The peacock mantis shrimp, found on
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, is equipped
with the most complex eyesight in the animal
kingdom. “It really is exceptional,”
says Dr. Nicholas Roberts, “outperforming
anything we humans have so far been
able to create.”
Consider: The peacock mantis shrimp
can perceive polarized light and process it
in ways that humans cannot do. Polarized
light waves may travel along a straight
line or rotate in a corkscrew motion. Unlike
other creatures, this mantis shrimp
not only sees polarized light in both its
straight-line and corkscrew forms but is
also able to convert the light from the one
form to the other. This gives the shrimp
enhanced vision.
DVD players work in a similar way. To
process information, the DVD player must
convert polarized light aimed at a disc
into a corkscrew motion and then change
it back into a straight-line format. But the
peacock mantis shrimp goes a step further.
While a standard DVD player only
converts red light—or in higher-resolution
players, blue light—the shrimp’s eye can
convert light in all colors of the visible
Researchers believe that using the peacock
mantis shrimp’s eye as a model,
engineers could develop a DVD player
that plays discs with far more information
than today’s DVDs. “What’s particularly
exciting is how beautifully simple it is,”
says Roberts. “It works much, much better
than any attempts that we’ve made to
construct a device.”
What do you think? Is the remarkable
eye of the peacock mantis shrimp a product
of chance? Or was it designed?
[As appeared in the magazine Awake!, November 2010]