Eye-Rolling Improves Vision For Mantis Shrimp

Mantis shrimp roll their eyes to improve their polarized vision. Photo by Michael Bok/University of Lund

BRISTOL, England, July 13 (UPI) — Those eye-rolling mantis shrimp aren’t showing disrespect, they’re just trying to sharpen their eyesight. According to researchers at the University of Bristol, eye rotations improve the crustacean’s polarized vision.

The eyes of mantis shrimp process polarized light. Rolling their eyes is like turning up the contrast on the television, it sharpens their marine surroundings and helps objects stand out.

“We have known for a while that mantis shrimp see the world very differently from humans,” Nicholas Roberts, a biologist at Bristol, said in a news release. “But the eye movements of mantis shrimp have always been something of a puzzle.”

In addition to seeing polarized light, mantis shrimp also use 12 different color channels. Humans only use three.

“Intuitively, a stable eye should see the world better than a mobile one, but mantis shrimp seem to have found a different way to see more clearly,” Roberts added.

Researchers were able to show that two mantis shrimp species, Gonodactylus smithii and Odontodactylus scyllarus, use eye rotation to better align specific photoreceptors with the angle of polarization.

The new findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

“This is the first documented example of any animal displaying dynamic polarization vision, in which the polarization information is actively maximized through rotational eye movements,” researchers wrote in the new paper.

Researchers believe the discovery could lead to new optical technologies with applications for underwater exploration, materials analysis and more.

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