Insect visual acuity from eye to brain

Both eye and brain size are limited, making vision a high-cost sensory modality that places special demands on very small organisms.

Insects are now important models within visual ecology for understanding how acquisition of information from the environment is optimised for different tasks.

However, quantifying how insect eyes sample just the right information as appropriate for their specialised behaviour is complicated by technical issues that vary from species to species, such that complete understanding of how the eye works at both optical and physiological levels has only been obtained for a few model species.

In this project we will address this shortfall by applying several novel techniques recently developed in our laboratory.

These will allow us to (i) map the acquisition of visual images by optical mechanisms within the eye, (ii) quantify sampling of information in space and time by the photoreceptors and (iii) establish the effectiveness in transfer of that information to higher order feature detection pathways. Our novel methods are widely applicable across a broad range of species.

We will focus on species from 3 orders of flying insects: Hymenoptera (bees and wasps), Odonata (damselflies and dragonflies) and Diptera (2 winged flies).

This will allow us to establish directly how visual performance scales with the size of the eye within diverse species that show similarities in behaviour as well as across species with similar eye size but more varied behaviour.