What is it about mantis shrimp that they have this seemingly comically over-engineered vision system? They eat small prey, so that's obviously one reason to have decent vision, but I can't imagine why they need so developed a vision system where other animals eating the same prey have no such need.
Unlikely. Vision is so metabolically expensive that it disappears really quickly once it no longer confers an advantage.
On the other side of the equation, vision is so stupidly useful that it has evolved independently from several different systems in different organisms.
Do we know that this is true for features of vision systems in the same way it is for the system in general?
For example, animals who end up in dark environments lose sight relatively quickly in a few generations, but for other cases, do animals tend to lose specific parts of their vision system - color, edge detection, etc.?
The same thought came to my mind. When wearing my polarized sunglasses, sometimes the screens on gas station pumps will be unreadable. However, if I rotate my head slightly one way or the other, the polarization filter is removed and I can read the screen clearly.
This makes me think that maybe mantis shrimp relies on powerful sensor to see the world but doesn't have a lot of good software / internal hardware to do further processing. Human's eye sensor seems poor compare to the ones of mantis shrimp but a lot of work is done in the post processing. It's be difficult to clearly define if mantis shrimp can indeed see "more".
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadWeird.
On the other side of the equation, vision is so stupidly useful that it has evolved independently from several different systems in different organisms.
For example, animals who end up in dark environments lose sight relatively quickly in a few generations, but for other cases, do animals tend to lose specific parts of their vision system - color, edge detection, etc.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_blind_salamander