CHECKOUT THE PEACOCK MANTIS SHRIMP’S EYES (Odontodactylus scyllarus) !!!

The Peacock mantis shrimp Odontodactylus scyllarus has, like many other invertebrates, a compound eye composed of visual units called ommatidia. What makes this wonderful sea animal's eyes unusual is that they have ten different types of photoreceptors, as researchers Thomas Cronin of the University of Maryland and Justin Marshall of the University of Sussex in England reported in May. Humans manage with just three kinds of receptors for color vision; while some species have four or five, none comes close to this shrimp's variety of receptors, most of which are found in a band of ommatidia across the middle of its circular eye. No one is sure what the adaptive advantage of this system is, but it may allow mantis shrimp, which have brightly colored and varied markings, to recognize each other.

The peacock mantis shrimp is found on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, equipped with the most complex eyesight in the animal kingdom. Dr. Nicholas Roberts says “It is really exceptional, outperforming anything we humans have so far been able to create.”

The peacock mantis shrimp can perceive polarized light and process it in ways that we humans cannot. Polarized light waves can travel along a straight line or rotate in a corkscrew motion. Unlike other creatures, the mantis shrimp cannot only see polarized light in its straight-line or corkscrew forms but is also able to convert the light from the one form to the other. This gives the shrimp enhanced vision.

DVD players work in a similar way. To process information, DVD player must convert polarized light aimed at a disc into a corkscrew motion and then change it back to a straight-line format. But the peacock mantis shrimp goes a step further. While a standard DVD player only converts red light-or in higher-resolution players, blue light-the shrimp’s eye can convert light in all colors of the visible spectrum.

Researchers believe that using the peacock mantis shrimp’s eye as a model, engineers could develop a DVD player that plays discs with far more information than today’s DVDs. Dr. Roberts says “What makes it particularly exciting is how beautifully simple this sea animal's eyes is, and that it also works much, much better than any attempts that humans have made to construct a device.”