The white spots you see behind the tiger’s ears. They’re called ocelli, and they’re part of this predator’s silent strategy. When the tiger lowers its head to drink water or rest, the ocelli are exposed. The effect is unsettling: it looks like a pair of eyes observing everything around it.
by lolonator3
28 Comments
I’m going to ask the obvious question. Who the fuck is gonna attack a tiger? Which animal are those “eyes” keeping back?
Yeah. It looks like an absolute monster of a tiger’s head that way.
If you unfocus your eyes you can kinda see it. Very scary, like a giant dragon head
never seen it like that, KITTY 😀
That’s cool, I hadn’t seen that before. How on earth does that even evolve? Like how many predators would ancestor tigers have to successfully put off attacking them with their fake eyes while drinking, for that to be selected as an evolutionary advantage?!
Bro won a Legendary loot box skin, irl.
That totally looks like the Predator.
A natureza é foda demais!
Oh damn, it’s working on my monkey brain.
Just squint your eyes and you’ll see the effect better!
The back picture it’s when it need to attract pandas?
Yeah this might be true yet I think you’re really reaching out there.
What’s even more amazing is the tiger doesn’t know it has this.
This is why I have a big butterfly tramp stamp
Did you ask the zebras and crocodiles to come to this conclusion?
If you look to the part down right with your eyes half-opened, it looks like a feline/canine’s face, with the white parts in the tiger’s face resembling the whiskers. It looks terrifying like this.
Imagine the number of tigers that got mauled to death by crocodiles for them to evolve a face on the top of their head!
https://preview.redd.it/vo9b0kpq93sf1.jpeg?width=194&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=09633f0f806aa7a3b3c86a2628d24c35a2e0b391
So the thing about tigers is that they look orange to us because we’re trichromats, we have red, green and blue colour receptors.
Most other mammals though are dichromats. They have two colour receptors (green and blue), and so a tiger to them will look green. In other words, tigers are extremely well camouflaged and so while they do have spots on the back of their ears I have always found it highly unlikely that the white spots on the back of a tiger’s ears are true false eyes.
Evolution isn’t perfect, just good enough. You already have a perfectly camouflaged ambush predator in the tiger, why would it need false eyes on its ears? Random mutations that don’t impact reproduction get carried over all the time, and I’m more inclined to think that the white spots on a tiger’s ears are just one of those things.
Like yes, if you take a photo of a tiger in the EXACT pose that OP has presented and then draw a face all over the tiger that includes those white spots, you’ll get what OP is describing. In reality though, for our dichromatic mammal friends, if they see a tiger at all they’d be looking at a green animal against a backdrop of green.
How did they even evolve these features ?
Reminded me of Yunjiro’s back
https://preview.redd.it/2cs6ey8yb3sf1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=7d0adc1463133e087a20dd5f83f8cf8d447e9189
Built over millions of years for death
It looks like a dragon in one pose and a cute floofy ball of fun in the other.
Probably cause of crocodiles.
it’s so funny how the ear spots look scary and intimidating and the actual eyes are just, like, cat.
God why did I spawn as a human instead of this beauty of a specimen
I was just about to attack that fucker..
You can see my big head when I do this but I’m going to eat you with the little mouth. ( little tiger head coming out of the big tiger head.)