Project Information


Color Blindness in Dogs

School Name: Sherwood Heights School Team Size: 1 or 2
Grade Category: 7-9
ProjectType: Experimental
Subject Area: Biology
Language: English
Team Captain First Name: Jordan
Team Captain Last Name: Kent
Awards Obtained :Honourable Mention
Special Skills used: HTML
Project Title: To See or not To See
Project Abstract: The purpose of my experiment is to find out if my Jack-Russell dog named Toby is color blind or not.In order to prove my hypothesis correct my dog would have to eat out of a different bowl every time.For my experiment I used a Jack-Russell dog named Toby, a Digital Camera, 1 red bowl,1 yellow bowl,1 blue bowl, and 1 green bowl.
It is not true that dogs are completely colorblind. While dogs do not have the same color vision as humans, they are able to tell yellow from blue. Like a human with red-green colorblindness, they are unable to tell the difference between red and green. The reason for this limited range, in both the colorblind human and the dog, is that there are only two kinds of colour receptors in the retinas of their eyes. While most humans have three kinds of colour cells, with three different receptor molecules sensitive to blue, greenish-yellow , and red, dogs only have receptors for yellow and greenish-blue. Canine eyes also lack another human trait: the fovea, an area especially dense with detail-sensing cells. As a result, their detail vision is not as good as ours. But they make up for this by having much better night vision and greater sensitivity to movement.

Color Blindness

The way we see color depends on the combination of the responses from cone cells in the retina of the eye. Normally, there are 3 types of cones, each sensitive to a different range of color: red (long wavelength), green (medium wavelength) and blue(short wavelength).Each of these photo pigments peak at different wavelengths and this colour system is called trichromacy. Among mammals only monkeys and apes have been found to have trichromatic colour vision like humans, other mammals such as cats and in our case dogs have dichromatic vision.


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