Eye See You: Moving Retina in Jumping Spiders
⦿ Jumping spiders (Salticidae) don’t use a web to catch prey. Instead they locate, stalk and mount a jumping ambush when they are 1-2 cm away. To do this, they need to detect and then evaluate objects so they don’t confuse a potential mate as prey! Fortunately, jumping spiders have among the sharpest vision among invertebrates.
⦿ Unlike insects, spiders don’t have compound eyes. Instead their 8 “simple” eyes point forward (for high focus) and sideways (to detect motion). Strategically, this is similar to the division of labor in our eyes: we detect peripheral vision at the edges of our retina with low resolution but wide field of view, and sharp images at the fovea in the center of the retina, which is packed with a high density of vision receptors, but has a limited field of view. Since the spider’s large central eyes are set close together and have a limited field of view, they must be moved to point the fovea towards the object. How do they do this?
⦿ Involuntary leg movements are triggered by stimuli from the lateral eyes to reposition the body. However, the spider cannot swivel its whole eyeball as we do, because the lens is built into the carapace, or outer skeleton. Instead, a set of six muscles moves the retina: up and down, sideways and rotationally, while the lens stays fixed. In a transparent spider, you can see the unusual movements of the retina in the tube-like principle eyes. Just one more addition to the cuteness quotient of these tiny spiders!
REF: M.F. Land (1969) Movements of the retinae of jumping spiders (Salticidae: Dendryphantinae) in response to visual stimuli. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/51/2/471.full.pdf
Video Source: Yellow amycine jumping spider from Ecuador, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvN_ex95IcE
GIF Source: http://gph.is/1n7n4aR