![]() Thus, eye size may represent an ideal indicator of the visual requirements underlying the evolutionary tradeoffs between visual functions and energy expenditure. For example, organisms with the larger eyes may possess better foraging efficiency due to the improved visual resolution and/or the greater light sensitivity ( Land and Nilsson, 2002 Thomas et al., 2006 Ausprey et al., 2021) yet, they may be imposed by higher energy expenditure simultaneously. ![]() Such a morphological trait can further account for the functional mechanisms of how species adapt to the environmental lights given their physical limitations. Eye size, which positively associates with the amount of photoreceptors in eyes ( Land and Nilsson, 2002), determines visual acuity, sensitivity, and temporal resolution ( Roaf, 1943 Land and Nilsson, 2002). Vision is a crucial sensory system connecting organisms to their environments. Our findings not only shed light on the adaptive significance of the visual system in diversifying the behaviors and the environments exploited in snakes, but also underline the interactive effects of multidimensional evolutionary attributes (e.g., behavior, ecology, physiology and phylogeny) on the evolution of optimal visual performance. Among the traits we examined, we found that terrestrial and/or diurnal snakes tended to exhibit the larger relative eye size, indicating the evolutionary responses of eye size to changes in habitat types and activity patterns, respectively, while no evidence of how foraging strategies and the presence of pits affected snake eye size was found. head width) associated with the ecological (i.e., habitat), behavioral (i.e., diel activity pattern, foraging strategy), and physiological traits (i.e., the presence of pits), respectively, across six snake families from Taiwan. In this study, we comparatively investigated how the relative eye size (i.e., eye diameter vs. They also demonstrate a variety of behavioral and physiological characteristics, such as activity time, feeding patterns, and prey detection. The habitats of snake species are diverse, ranging from fossorial, terrestrial, arboreal, to aquatic. ![]()
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