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Scientists Give Praying Mantises Tiny 3D Glasses
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Newcastle University are outfitting praying mantises with tiny 3D glasses in order to study how their vision works. From the article: 'Praying mantises have stereoscopic vision, unlike most invertebrates. This makes them sophisticated hunters, and ideal subjects for a team from Newcastle University led by vision scientist Jenny Read. By putting 3-D glasses on the mantises and faking them out, Reid and her colleagues want to learn how the insect's vision differs from ours.""
Great. Maybe they will enjoy the stupid 3D movies that no one else gives a crap about.
Scientists returned to the drawing board after their first field trial of putting the glasses on a praying mantis ended in failure. The team is soon expected to announce the design prosthetic ears for the praying mantises,
Perhaps they are making some distinction between stereoscopic and binocular vision. A multi-eye configuration isn't necessarily binocular, even if the eye clusters are separated into two spaces. The eyes are well spread for their size, but they don't move and focus the same, so they may not image the same.
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By the way: "stereoscopic" vision is hardly unusual in arthropods. Most crabs and shrimp have it. Hunting spiders often have it (not even just "stereo"... more like surround sound). And so on. I am pretty sure a lot of flies can see forward in stereo.
Are you just citing arthropods that have multiple eyes that can see in different directions? Stereoscopic means that the difference in what the two eyes see can be interpreted as depth (i.e. through parallax). Think of it like stereo vs mono sound. Just because you have two speakers that you point in different directions doesn't mean you have stereo sound even though it might fill the room better than a single speaker, the difference between what's coming out of the two speakers is what makes it stereo.