Insect Vision Uncovered

Hello and welcome to your Daily Fun Fact From Flora Today we are going to have a look at the compound eyes of insects. Now they look like this

Seeing With Insect Eyes | A Moment of Science - Indiana Public Media

(very cool) And they are made up of thousands of little individual photoreceptors that are called ommatidia .

Compound Eye | Taken with an electron microscope. | St Stev | Flickr

The input from of these little units, the ommatidia, is combined to form an image . Because the insect eye is convex it means that they all point in slightly different directions, giving the insect a pretty wide field of vision. These eyes can even detect the polarisation of light in some cases (but that’s another day’s fact). Now because the lenses are so small , the effects of diffraction mean that the image that is produced does not have very high resolution . This means that it is not very good at making out fine detail. This can only be countered by increasing the size and the number of these ommatidia which can happen but only as far the eye can be physiologically maintained. It wouldn’t be very useful having eyes that had a fabulous resolution but were so massive that you couldn’t walk or fly .

If we wanted to have compound eyes , but keep the resolution that we see with the same. We would need to have compound eyes that were Guess how big Wrong

22 metres in diameter. HOW NUTS IS THAT?! So even if you need glasses — you’re doing a whole lot better than a fly. Lots of love, Flora PS this is your new segment of a gif of an animal falling over because it’s the energy we all need right now (thank you Clare for inspiring it)