It’s not the question if the eyes on the side or in the front, it’s about the capability to be able to focusing on a stereoscopic vision to be able to calculate the distances to the prey or not.
Side eyes increase the field of vision, which can be advantageous for fleeing animals, but does not exclude that predators can also use it to strategically locate themselves better in the environment.
But it is true that animals with frontal vision are generally predatory.
There are lots of reasons to have binocular frontal vision. Redundancy, differing info for optic flow, sensitivity, reducing the frontal blind spot, compensating for retinal blind spots, higher frontal resulution, seeing around things, depth perception…
Most of there are good for predators, but predation isn’t the only reason to have them.
It’s not the question if the eyes on the side or in the front, it’s about the capability to be able to focusing on a stereoscopic vision to be able to calculate the distances to the prey or not. Side eyes increase the field of vision, which can be advantageous for fleeing animals, but does not exclude that predators can also use it to strategically locate themselves better in the environment. But it is true that animals with frontal vision are generally predatory.
Well…
There are lots of reasons to have binocular frontal vision. Redundancy, differing info for optic flow, sensitivity, reducing the frontal blind spot, compensating for retinal blind spots, higher frontal resulution, seeing around things, depth perception…
Most of there are good for predators, but predation isn’t the only reason to have them.