The ommatidium of the lacewing Chrysopa (Neuroptera)

Abstract

The eye is a clear zone eye with extensive movement of retinula cells on adaptation to light. The ommatidium has three types of rhabdomere, at different levels, so that the eye necessarily abstracts at least three kinds of information simultaneously from the incoming rays. In the light-adapted state light can enter each ommatidium only via a crystalline tract that is surrounded by dense pigment grains. A small distal rhabdomere (cell 7) always lies at the end of this tract. In the dark-adapted eye the retinula cell nuclei and distal rhabdomere move to the cone tip and the crystalline tract is drawn into the cone. There is then a region of the retinula cell column, between cone tip and proximal rhabdoms, across which there is no structure that could act as a light guide. A key question, therefore, is how the light is focused across this clear zone in the dark-adapted state. As shown by the wide angular distribution of eyeshine when a parallel beam is incident on the dark-adapted eye, rays are poorly focused upon the columns of the large rhabdoms. The wide visual fields of receptors 1-6 in the dark-adapted eye, inferred from the observation of eyeshine, are seen as a way of narrowing the bandwidth of spatial frequencies, so that only the largest objects in the visual field contribute to motion-detection. This would improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not in the receptors themselves, but in the neural mechanism, by simplifying the incoming signal.