![were humans pursuit predators or ambush predators were humans pursuit predators or ambush predators](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9yoF6mVvABw/VXyiWG-VLtI/AAAAAAAABHM/KtS38cbYx-4/s1600/FullSizeRender%255B1%255D.jpg)
While prey animals need to be able to see all around them, predators need binocular vision to see how far away their prey is. "Sure enough, when goats, antelope and other grazing prey animals put their head down to eat, their eyes rotated to maintain the pupils’ horizontal alignment with the ground." "To check this out, I spent hours at the Oakland Zoo, often surrounded by school kids on field trips, to observe the different animals," said Banks. In fact, the sideways orientation so important for a grazing animal that when it drops its head, its pupils rotate (in opposite directions!) by up to 70 degrees to stay horizontal, the researchers found. Martin Banks, professor of optometry at Berkeley, and Gordon Love, director of the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation at Durham, say that prey animals have two key visual requirements: spotting and fleeing predators. Circular pupils, found in humans and birds, provide good all-around vision and are linked to animals that chase down their prey. After analyzing the eyes of 214 species of land animals, they discovered that pupil shapes are directly linked to an animal’s ecological niche.įor instance, animals with pupils that are vertically elongated, like domestic cats and geckos, are more likely to be ambush predators – hunters active day and night who use stealth, not strength or speed, to overcome their prey.Īnimals with horizontally elongated pupils, such as goats and sheep, are likely to be plant-eating prey animals, the researchers found. Their research appears in the current issue of Science Advances. Scientists from the Universities of California–Berkeley and Durham in Britain have discovered that eye shape can reveal whether a species is predator or prey. Have you ever wondered why your cat has long slits for pupils? Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.What restoration is possible centuries later?A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process.