Monday, September 2, 2019

Ocelli are not noodles

Chalky Percher sounds like the name of some Dickensian cockney pickpocket, doesn’t it? But it’s a species of dragonfly that lives in Asia. They have five eyes – two big compound ones with tens of thousands of ommatidia to create a highly-resolved hemispherical image and then three little high speed lo-res ocelli on top of their heads to orient them in flight. These carnivores have tiny tiny brains but somehow they process all this input and select one specific bug in a cloud of identical bugs and catch it and eat it. So you don’t need to be smart, just focused.

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