On this the sixth day of pizza, Miss I would like to introduce you to the manual or palaces Cat.

It's a wildcat that is roughly the same size as cameo, my cat.

But while it may look similar, they are not spread across Tibet, China, Pakistan, India, Mongolia Ran These solitary, grumpy, temperamental cats eke out a living on small rodents and birds, keeping warm with the longest hair of any cat hunting not through speed but through stealth, with fertility windows as short as one day per year.

But the thing that makes them so cute is what I want to talk about today, their eyes, and you may be noticing that this cute is a little less cute than the other manuals I've showed you so far.

That's because I Photoshopped house had eyes onto it.

Here's the real boy.

There's something about those eyes we've gotten used to the eyes of our cats.

But they are a little bizarre these vertically slated pupils or complicated mysteries that have evolved separately not just in cats but in Fox's alligators, snakes, even some birds and sharks.

And not all cats have these vertical pupils big cats don't have them, but most small cats do in the European links, which is of moderate size, actually has intermediate pupils.

Animals that have vertical people tend to have a few things in common.

They're all hunters.

They all deal with low light conditions, and they're all ambush predators.

The palaces cat feels all those conditions.

They're low light ambush predators.

So how did they end up with these adorable, relatable eyes?

I don't know, and neither does anyone.

But I found this whole thing fascinating, so let's walk through it.

There are three theories as to how vertical pupils help ambush predators.

First, vertical people's rely on a curtain of stranded muscles to contract, while circular people's rely on a sphincter.

Yes, you have sphincters in your eyes, and that more complex musculature allows them to contract and expand Maur.

But as the Loris has shown us, this is not a hard and fast rule.

Second, we have distance judgment, which is, as you might expect, pretty important for an ambush predator.

And there are three ways animals use site to tell how far away something is.

The first is Parallax, where objects farther away appear to move more slowly than objects close up.

The second is binocular steri op sys, which is the fancy way of saying normal depth perception when two eyes feed the brain slightly different images that are interpreted into a three dimensional image but last and least noticed is blur.

When you look at something, especially something fairly close up, things closer to you and farther away from you from that point appear blur.

And when you're close to the ground, like a small cat or snake, this matters more because you're closer to your prey, and thus the depth of field is shallower.

Vertical pupils seem to conserve horizontal blur, which animals uses a distance Judging technique without sacrificing the vertical contrast necessary for steri ops is now.

The third theory is a little harder to wrap your head around cause it involves optics.

Basically, if you want to focus on something, close up with a really wide aperture like if your pupils are super dilated cause it's dark, the ability of a lens to focus kind of breaks down different wavelengths of light, so different colors passed through the lens medium at different angles, so the image will never be sharp.

to get that sharp image.

Some animals, including cats, have actually evolved toe have lenses with focal Grady INTs middle optimized for green wavelengths and then red.

And then blue is works.

But if you have a circular pupil than when you contract, the area of the lens optimized for blue gets completely blocked.

A vertical pupil, on the other hand, preserves all of the color optimization.

Now, as is often the case when it comes to how animals perceive the world, we're not 100% on any of these things.

But we do know that with its lifestyle of vertical, pupil would be advantageous to palaces Cat.

So they're adorable.

Pupils, it turns out, are a mystery on adorable mystery.

They shouldn't be there, but they are so love it.

The manual or palaces Cat is the bizarre beast of this month, and I have great news.

That bizarre beep in club is opening back up just until the end of pizza miss.

So if you want, this palace is cap in, which is very good, you conjoined right now.

Also, get another pen every month with a different bizarre beast and information about it on the card, and they're more bizarre beast on their way.

Pizza miss also continues.