I can just see the “common-sense” man shaking his head at the report that scientists adorned praying mantis (surely one of the greatest pun-names every constructed) with glasses. What a waste of money, I can hear muttered.
Well, sorry. They discovered something. From The Verge, who can probably produce a better interpretation of the scholarly paper than I can:
Photo: Newcastle University, UK
Praying mantises willing to wear 3D glasses and sit through bizarre, abstract movies have revealed a new way of seeing the world in three dimensions. The findings could help improve machine vision for robots that need to judge distance, like drones. But most of all, thanks to this research, we now know what bug-eyed mantises look like in glasses: adorable.
These carnivorous — frequently, cannibalistic — insects are well known for their pious posture, and the female’s habit of devouring her mate after sex. Praying mantises also have an unusual perspective for a bug: they’re the only insect we know of that can see in 3D, like we can. But figuring out how their bug-brains judge distance has been a challenge, because you can’t exactly ask a mantis to describe what it’s seeing. So scientists developed what they call a “3D insect cinema” and the bug versions of 3D glasses to test mantis vision. They discovered that mantis brains tune out confusing background information to judge distance to a moving target, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
That’s completely different from how our own brains sense depth. To create a 3D perception out of each eye’s slightly different 2D picture of the world, the human brain has to merge both images. By comparing where the images match and where they differ, the brain can calculate what’s nearby and what’s far away. But if the images differ too much — like if one eye is seeing a picture of a forest and another is looking at a car on a road — that merging process breaks down.
A discovering with immediate application, if we can only implement it.
The silliest studies can surprise you, can’t they? Worth keeping an open mind.
