This is the second volume in zoologist and biologist Andrew Parker's trilogy about sight. The first book in the series, In the Blink of an Eye, was published in 2003 and deals with the evolution of the eye and how it shaped the development of life on Earth. In Seven Deadly Colours, the Australian author begins with Darwin, who wondered if "the eye was just too accomplished to have been conceived by evolution".

According to Parker, the great man needn't have worried, and to illustrate the point he chooses seven examples from the animal kingdom, one drawn from each principal colour in the visible spectrum (except indigo) plus ultraviolet, in which prey and predator seek to get the better of one another, prey striving to evade its pursuer with camouflage that exploits a weakness in the design of the eye, predator adapting its sight to avoid going hungry.

The book opens with the tale of the kestrel and the vole, the one powerful, fast and sharp-sighted; the other small, nimble and well camouflaged to avoid detection in good groundcover. Stalemate? Not quite: the kestrel's eye is equipped with a receptor that enables it to see traces of ultraviolet in the vole's urine. It hovers, 10 metres up, watching a faint trail grow … Then there's the Honduras milk snake - this metre-long sprinter from South America has a pattern of orange, black and white stripes yet somehow evades its predators in a green landscape. How? Read on.

There is good science here: the explanations of how colour is generated and how it is received and processed by the eye and the brain are alone worth the price of the book. Add the real-life drama of the eternal battle between predator and prey and Seven Deadly Colours goes well beyond the merely interesting.