Factoid Friday – Mantis Shrimp Eyes
August 28th, 2009 |
A marine crustacean called the Mantis Shrimp has likely the most advanced eyes in the animal kingdom.
They have two eyes in cups located on their eyestalks. These eyes can move 70 degrees in all axes. Their eyes are compound eyes, composed of over 10,000 fixed lenses called ommatidia divided into three sections. Each section can operate independently, with the upper and lower hemisphere used for detecting motion and the midband used for color vision.
Mantis Shrimp have hyperspectral vision, being able to see well up into the ultraviolet part of the light spectrum, and have an incredible 16 eye pigments with which to distinguish color (humans have 3-red, green, and blue).
On top of all that they can see the direction of polarized light! Humans cannot even tell if light is polarized or not.
In the paper “Behavioural evidence for polarisation vision in stomatopods reveals a potential channel for communication” published in Current Biology in 1999, a team of researchers tried to figure out why Mantis Shrimp have such advanced eyes. They did tests which gave food rewards for identifying polarization patterns in light and analyzed the shrimp’s bodies.
Their conclusion was that the ability to see polarity helps the Mantis Shrimp see and catch shiny or clear prey animals. Additionally, the mantis shrimp can wave two paddles on its front legs to polarize the reflected light and communicate with other mantis shrimp. These results may help improve photographic lenses and underwater object detection systems.
