The cat in the picture was my most loyal assistant, Sylvester, a beautiful Abyssinian who for years made our studio his home. He had adopted a comfortable chair as his pied-à-terre, and while he slept there, something curious often caught the eye: if you stared at his closed eyelids, didn’t it seem as though they suddenly opened?
The clear and dark stripes around his eyes (Fig. A) roughly trace the outlines of real cat eyes (Fig. B). In the animal world, eyes are powerful signals—used to warn, deceive, or intimidate. These “subjective eyes,” known to scientists as ocelli, are a kind of passive defense, deterring potential threats even in sleep. When awake, the same markings act like natural eyeliners, making his eyes appear larger and more striking. I was the first to study this phenomenon in cats, observing how these markings function as a subtle form of visual automimicry.*
This visual strategy, known as automimicry, is widespread in nature. Many butterflies, such as Smerinthus ocellatus (Fig. C), display prominent eyespots on their wings—patterns that echo the gaze of larger animals, enough to startle or mislead predators.
*Automimicry is most often studied in wild species
