How Good Is A Wasp’s Vision?
WouterAmong the various questions people have about insects is how good is a wasp’s vision? The fact is, there are several different species of wasps in South America and Europe, some of which have better eyesight than others. Whether the better vision is due to natural selection or evolution is not clear.
Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have shown that some wasps have bigger eyes. The study, conducted by Elizabeth Tibbetts, an associate professor of ecology, and Judy Jinn, a graduate student in the psychology department, was published in the journal Biology Letters.
The study, which compared the optical sensitivity of a nocturnal moth with that of a superposition eye, showed that the nocturnal moth’s S-value was 69 mm2 sr, which is significantly higher than the S-value for a superposition eye of 63 mm2 sr.
The UC Berkeley study also showed that some wasps have more than one compound eye. They also demonstrated that the size of the compound eye’s facets was disproportionately larger in some species. However, the UC Berkeley researchers were not able to find the same pattern in the superposition eye.
However, they did find that larger facets in a compound eye actually increase the resolution of the image it produces. A compound eye is comprised of thousands of smaller eyes, which combine to give the wasp a single image. The UC Berkeley researchers say this is not a “big eye” evolution, but rather a corollary of evolution.
