Iris Clops can thank her eye-obsessed parents for not choosing the name Pupil or Sclera for their darling daughter (though "Sclera" rhymes with the name "Sarah", so maybe it could have worked?!). The word Iris is used for a girl's name, a beautiful flower and also the colorful part of your eye. Iris Clops' iris is olive green but human eyes can have many different colored irises. People can have brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, gray eyes, hazel eyes and all of the colors in between. Did you know that in Ancient Greek, Iris means Rainbow for just this reason? Let's have a look at the parts of the eye, using Iris' eye as an example. You might want to get a mirror and check out your own! |
Light changes the size of the pupil. When it is bright and light is strong, the pupil gets smaller. When it is dark, the pupil gets bigger to let in more light.
In other animals, the pupil can be a different shape. Cats and Werecats have vertical slit pupils as do snakes, Swamp Monsters, Dragons and Gorgons.
The colorful circle around our pupil connects to muscles in the eye. These muscles control the pupil and can make it bigger or smaller.
The iris is responsible for making the muscles let light into the pupil when it is dark and keep light out of the pupil when it is bright.
While Humans and Cyclops have white scleras, other mammals are different.
In dogs, cats and other mammals the part of the sclera we can see matches the iris, so it looks like they have no sclera at all.