![octopus eye suite octopus eye suite](https://www.hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/oral-octopus-mri-1536x904.jpg)
Our brains adapt to this blind spot by making us ignore it. In our eyes the optic nerve passes through the retina, which means that there are no receptors at this point on the retina and therefore this optic nerve causes a blind spot to occur. Now all this information gathered by the eyeparts needs to be transferred to the brain. The retina contains two types of cells rods, which capture the light energy, and cones, which are used to detect detail and color.
![octopus eye suite octopus eye suite](https://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/sites/seagrant.oregonstate.edu/files/octoeyes_cross_section.jpg)
Note, the pupil doesn’t change size, the iris does.īehind the pupil is the actual light-capturing layer, called the retina. This iris can expand or contract depending on the intensity of the light to allow more or less light into the pupil. Surrounding the pupil is the iris, the colored part of the eye, which is blue if genetically you have little pigmentation in the iris and brown if you have more. When light hits our eyes it enters through the cornea and into the pupil. Very briefly, here’s how our eyes work and then we’ll look at the few differences in the eyes of these completely unrelated mollusks. This is because the vertebrate/invertebrate lines diverged around 500 million years ago, before either branch had eyes at all. You may wonder how we know the octopus and mammalian eye is truly convergent evolution and not just common traits inherited from common ancestors. But the similarities between the eyes of mammals and cephalopods are so close it would be like if bats had independently developed feathers and hollow bones. One example is the wings of bats and those of birds.
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“We can leverage 400 million years of iterative learning to show us how to make shortcuts at the engineering bench,” she says.Convergent evolution occurs when two unrelated groups of animals develop similar structures independent of each other. Sweeney hopes that researching squid eyes can be beneficial to humans, too. That’s essentially what the squid lens proteins do.” Imagine you want to build a LEGO castle, she says, and that you “had a bunch of little bricks, put it into a bag, and shake the bag, the castle will just come out again. “What we saw was: A squid lens genuinely self-assembles into this really cool, higher order complex optical structure,” says Sweeney. To see the structure of the squid’s special S-crystallin proteins, the team shot an X-ray through the lens-and they discovered something fascinating. Credit: Luke Groskin The density of proteins in a squid eye. “It’s really sort of a neat trick to find a way to put proteins together in a whole bunch of different densities, such that none of them are going to require any energy to maintain that structure,” says Sweeney. In order to get around the sphere-shaped lens problem, squid have evolved to put denser proteins at the center of the lens and less dense proteins at the edges, producing a crisp image every time. Squid lenses are filled with S-crystallin protein, which were thought to just float in solution. But that comes at a trade-off: “You don’t get a very crisp image out of a spherical lens,” Sweeney says. For many creatures, including land-loving humans, your retinas determine how sensitive your eyes are to light-the rounder and bendier the retina, the quicker your eye can absorb light. That’s because squid eyes have specially-designed lenses in their eyes that are tailor-made for their environment. But “if you’re a squid that’s been evolving for 400 million years to live at that depth,” says Sweeney, “you can see great.”
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There’s nothing around for miles, and it’s about as bright at noon as a night with a full moon.
![octopus eye suite octopus eye suite](http://www.re-medical.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/au-600-p-09.jpg)
Unlike visually stimulating forests, cities, or reefs that other creatures live in, the world 400 meters below the surface of the ocean is gloomy and featureless. Mid-ocean squid live in a world very different than our own. She’s looking at squid eyes due to their large numbers, or as she put it, “if you were a Martian who swooped down and scooped up exactly one animal off of Earth, you are more likely than not to get something transparent and bioluminescent that came from 400 meters in the ocean, because that’s where 99% of the space is.” She looks at these things as materials, much like an engineer, and tries to figure out how they came to be.
![octopus eye suite octopus eye suite](https://octolab.tv/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Untitled-design-2019-08-28T123810.457.jpg)
Sweeney studies the evolution of novel materials in nature like wood, muscles, bones, and more. “The resolution of their eyes is approaching that of humans, their retinas are much more sensitive than ours are to light, and if you dig into the nitty-gritty of how nature figured it out, I’m forever blown away at the level of nuance to get it to work.” “A squid lens is infinitely more elegant than our eye,” says Alison Sweeney, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder-but for squid, it’s in the lens.