“So,” he said, “there I was, sitting in the IMAX theater, waiting for the 3D show to start, and I look over, and sitting in the seat next to me is a praying mantis with 3D glasses on. Yeah! That’s what I thought. The place is infested with bugs. But I didn’t notice others, and this one seemed intent on watching the giant screen with its big bug eyes. One lens was blue, but unlike my 3D glasses, the other was green. No, really, I’m serious. It was a praying mantis with glasses. You would have thought it was there for a 3D showing of A Bug’s Life.”
Newcastle University researchers have actually fitted a mantis with 3D glasses. The lead researcher, Jenny Read, as reported in ScienceDaily online, says that mantises shown 2D films of bugs didn’t attempt to capture a meal, but when they were shown 3D videos, they reached out with those terrible spikey legs. Imagine. That little brain has 3D vision, a fact that was initially discovered by Samuel Rossel decades ago.
Experiments with bugs wearing glasses might seem wholly without merit, possibly the product of a civilization that has reached a point of ultimate ennui, but think again. If we have discovered that a bug has the ability to see the world in ways we might never have imagined, is it not possible that those human critters around us also see the world in depth and in ways that we cannot imagine?
Newcastle University researchers have actually fitted a mantis with 3D glasses. The lead researcher, Jenny Read, as reported in ScienceDaily online, says that mantises shown 2D films of bugs didn’t attempt to capture a meal, but when they were shown 3D videos, they reached out with those terrible spikey legs. Imagine. That little brain has 3D vision, a fact that was initially discovered by Samuel Rossel decades ago.
Experiments with bugs wearing glasses might seem wholly without merit, possibly the product of a civilization that has reached a point of ultimate ennui, but think again. If we have discovered that a bug has the ability to see the world in ways we might never have imagined, is it not possible that those human critters around us also see the world in depth and in ways that we cannot imagine?
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