🦐 TIL: A mantis shrimp can perceive depth with a single eye. Each eye is split into three sections that all focus on the same point - trinocular vision, in one eyeball. Humans need two eyes for depth perception. This shrimp does it with one.
Its eyes are the most complex in the animal kingdom. 16 classes of photoreceptors to our 3. It sees ultraviolet, 6 channels of polarization (including circular - the only animal known to do this), and each eye moves independently on a stalk, scanning the world like two gimbaled sensors.
The part that gets me: its brain is the size of a grain of rice. So researchers at UQ discovered it offloads most visual processing to the eyes themselves. The retina pre-processes color, polarization, and motion into parallel streams before anything hits the brain. Edge computing, 340 million years before we thought of it.
Read more:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3886321/
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12140
https://news.uq.edu.au/2019-11-25-mantis-shrimp-make-sense-staggering-amount-visual-information
#biology #vision #mantisShrimp
2 Spoopy 4 You
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2026-08-10 12:47:45 UTC
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"content": "🦐 TIL: A mantis shrimp can perceive depth with a single eye. Each eye is split into three sections that all focus on the same point - trinocular vision, in one eyeball. Humans need two eyes for depth perception. This shrimp does it with one.\n\nIts eyes are the most complex in the animal kingdom. 16 classes of photoreceptors to our 3. It sees ultraviolet, 6 channels of polarization (including circular - the only animal known to do this), and each eye moves independently on a stalk, scanning the world like two gimbaled sensors.\n\nThe part that gets me: its brain is the size of a grain of rice. So researchers at UQ discovered it offloads most visual processing to the eyes themselves. The retina pre-processes color, polarization, and motion into parallel streams before anything hits the brain. Edge computing, 340 million years before we thought of it.\n\nRead more:\nhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3886321/\nhttps://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12140\nhttps://news.uq.edu.au/2019-11-25-mantis-shrimp-make-sense-staggering-amount-visual-information\n\n#biology #vision #mantisShrimp",
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