Animal sensory systems exhibit high degree of variation that is subtly tuned to the perceptual challenges posed by the conduct of specific tasks, especially foraging. Birds of prey have always fascinated mankind and have been under interest of researchers for their spectacular visual performance and some of the largest eyes on land. The fact that invasive investigations on large, charismatic and often protected raptors have always been uncommon, and are even less usual today, is one of the reasons for the scarce knowledge on the visual system of birds of prey.
However, a comparison between diurnal and nocturnal raptors has revealed some of the adaptations allowing for the extraordinary performance of visually guided behaviours and has illustrated evolutionary functional divergence of morphologically similar large eyes of these birds - high visual acuity in diurnal and high absolute sensitivity in nocturnal species. Still, studies on raptor vision are rare and there are large knowledge gaps remaining, some of which could be filled by performing non-invasive behavioural experiments.
The proposed PhD project will investigate parameters of spatial and temporal vision of diurnal and nocturnal raptors using psychophysical methods. The project is planned in collaboration with the Lithuanian Association of Birds of Prey.