The Scallop Sees with Hundreds of Eyes

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/science/scallops-eyes.html

by sharp11 • 9 years ago

61 9 9 years ago

nytimes.com

always_good• 9 years ago

The hero image doesn't do it justice.

I recommend image-searching "scallop eyes": https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=scallop+eyes&tbm=isch

A beautiful beast.

I also enjoyed the morbidity of the article pointing out how much we have to learn from these creatures yet also how we sear them in butter.

matt_the_bass• 9 years ago

If you can get them live, you need neither butter or searing. Just a quick cut with a scallop knife. :)

When diving for them, they definitely see me and will close tight. But unlike as the article mentions, I’ve never seen them propel themselves away. I have however seen trails in the sand of where they’ve come from. The impression I have is they move slowly to better position themselves to capture food.

p1mrx• 9 years ago

Here's another article, containing a cryo-electron microscope image of the square tiles:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scallops-amazing-eyes-us...

mattbierner2• 9 years ago

Inspiring. Just as our brains combine signals from two eyes, scallop brains must be able to combine the signals from all of their eyes, but what would this conception of the world even be like?

It’d be fun to build a headset rig that tries to imagine scallop vision. With present tech, I imagine this would require some preprocessing to combine the various eyeball streams into something human eyes could understand. Anyone done something similar yet?

erikpukinskis• 9 years ago

You already know exactly what their conception of the world is like. When you look at the world you don’t see two images, you just perceive the presence of things.

The thing that would make scallop reality different than yours is not the many eyes, it’s the different body. Because you have fingers and lips you will perceive a fish differently than a creature with tentacles and gills would perceive it. We can only perceive that which we can relate to our own bodily experience.

(Although as humans our layering of cultural references on those bodily sensations can sometimes lead to the illusion that our perceptions are abstract.)

alanbernstein2• 9 years ago

The 360 degree field of vision seems like a significant difference to me as well.

mattbierner2• 9 years ago

I'm not so sure. Just as language influences how we think and how understand the world, don't our senses mediate our understanding of reality?

Say there were a hyper-intelligent, speaking scallop. I agree that we could build a shared language with the scallop for properties as "presence" or "absence", but the scallop's internal conception of presence and what presence looks like may be completely incomprehensible to us. Could that scallop then ever teach a human what presence is without showing it to them? (similar idea to knowledge argument)

More practically, two points I find interesting about scallop vision:

- 360 vision from multiple small eyes. How are these inputs combined in the scallop's brain?

- Scallop eyes seem to be optimized for seeing contrast and detecting motion. What would seeing using an array of low resolution, light/darkness sensors be like?

alanbernstein2• 9 years ago

I believe it's been tried at least once, but I have no specific references.

There has also been at least one pair of twins conjoined at the head, who can apparently see with each others' eyes (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-t...). If a human brain learned to see through a ring of eyes, I wonder just how it would adapt to the sensory input.

blarg1• 9 years ago

I'd imagine it'd be like have a huge peripheral vision. And if they had the same capability of human eyes, than they would probably focus with a single eye, while the rest is seen as peripheral.

The Scallop Sees with Hundreds of Eyes

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