animal eyes

Evolution of vision - The regular route and shortcuts

Eyes abound in the animal kingdom. Some are large as basketballs and others are just fractions of a millimetre. Eyes also come in many different types, such as the compound eyes of insects, the mirror eyes of scallopsor our own camera-like eyes. Common to all animal eyes is that they serve the same fundamental role of collecting external information for guidingthe animal’s behaviour. But behaviours vary tremendously across the animal kingdom, and it turns outthis is the key to understand how eyes evolved. The lecture will take a tour from the first animals that could only sense the presence of light, to those that saw the first crude image of the world and finally to animals that use acute vision for interacting with otheranimals. Amazingly, all these stages of eye evolution still exist in animals living today, and this is how we can unravel the evolution of behaviours that has been the driving force behind eye evolution