The extraordinary vision of the mantis shrimp

The website has an annoying amount of in-your-face requests, but the content is very interesting.

Mantis shrimp vision is extraordinary — we already knew that. Not only do they have an extremely clear colour vision (mammals have just three photoreceptor cells, whereas mantis shrimps use a dozen), but they also have the ability to see the polarisation of light. Now, researchers have shown that they have extremely mobile eyes that never stop moving — in direct contrast to most other creatures, which try to limit eye movement as much as possible to avoid blurring.

Out of the 450 or so species of mantis shrimp, one of the best studied is the peacock mantis shrimp, Odontodactylus scyllarus. The compound eyes of this shrimp are perched on the end of supportive stalks, being able to move independently in all three axes of rotation: pitch (up-down), yaw (side-to-side) and roll (twisting about the eye-stalk). Amazingly, they always know which way is up, regardless of what their eyes are doing.

"The mantis shrimp visual system seems entirely immune from any negative effects of rolling their eyes. Indeed, it appears as though rolling has absolutely no effect on their perception of space at all: up is still up, even when their eyes have rolled completely sideways. This is unprecedented in the animal kingdom.”


https://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/mantis-shrimp-eyes-02052018/