Post #14693

Barrel Eye: The strangest eyes. Balls in the center of a transparent head As a person who experienced serious conjunctivitis in his youth (two weeks in a dark room, drops, ointments and a lot of audiobooks), I sincerely envy barrel-eyed people. After all, their eyes are in some way unique: they are not afraid of injuries, parasites and any infections that the waters of the Pacific Ocean can bring. How did they achieve this? You can understand for yourself if you look at their eyes more closely. No, not those black dots on the face - those are the nostrils. You need to look higher and deeper, at the strangely shaped green segments shining through the transparent skin. These are real eyes. It is physically impossible to get close to them from the outside, so not a single dangerous parasitic worm or harmful virus can harm them. And it sounds so cool that it even becomes unclear: why didn’t all the other vertebrates think of this? Why did some deep-sea fish decide to hide their eyes behind a huge transparent lens, while people, birds and frogs are forced to blink 20 times a minute so as not to simply go blind? Because such reliable but crude eye protection actually destroyed the barrel eye’s vision. Through a thick, leathery lens, the fish sees only the silhouettes of animals, can track their size and direction of movement, but even to provide itself with such simple vision, it had to turn its eyeballs into cylinders, the operating principle of which is reminiscent of binoculars. Owl eye skeleton. This shape allows you to look very far, like through binoculars. The same is true for the barrel eye. The only reason why the half-blind fish has not yet been eaten with its giblets is its habitat. The barrel eye lives at depths from 600 to 3600 meters, half of the locals cannot see at all, and as you know, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed king. But in fairness, it should be admitted that the barrel-eyed eyes are capable of more than was expected of them. Previously, we believed that the eyes of a fish could not move in principle, turning it into a kind of underwater owl. This was a mistake; the scaly thing still knows how to move them, and almost 90°. In a vertical position, the barrel-eyed eyes look out for the silhouettes of potential predators ready to attack from above, and in a horizontal position, they look for prey: jellyfish and siphonophores. The fish eats them along with poisonous tentacles, to which it is immune. But how fish look for each other during the breeding season is still a mystery. It is unlikely that they rely on their weak eyesight, but it has not yet been possible to understand the exact methods of finding a soul mate - the fish are too rare. But it is known that both the male and the female did not care about the fertilized eggs and did not even try to protect them. The eggs, covered with an oily coating, quickly float to the surface and spread over a good half of the Pacific Ocean, providing the species