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Island Tribes Develop Superior Underwater Vision
Artifice_Eternity writes "I found this Washington Post article fascinating. A tribe of skilled divers known as "sea gypsies" have developed a previously unknown physiological adaptation that gives them better vision underwater. Most humans see poorly underwater, because water has a similar refractive index to the fluid inside the eye, making it difficult to focus incoming light. But children of the Moken tribe compensate by shrinking their pupils (the same way photographers reduce a camera's aperture size to increase sharpness). Their underwater visual acuity is more than double that previously thought possible in humans. The article also describes other adaptations discovered in recent years that challenge our understanding of what the human body and brain can do." (Painless non-registration demographic click-through required.)
True. We Americans have been training ourselves for years to be blind to the damage we are causing the rest of the world, and I must say it is working exceptionally well.
This idea, with obvious commercial applications, and clearly not in use anywhere else, should be patented by the Moken tribe. Otherwise, some industrialized country will patent it and sell it to the grandchildren of the current Moken. The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity supports the idea that indigenous people should be able to patent their discoveries. Go for it!