If you ’ve ever been to a fancy restaurant and eaten a crenel , you might cerebrate they are little more than a rubbery slug with a nice shell . But do n’t be fool by their looks , these ancient puppet have some unbelievable biological gadgetry beneath that shell .
A team of Israeli and Swedish scientists has taken a detailed expression at the sophisticated visual system of the king scallop . They discovered this lowly creature has a ocular system that would impress even the most punctilious NASA scope engineers , comprised of over 200 eyes that rivet lighting using a system of concave mirrors and pondering lechatelierite .
Biologists have known about this unusual ocular scheme since the 1960s . This new field , published in the journalSciencethis hebdomad , is the first successful attempt to understand how it all works using various microscopical imaging techniques .
The eye of humankind , and the majority of other creature with a fine horse sense of vision , work by light passing through a lens which focuses it onto the retina , a layer of unclouded - sensible cells . This is not the case with the scollop and a select few other puppet .
" In some rarefied visual systems in nature , mirrors are used instead of genus Lens to produce double , ” the study author write . “ A singular model of such an eye is found in the Pecten scallop , which possesses up to 200 minute eye lining the mantlepiece tissue . ”
The eyes are made up of a multi - layered mosaic of tiny mirrors and square G watch glass , a highly reflective fabric found in the innate man . After weak enters through a poppy - seed - sized hole , the layer of this mosaic work together to reflect brightness off these concave mirror onto the retina above .
" The mirror forms image on a double - layered retina , to separately visualise both peripheral and central fields of view , " the researchers wrote .
Once the retina invite this information , the squad believe the scallop ’s unquiet system ( after all , they do n’t in reality have a proper brain ) then treat the images from its 200 eyes into a single picture . This aid the scallop comprehend the world with a complex three - dimensional scene of the humanity with mm precision . All those centre also mean they can view a wider horizontal area to keep an middle out for predators .
As a rather cool side distinction , the researchers on the task believe their work could even avail develop more powerful telescopes . As is ever the case , nature is way forward of us .
