Saturday 17 April, 2010.Your browser may not support display of this image.
Eyes of archerfish are adapted perfectly. Scientists have identified a fish which they say, can see above and below the water simultaneously. Archerfish live in mangroves and river. They have got very unique vision. This allows them to see above and below the surface of water at the same time. They can detect dark objects and distinguish shades of brown in the depths of the water.
The information was presented by a team, led by the University of Queensland. Dr. Shelby Temple team leader said, “Archerfish spit jets of water with remarkable accuracy at insects above the water’s surface, despite the bend that occurs due to the bending of light as it passes from air to water.
When light passes from rarer medium to the denser medium, it never travel in straight line but it bends. They do all this while being attentive to the potential marauder approaching from above or below. The ‘Nature’ journal reported that this is the first empirical evidence for a functional role for the difference in colour vision across the eye. This feature is only found in vertebrate texa such as pigeons, mice, humans and some fish have got this attribute.
Temple asserted, “The correlation we found between the color sensitivity of the archerfish eye for ‘looking’ in different directions and the background environment in those different directions indicates that the archerfish eye is highly turned to difference in the spectral quality of light in different directions”. She further added that this might help to solve why such intra retinal differences exists in so many other vertebrate eyes.
