Scallops have short tentacles and 30 to 40 blue eyes around the edge of their shells. The eyes allow scallops to detect predators. Shallow waters, usually among eelgrass beds. Unlike other bivalves, bay scallops lie on the bottom, rather than burrowing under the sand. Their shells are often found on sandy beaches.
Its ribbed, multicolored shells are often found on beaches throughout the lower Bay. Bay scallops have rounded, corrugated shells that vary in color from gray or purple to reddish-brown.
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To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Scallops, hardly the most complex of creatures, have intricate eyes that work like telescopes, say researchers. They hope this discovery can one day help us make our own telescopes more powerful. For a paper published today in the journal Science , researchers used a few different microscope techniques to get a detailed view of how the king scallop, or Pecten maximu s , is able to see.
The scallop has tiny eyes lining its mantle, or outside edge. Each of these eyes contains tiny mirrors, which is different from how most animals, including humans, see. Our eyes use lenses the cornea that focus and bend the light passing through it. The light is focused into the retina, or the light-sensitive tissue layer at the back of the eye. But scallop eyes, and powerful telescopes, use mirrors instead.
Mirrors don't focus light but instead reflect it, which has a few advantages. Lenses can only deal with certain wavelengths of light, but mirrors can gather more types, and thus more information. Lenses are more likely to have engineering and design problems, which will make images unclear. Each mirror is carefully calibrated to reflect the right wavelength. Together, it makes the picture clearer, and with its eyes and a double-layered retina, scallop can see peripheral and central pictures at the same time.
A new study published in Current Biology reveals that scallop eyes have pupils that dilate and contract in response to light, making them far more dynamic than previously believed. The optics of scallop eyes are set up very differently than our own ocular organs. As light enters into the scallop eye, it passes through the pupil, a lens, two retinas distal and proximal , and then reaches a mirror made of crystals of guanine at the back of the eye.
The curved mirror reflects the light onto the interior surface of the retinas, where neural signals are generated and sent to a small visceral ganglion, or a cluster of nerve cells, whose main job is to control the scallop's gut and adductor muscle.
The structure of a scallop's eye is similar to the optics systems found in advanced telescopes. For many years, the physics and optics of the scallop eye posed a perplexing problem. In other words, any image on the proximal retina would be blurry and out of focus. The new study sheds some light on this mystery. A scallop pupil's diameter changes by about 50 percent at most, and the dilation or contraction can take several minutes. These contractions can change the curvature of the cornea itself, opening the possibility that the scallop eye might change shape and respond to light in a way that makes it possible to form crisper images on the proximal retina.
Now, Speiser is working to understand if the scallops are able to change the curvature of the mirror and the eye as a whole, which would enable it to adjust the focus of the image even further.
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