3-D Vision for Tiny Eyes in Hasarius adansoni: To Gauge Distance

3-D Vision for Tiny Eyes in Hasarius adansoni: To Gauge Distance

Video: This movie, captioned in English, shows the jumps of jumping spiders under green and red light. Under red light, the jump was short. This video relates to a paper that appeared in the Jan. 27, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by T. Nagata at Osaka City University in Osaka, Japan, and colleagues, was titled, "Depth Perception from Image Defocus in a Jumping Spider". (Credit Video Science).

- 3-D Vision for Tiny Eyes
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/01/3-d-vision-for-tiny-eyes.html?r...

- Jumping Spiders Use Blurry Vision to Catch Quick Prey with Precision [Video]
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/01/26/jumping-spiders-u...

Reference
- A Clearer View from Fuzzy Images
Science 27 January 2012: Vol. 335 no. 6067 pp. 409-410 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216887
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6067/409.summary

•Perspective - Physiology
Blurred vision is caused by an image not being focused correctly on the retina. In humans, blurred vision retards our ability to accurately perceive the world, and we go to great lengths to correct unfocused vision. In some spiders, however, images are deliberately defocused on the retina to provide for the crucial depth perception that allows high-precision jumps. On page 469 of this issue, Nagata et al. (1) elegantly demonstrate this novel form of depth perception in jumping spiders through a combination of molecular, electrophysiological, and behavioral experiments.

- Depth Perception from Image Defocus in a Jumping Spider
Science 27 January 2012: Vol. 335 no. 6067 pp. 469-471 DOI: 10.1126/science.1211667
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6067/469.abstract

Abstract
The principal eyes of jumping spiders have a unique retina with four tiered photoreceptor layers, on each of which light of different wavelengths is focused by a lens with appreciable chromatic aberration. We found that all photoreceptors in both the deepest and second-deepest layers contain a green-sensitive visual pigment, although green light is only focused on the deepest layer. This mismatch indicates that the second-deepest layer always receives defocused images, which contain depth information of the scene in optical theory. Behavioral experiments revealed that depth perception in the spider was affected by the wavelength of the illuminating light, which affects the amount of defocus in the images resulting from chromatic aberration. Therefore, we propose a depth perception mechanism based on how much the retinal image is defocused.

Supporting Online Material Video
Movie S1
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2012/01/26/335.6067.469.DC1/1211667s1...

Movie S2
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2012/01/26/335.6067.469.DC1/1211667s2...

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• depth
• perception
• image
• defocus
• jumping
• spider
• hasarius
• adansoni
• gauge
• distance