Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Varieties of eyes, The compound eyes of a dragonfly, Compound eye of Antarctic krill, Evolution of eyes.

Varieties of eyes

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The compound eyes of a dragonfly.

In most vertebrates and some mollusks, the eye works by allowing light to enter it and project onto a light-sensitive panel of cells known as the retina at the rear of the eye, where the light is detected and converted into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve. Such eyes are typically roughly spherical, filled with a transparent gel-like substance called the vitreous humour, with a focusing lens and often an iris which regulates the intensity of the light that enters the eye. The eyes of cephalopods, fish, amphibians, and snakes usually have fixed lens shapes, and focusing vision is achieved by telescoping the lens — similar to how a camera focuses.Compound eyes are found among the arthropods and are composed of many simple facets which give a pixelated image (not multiple images, as is often believed). Each sensor has its own lens and photosensitive cell(s).

Some eyes have up to 28,000 such sensors, which are arranged hexagonally, and which can give a full 360 degree field of vision. Compound eyes are very sensitive to motion. Some arthropods, including many Strepsiptera, have compound eye composed of a few facets each, with a retina capable of creating an image, which does provide multiple-image vision. With each eye viewing a different angle, a fused image from all the eyes is produced in the brain, providing a very wide-angle, high-resolution image.

Compound eye of Antarctic krill.

Possessing detailed hyperspectral color vision, the Mantis shrimp has been reported to have the world's most complex color vision system. Trilobites, which are now extinct, had unique compound eyes. They used clear calcite crystals to form the lenses of their eyes. In this, they differ from most other arthropods, which have soft eyes. The number of lenses in such an eye varied, however: some trilobites had only one, and some had thousands of lenses in one eye.

Some of the simplest eyes, called ocelli, can be found in animals like snails, who cannot actually "see" in the normal sense. They do have photosensitive cells, but no lens and no other means of projecting an image onto these cells. They can distinguish between light and dark, but no more. This enables snails to keep out of direct sunlight. Jumping spiders have simple eyes that are so large, supported by an array of other, smaller eyes, that they can get enough visual input to hunt and pounce on their prey. Some insect larvae, like caterpillars, have a different type of single eye (stemmata) which gives a rough image.

Evolution of eyes


Diagram of major stages in the eye's evolution.

The common origin (monophyly) of all animal eyes is now widely accepted as fact based on shared anatomical and genetic features of all eyes; that is, all modern eyes, varied as they are, have their origins in a proto-eye believed to have evolved some 540 million years ago.The majority of the advancements in early eyes are believed to have taken only a few million years to develop, as the first predator to gain true imaging would have touched off an "arms race". Prey animals and competing predators alike would be forced to rapidly match or exceed any such capabilities to survive. Hence multiple eye types and subtypes developed in parallel.
Eyes in various animals show adaptation to their requirements. For example, birds of prey have much greater visual acuity than humans, and some can see ultraviolet light. The different forms of eyes in, for example, vertebrates and mollusks are often cited as examples of parallel evolution, despite their distant common ancestry.

The earliest eyes, called "eyespots", were simple patches of photoreceptor cells, physically similar to the receptor patches for taste and smell. These eyespots could only sense ambient brightness: they could distinguish light and dark, but not the direction of the lightsource. This gradually changed as the eyespot depressed into a shallow "cup" shape, granting the ability to slightly discriminate directional brightness by using the angle at which the light hit certain cells to identify the source. The pit deepened over time, the opening diminished in size, and the number of photoreceptor cells increased, forming an effective pinhole camera that was capable of slightly distinguishing dim shapes.

The thin overgrowth of transparent cells over the eye's aperture, originally formed to prevent damage to the eyespot, allowed the segregated contents of the eye chamber to specialize into a transparent humour that optimized colour filtering, blocked harmful radiation, improved the eye's refractive index, and allowed functionality outside of water. The transparent protective cells eventually split into two layers, with circulatory fluid in between that allowed wider viewing angles and greater imaging resolution, and the thickness of the transparent layer gradually increased, in most species with the transparent crystallin protein.

The gap between tissue layers naturally formed a bioconvex shape, an ideal structure for a normal refractive index. Independently, a transparent layer and a nontransparent layer split forward from the lens: the cornea and iris. Separation of the forward layer again forms a humour, the aqueous humour. This increases refractive power and again eases circulatory problems. Formation of a nontransparent ring allows more blood vessels, more circulation, and larger eye sizes.

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