Unravelling the function and evolution of many-eyed visual systems. Led by @laurensr.bsky.social and based @MfNBerlin.bsky.social.
MultiplEye Lab
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Out today in @royalsocietypublishing.org - we show that crab spiders (the ones you usually see ambushing pollinators on flowers 🕷️🌸) get worse at hunting if their eyes are covered!🫣 Sounds obvious? It's actually quite surprising, here's why... 👀 (1/8)
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...
As ever, we have just as many questions as when we started, but this is a really exciting first step to understanding how eye loss occurs in animals that have multiple eye pairs and types of eyes to lose! Well done to Antonio and Andres for their mind-blowing efforts, and stay tuned for the paper...
If you'd be interested in a postdoc with us using CT scans of trilobite eyes to model their visual abilities, watch this space...!
It seems that transitioning to dim or low-light environments (e.g. leaf litter) is linked to partial eye loss - and this might give us a clue as to why the principal eyes are typically lost first. These are the only eyes that lack a reflective tapetum, meaning it likely performs worse in low light!
I am hiring a postdoc for scRNA-seq research in Lund, Sweden on the visual systems of non-model inverts as part of an ERC project on the evolution and ecology of advanced color and polarization vision. Apply here or share the link with someone who may be interested! 🧪
lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
Added to this, the principal eyes are controlled by a separate developmental pathway to the secondary eyes, potentially decoupling loss across these two parallel visual systems. When one pair of secondary eyes is lost, the others quickly follow, possibly due to their shared developmental origins.
They surveyed eye number across ALL described spiders (yes, literally all), and report >7500 species that have lost one or more eye pairs.
BUT not all eyes are lost equally - the vast majority of affected species lack the principal eyes, which are often associated with higher resolution vision...
The principal eyes have been lost many times over >200 Ma, with a distinct peak in losses in the Triassic and Jurassic 🦕 Our analysis strongly suggests that the principal eyes were also _regained_ multiple times! In contrast, secondary eye losses are much more recent...
So why do spiders lose their eyes? Eye loss is usually associated with living in very dark environments like caves, and we did find a strong correlation between cave living and the loss of all four eye pairs.
But most species missing selected eye pairs live above ground!
📢 New pre-print alert!
Most spiders have eight eyes, but not all - PhD researcher Antonio Galán Sánchez and Dr Andres Rivera Quiroz @naturalis.bsky.social led an exciting new analysis of the evolution of eye number and losses in spiders on a truly incredible scale!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
