Scallops are often eaten as delicacies, but did you know that a seemingly ordinary scallop has 200 eyes, and behind each eye there are multiple layers of concave lenses, which are also connected to a square crystal, so that the image can hit two layers of retina with different effects, so that the scallop's vision can be as excellent as a telescope.
Scientists have known since the 1960s that shellfish in the family Pecten can see objects through concave mirrors to the upper retina. Some crustaceans and deep-sea fish also have such eyes.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Lund University in Sweden, published in the academic journal Science, used a "cryo-electron microscope" to examine the eye cryosection of scallops and found that there was a complex visual system, and this discovery is also believed to help the transformation of artificial eyeballs.
Unlike the eyes of most living creatures, the eyes of scallops have concave lenses in addition to condensing crystals, and these tiny mirrors and crystals appear mosaic-shaped, neatly arranged in a place called a sheath; These concave lenses reflect light into two retinas, one that creates an image directly in front of the eye and the other that makes the edges clearer.
The researchers speculate that scallops are likely to use different retinas to avoid predator attacks and search for places suitable for resting and foraging. In addition, the scallop's crystals were found to be in the shape of flat blocks, which could hit the image on two retinas with different functions, so that the scallop's vision was better than that of other animals, and it had good vision like a telescope.