Another Green Lacewing

[Cyclops]

Fabulous!!

Rik, i wonder how the scientists figured out just how insects see?

[rjlittlefield]

Rik, i wonder how the scientists figured out just how insects see?

A zillion experiments, and still nobody knows most of the details for any species including our own.

One of my colleagues got his Ph.D. 30 years ago by developing a decent model of temporo-spatial neighborhood interactions in a frog retina. Those experiments were done by sticking microelectrodes into retinal neurons, recording their firing patterns, and correlating those against sequences of optical patterns projected onto the retina.

This stuff is hard enough to figure out at the level of photoreceptors and retinal neurons. Farther back in the system, say in the brain, it's still mostly conjecture. Check out the literature on automated pattern recognition, and you'll find that nobody has a clue how to make a computer that can compete with any animal at recognizing objects in natural scenes.

Even really "simple" questions are still not answered. I saw a paper recently talking about how a fly manages to land so neatly. The suspicion is that it's "just" a matter of the fly adjusting its flight speed to maintain a constant rate of optical flow across its retina. But finding the neural circuits that measure optical flow rate...I think that was left for future work.

--Rik

[NikonUser]

Attn: ChrisR
If regular bugs have a problem focussing/seeing think of the problems Whirligigs must have.
These images were posted before you came aboard.
SEE HERE

[rjlittlefield]

Ah yes, the Whirligig photos...I had forgotten about those. Marvelous work!

--Rik

[ChrisR]

Nature's glass bottomed boat? I'll look out for them! Super pictures, again.

Thanks for clearing up the insect eye structure Rik, trips to the net for info can be confusing.