Those freaky heads aren’t just there to make hammerheads stand out and get them in nature documentaries. According to new research the odd eye-positioning actually gives them incredibly good vision.

Michelle McComb, of Florida Atlantic University, and her colleagues caught a range of hammerheads and carted them back to labs. There they played weak lights in arcs over the poor beasties’ eyes and recorded the eyes’ electrical activity, allowing them to measure the limits of each eye’s vision.

They then plotted the field of vision on a diagram of the sharks’ heads. Perhaps surprisingly, the fields of each eye overlapped, showing that all the species of hammerhead they looked at do have binocular vision.

“When we first started the project we didn’t think that the hammerhead would have binocular vision at all. We thought no way; we were out there to dispel the myth,” says McComb (press release).

Even more surprisingly, bonnethead and scalloped hammerheads also have binocular rear vision, the team reports in a paper due to appear in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Hammerheads just got scarier…

Image: by tanjila via Flickr under creative commons