This Camera Can See the Mantis Shrimp's Invisible World
The ocean is more than dim and blue.
To the human eye, adapted for land, the underwater landscape can appear too dim, too blurry, and too blue. It’s easy to get lost.
To mantis shrimp, however, the ocean environment is richly textured and varied. For a small glimpse of the mantis shrimp’s view of the ocean, humans can now look through a mantis-shrimp-inspired camera from a team led by Viktor Gruev, an engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Mantis shrimp have unusual eyes. Mostly famously, they have 16 color receptors, compared to a human’s three. Oddly, they are, but they detect another property of light invisible to humans: polarization.
