UPHunter08

I'm going to have to whip out my BS card here. All joking aside, this statement isn't entirely true. Nobody here has ever been a virus either, but scientists have pretty well figured out how they work.

Rods are rods, and cones are cones. Biologists have a really good understanding of how mammalian vision works, and the basic parts are fairly similar. Just like a mechanic who knows his engine parts can figure out a new engine fairly easily, a biologist can make some logical conclusions on how vision in other mammals works. The lack of certain cones, for instance, tells you what colors they have trouble detecting. Therefore, it's inaccurate to say we have 'no idea' what deer can see. Unless deer are aliens that have developed wildly different senses, we have a pretty good idea of what they can see based on basic biology.

But regarding camo, I'm going to have to agree with kswild...to a point. Some camo patterns don't work well once you get beyond close distances. The busier-looking, 'photo quality' camo patterns integrate into solid colors when viewed from a distance. That's why the military never uses those patterns. Larger blobs and mixtures of light on dark (think military camo) work better for breaking up the human form. The modern military 'digital' camo patterns are meant to solve the integration problem by being able to scale up or down to blend into the background (ie. work well both close up and at a distance). I believe it's based on fractal theory...small patterns that work at close range integrate into larger patterns that break up your outline at greater ranges.

All that said, IIRC a deer's sense of sight is about 3rd, behind scent and hearing, in their toolset for detecting predators. If that's true, concentrating on hunting the wind and staying quiet rank up there with selection of camo. Camo is merely meant to break up your outline, so a cheap set of military fatigues probably works as well as the hideously expensive set up designer camo.