If you take a flash photo of a wolf do their eyes look red, like a domestic dog, or green?

When I took a recent flash photo of my two dogs, one dog's eyes glowed red (the one with no wolf), the other dog, who supposedly has some wolf in him, had eyes that glowed green. Why is there a difference?If you take a flash photo of a wolf do their eyes look red, like a domestic dog, or green?
Reflex Colors





The consistently red color of the human reflex derives from the red blood pigment hemoglobin. Light from the flash picks up the red from blood vessels encountered during its bounce off the retina, just as reflected sunlight picks up the color of a red sweater.





Why, then, do animal reflexes come in so many other colors and seldom in red? The answer lies in the tapetum lucidum, a highly reflective, variably pigmented membrane backing the retina in animals with good night vision (including dogs, cats and most domestic animals) but entirely absent in humans. The tapetum lies directly behind the retinal photoreceptors. Nova's The Nocturnal Eye nicely illustrates the anatomy.





The tapetum enhances low-light vision by giving retinal photoreceptors a 2nd crack at any incoming light that manages to escape absorption (detection) on the first pass. In dogs, at least, an additional boost may come from tapetal fluorescence, which shifts incoming wavelengths into better alignment with the peak spectral sensitivities of the photoreceptors. Tapetal pigments surely come into play here.





When tapetal pigment is present, its color dominates the color of a given animal's reflex. Tapetal color loosely follows coat color. For example, black coats and green reflexes tend to go together, as seen in our border collie above. Most dogs and cats show a blue reflex as their eyes mature in the first 6-8 months of life. Pigment-poor animals like blue point Siamese cats with no tapetal pigmentation show a red reflex for the same reason humans do.


http://dpfwiw.com/red-eye.htmIf you take a flash photo of a wolf do their eyes look red, like a domestic dog, or green?
Both my dogs' eyes glow green in photos, and they're as far from wolfish as it gets. Your red-eyed dog is some sort of mutant freak. Is he white or blue-eyed? Maybe he lacks certain pigments that wolves and most domestic dogs have.
could be either my dog not wolf but chow husky and lab has one green and one red in flash photo!!!
No.. my shih tzu's eyes always come out green and she has no wolf in her..lol...





It just depends on the light, dogs eye color etc.. Some come out red, green, orange and purple.. At least those are the colors I have seen from a flash.
Chetco's answer is excellent and well researched. There is a theory amoungst Bernese Mountain Mountain Dogs people, that since the colour that dogs' eyes reflect is linked to pigmentation etc., those that reflect red most probably carry the gene for blue eyes whilst those that reflect green, to greenish/white do not.


I am not aware of any conclusive studies undertaken, but certainly no blue eyes have ever resulted from parents that reflect green or if one parent reflects green, but blue eyes do occur if both parents reflect red.
The green and the red are different ways the light reflects off the back of their eyes. It has nothing to do with the breed or the dog, or whether there is wolf in them. It has to do with how the light hit their retina, and reflected back.