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Beautiful Transience

By bioephemera on December 12, 2008.

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Emerald Damselfly
Martin Amm, 2008

Martin Amm's beautiful photographs are perfect bioephemera: insects bejeweled with droplets of dew. The crisp iridescence of these photos is simply mesmerizing.

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Ugly Beauty
Martin Amm, 2008

I particularly love the way the droplets of water on the head of the red-veined darter below magnify the facets of its eyes (click on the link for a larger image). These photos look too good to be real!

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Red-veined Darter II
Martin Amm, 2007

Martin Amm/Stephen Amm, Naturfranken.de

Tags
biology
ephemera
Photography

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I've always wondered how insects "see", as in how exactly the insect would integrate the information from dozens (hundreds?) of independent sense organs. Would it be similar to how we integrate the data from two desperate eyes forming a unified whole, or something different?

How would the added deformation of light due to dew (that was one of the coolest things I've ever typed) affect it?

in any case, beautiful pictures.

I'm not an expert on insect eyes, so don't take anything I say as fact, but here's my vaguely recalled book learnin' mixed with an unknown amount of conjecture.

Insects really only respond to motion, some colors, and light. The eye is relatively simple, in terms of what it processes, and the brain doesn't really need to parse a whole image. There's just a hierarchy of responses. Something like red coming in along one pathway, given a modifier based on the number of eye units perceiving roughly contiguous sections of red, weighed against other inputs, and then an action is triggered based on what has the greatest weight at that moment.

We do similar things, of course, but with a more complex eye and brain we can also evaluate environments in a larger scope, then project consequences out along fictional timelines. Insects are more like integrated circuits, and react very much on immediate sensory values.

There's actually a neat game called BugBrain that allows you to play around with some of those concepts.
http://www.biologic.com.au/bugbrain/