore safely conclude that the shark is also looking at your cheque account.
hello, yes, this is shark!
Pls respond.
Yes Sharky?
CAN I PLEASE MOVE? I'M SUFFOCATING!
...300 million years, can't sit still, smh...
The perfect predator. Can’t survive out of water. What are sharks even doing??
TBF, most land predators can't even survive in water. The real perfect predators are dolphins. They were in the water, left it, and returned just to show us they still got it.
Obligate ram breathing is kind of mind-blowing. They have to swim to flow water through their gills because their gills have no muscles to flap like most fish have.
Only a few sharks are obligate ram breathers, though. Many species are able to take breaks from swimming.
That's if sight is your primary sense for hunting / evasion, right?
Last time I saw this kind of comment/meme someone pointed out that dragons are usually depicted with eyes on the sides of their head. What hunts them, I wonder
That's like how in dnd lore the tarrasque, basically the biggest, scariest monster, is always depicted with big spikes on its back. Animals evolve spikes like that to ward off predators. That means something at least used to hunt tarrasques
Actually they develop in its juvenile state when they are vulnerable to more mundane predators but are then retained for sexual selection in adulthood.
There is only one tarrasque in existence, resulting in it taking its sexual frustration out on level 20 adventuring parties and parties that keep making fun of the lore- uh, history- of the world they grew up in.
Human.
Adventurers...
Bigger dragons.
Horny donkeys
Are we the baddies?
It turns out it's man.
This is a plot point in one of the Witcher short stories.
...hobbits...
The Hobbits just piss them off, then humans have to deal with it..
It's not the question if the eyes on the side or in the front, it's about the capability to be able to focusing on a stereoscopic vision to be able to calculate the distances to the prey or not. Side eyes increase the field of vision, which can be advantageous for fleeing animals, but does not exclude that predators can also use it to strategically locate themselves better in the environment. But it is true that animals with frontal vision are generally predatory.
Well....
There are lots of reasons to have binocular frontal vision. Redundancy, differing info for optic flow, sensitivity, reducing the frontal blind spot, compensating for retinal blind spots, higher frontal resulution, seeing around things, depth perception...
Most of there are good for predators, but predation isn't the only reason to have them.
They also have to orient themselves in a truely 3D landscape, unlike terrestrial predators who hunt on basically a 2D plane. ~~Birds of prey (with the exception of owls) also don't have front-facing eyes, probably for similar reasons~~* (and they're stereoscopic vision also works a bit different I think with very different points of focus).
*see comments below
Wrong, all birds of prey have front-facing eyes, not only owls
Haha, I'm not a bird person and didn't bother to look it up. Thanks for the correction!
Although they still don't look fully front-facing like e.g. in cats, right?
Well, better as front-faces, the capability to focus on a point in front, since a 3D vision is essential for a predator, to be able to accurately calculate distances. Insects and arthropods often combine side and frontal vision, if they are predators, obtaining a vision in practically 360º, for example dragonflies and also jumping spiders or hunters, these usually have two large eyes in front and 6 smaller side eyes. Chameleons solve this with eyes that can move independently, only focusing on the front before the attack. In small animals a wide field of vision is necessary, even if they are predators, since they themselves appear on the menu of others.
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Turtles are kind of in between with their wedge-shaped heads. They need the awareness to hide from predators, but some of them are also predators themselves or they at least snap at fruits and veggies to eat them.
Here's my tortoise doing his best disappointed-in-you baby yoda:
And here's the yellow belly slider locking target on to some shrimp.
But it sounds like the rules aren't as consistent in the water, judging from other comments. Even something like an alligator snapping turtle's eyes are no further forward than these pics.
Nobody gunna complain Blåhaj has an issue?
Jumping or climbing animals are an exception on the other side.
Is it actually possible for a fish-like animal to have eyes at the front (i.e. an animal with a hydrodynamic shape that spends all its time underwater)?
I feel like that's really difficult for evolution to achieve, especially because the mouth has to go somewhere at the front too. I mean, look at where the lights of a high-speed train are placed and their shape.
Intuitively it feels easier to just put the eyes on the side. Plus it feels like there's a lower risk of damaging them when bumping into something.
Is it actually possible for a fish-like animal to have eyes at the front
Barreleyes get sorta close. They look up but can look forward too.
I don't remember what it's called but I'm pretty sure there is one I saw once and it was kind of terrifying looking.
Is this the guy who got his bike stolen
I see what you did there... and also there.
Sharks see with their jaws, though.
Being a predator is not a property, its a relation. X is a predator of Y... but not of Z, and is a prey of V and not of W.
Axe-u-a-lee...
Arilou Lalee'lay?
Are apes considered predators? I kind of thought they were just neither.
Gorilla are pure herbivores, chimpanzees are predators which mostly eat plants, I don't know about Bonobos, all that's talked about them is their seed life, and homo varies from pure carnivore (in cold places, those with few edible plants) to scavenger to omnivore (especially in the tropics and places with fruit) depending on environment
Homo, of course, has been lying to itself about what food best sustains it, we can't live happily on the excess grain we've been producing for the last 10k years
By far the most dangerous predator on Earth is humans, we eat each other, anything that moves, kill for fun, build machines to do it for us, design what we eat to be easier to kill, and have you dealt with women? We're a scary bunch.
Right, because we had better stamina than predators, and then developed intelligent brains. But are apes?
Met any chimps? And about that stamina thing...
https://afan.ottenheimer.com/articles/myth_of_persistent_hunting
yeah. We're scum. We're just violent++.
Have I...met any Chimps? Uh, no, I guess they go to different bars than I do.
And fine. Sorry, I'm not a scientist, as evidenced by my question--which still hasn't come close to being answered.
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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