Extreme mobility of mantis shrimp eyes | Hacker News Reader

Extreme mobility of mantis shrimp eyes

phys.org

28 pointsdnetesn12 comments

What is it about mantis shrimp that they have this seemingly comically over-engineered vision system? They eat small prey, so that's obviously one reason to have decent vision, but I can't imagine why they need so developed a vision system where other animals eating the same prey have no such need.

Weird.

It's possible that the vision system evolved long ago under radically different circumstances and just had no imperative to get rid of it.

Unlikely. Vision is so metabolically expensive that it disappears really quickly once it no longer confers an advantage.

On the other side of the equation, vision is so stupidly useful that it has evolved independently from several different systems in different organisms.

Do we know that this is true for features of vision systems in the same way it is for the system in general?

For example, animals who end up in dark environments lose sight relatively quickly in a few generations, but for other cases, do animals tend to lose specific parts of their vision system - color, edge detection, etc.?

Yes, newts and salamanders in cave systems have lost their eyes, due to scarcity of nutrition and habitats devoid of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_blind_salamander

More on mantis shrimp: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

That was the first thing I thought of too! I wonder if he'll update the comic in light of these new findings.

This is my goto for Mantis Shrimp information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5FEj9U-CJM

This makes me think that maybe mantis shrimp relies on powerful sensor to see the world but doesn't have a lot of good software / internal hardware to do further processing. Human's eye sensor seems poor compare to the ones of mantis shrimp but a lot of work is done in the post processing. It's be difficult to clearly define if mantis shrimp can indeed see "more".

You're right. Radiolab had a recent episode that goes into this; https://overcast.fm/+JaxJ5s

If they can see the polarization of light, perhaps rolling their eyes can change the filtering of the polarization?

The same thought came to my mind. When wearing my polarized sunglasses, sometimes the screens on gas station pumps will be unreadable. However, if I rotate my head slightly one way or the other, the polarization filter is removed and I can read the screen clearly.

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