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It is Friday, which means it’s time once again for the Ancient Lore post – time flies, doesn’t it? This week it’s a selection from the Science\/Miscellaneous folder, and so what you’re seeing here is the eye of a horseshoe crab.<\/p>\n
It is Friday, which means it’s time once again for the Ancient Lore post – time flies, doesn’t it? This week it’s a selection from the Science\/Miscellaneous folder, and so what you’re seeing here is the eye of a horseshoe crab.<\/p>\n
Okay, that’s a bit misleading. First off, it’s not the eye of a horseshoe crab, but just the cornea, kinda, because this is from the molted exoskeleton, an empty shell from a juvenile found entangled in dead seaweed. Second, it’s one of the compound eyes, but horseshoe crabs have ten<\/em> eyes, or really, a hell of a lot more, but we’ll just count the compound eyes as two because I’m too tired to count all of those little ommatidia right there and you don’t care anyway.<\/p>\n Now, if you know anything about horseshoe crabs, you know that they’re armored and spiky little bottom-dwellers that mostly scavenge, and their mouth is directly underneath their shell;<\/strong> so, not exactly pursuit hunters, and not exactly easy prey. Which raises the question of why they need so many eyes, when it would seem that they don’t actually need any<\/em>. This might be like asking why anyone needs multiple homes or sports cars or Hummel figurines – they don’t need<\/em> them so much as they have some neurosis about collecting them. The better answer, perhaps (probably not,) is that they’re actually arachnids (the horseshoe crabs I mean) and we all know how they<\/em> are with eyes – why have two when you can have eight, you know? But curiously, while most spiders have both simple and complex eyes (you know, the kind with focusing lenses,) none that I know of have compound<\/em> eyes like those of flying insects, so horseshoe crabs are definitely being optical hogs here. Most of their other eyes are simple, and dot the top of the shell, a few on the underside, and a selection along the tail<\/em>. Because why have a blind tail? I mean, really…<\/p>\n And when the habits of horseshoe crabs have been studied, it appears that the primary uses of these eyes are for sex. I am forced by my own nature to surmise that horseshoe crabs must have a habit of saying, “Hey, my eyes are up here<\/em> – and down here<\/em>, and over here<\/em>, and under here<\/em>…” And now you’re wondering where a horseshoe crabs boobs are, aren’t you? You perv. Anyway, according to this article<\/a>, even though the main eyes are unfocused compound jobbies, they still do a remarkable job of discerning details and contrast, at least if the computer simulation reflects any degree of accuracy. These are the kinds of rabbit-holes I find when I’m just looking to fill in some simple details for a post.<\/p>\n Anyway, don’t try to sneak up on a horseshoe crab, and don’t expect to get away with any sleight-of-hand tricks. And to provide a little more context and scale, I present this other image from the same time, my brother finding the crab and apparently sticking his fingers in its eyes…<\/p>\n It is Friday, which means it’s time once again for the Ancient Lore post – time flies, doesn’t it? This week it’s a selection from the Science\/Miscellaneous folder, and so what you’re seeing here is the eye of a horseshoe crab. Okay, that’s a bit misleading. First off, it’s not the eye of a horseshoe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3,12],"tags":[4661,2438,4657,4663,4665,4662,4659,4664],"class_list":["post-23053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","category-random","tag-1500th-post","tag-compound-eye","tag-horseshoe-crab","tag-its-not-binary","tag-limulus","tag-rounding-error","tag-simple-eye","tag-well-la-de-da-already"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"juvenile](\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/DaWholeThing.jpg\")
By the way, I have to point out that this is my 1,500th blog post;<\/strong> I would have liked to have done something a little more special for the occasion, but time and lack of new photos and this heinous schedule have all conspired against me. I took note of the 500th post<\/a>, coincidentally another about an aquatic subject, but missed celebrating the 1,000th post<\/a>, which is remarkably anticlimactic. Maybe I should simply stop drawing attention to these events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"