By Rafi Letzter, Staff
Writer | December 2, 2017 09:10am ET
Gaze into the fleshy maw of the
scallop, and lo, the scallop will gaze back — its up to 200 eyes glittering and
alien, giving no sign as to what they think of you in their endless hunt for
particles of floating food.
Scientists have known since at
least the 1960s that scallops use mirrors at the backs of their eyes to
reflect light forward and project images onto their double retinas. That was
the work of Michael Land, a pioneer in researching animal vision. But Land
could never figure out what those mirrors were made of, or how they worked; he
guessed that crystalline guanine was involved, but all the microscopic
techniques of the era dehydrated the mirrored tissue, destroying his samples
before he could study them.
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