Spookfish sees the world in a unique way!!!
The brownsnout spookfish (Dolichopteryx longipes)is a deep sea dweller and hit the headlines across the scientific field for the way it sees the outer world. Deep oceans hold many secrets and spookfish with four eyes is out there competing with the very best for the top spot.Recent research has shown that it is the first vertebrate to use mirror instead of lens to see the world around in deep ocean. In fact these spook fishes does not have four eyes but has just two eyes, each eye has two parts, one looking upwards and the other down making it quite unique.All the known vertebrates (animals with back bones) use a lens to divert the path of incoming light and focus it onto the retina. But the spookfish’s downward-facing eye differs in using mirror instead of lens.
The mirrors must give the fish a great advantage in the deep sea, where the ability to spot even the briefest of lights can be the difference between eating and being eaten
Professor Julian Partridge–Bristol University
This kind of fishes are known for last 120 years but no live specimen had ever been captured and this was the reason why reflective eyes of spook fish remained elusive. Last year Hans-Joachim Wagner scientist from Tuebingen University, Germany caught one off Pacific island of Tonga and no one the boat knew what it was -the reason it caught attention was that it looked like it had four eyes, and vertebrates with four eyes don’t exist.
The team from Germany published their results in latest issue of current biology which states that the eye looking down uses thousands of tiny reflective crystals – acting like mirrors – that are angled in slightly different directions to focus light onto the retina. This is far different from a typical fish eye, which uses a single lens to bend light onto a focal point, similar to the way the human eye works.
“In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes — how to make an image — using a mirror,”–Julian Partridge from the University of Bristol.
Reference:
A Novel Vertebrate Eye Using Both Refractive and Reflective Optics
Hans-Joachim Wagner, Ron H. Douglas, Tamara M. Frank, Nicholas W. Roberts, and Julian C. Partridge
10.1016/j.cub.2008.11.061
Image credit: Mashqet/FlickR
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