Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Bocholt, Germany.
Elife. 2019 Feb 26;8:e40613. doi: 10.7554/eLife.40613.
The quality of visual information that is available to an animal is limited by the size of its eyes. Differences in eye size can be observed even between closely related individuals, yet we understand little about how this affects vision. Insects are good models for exploring the effects of size on visual systems because many insect species exhibit size polymorphism. Previous work has been limited by difficulties in determining the 3D structure of eyes. We have developed a novel method based on x-ray microtomography to measure the 3D structure of insect eyes and to calculate predictions of their visual capabilities. We used our method to investigate visual allometry in the bumblebee and found that size affects specific aspects of vision, including binocular overlap, optical sensitivity, and dorsofrontal visual resolution. This reveals that differential scaling between eye areas provides flexibility that improves the visual capabilities of larger bumblebees.
动物所能获得的视觉信息质量受到其眼睛大小的限制。即使是在密切相关的个体之间，眼睛大小的差异也能观察到，但我们对这如何影响视觉知之甚少。昆虫是探索大小对视觉系统影响的良好模型，因为许多昆虫物种表现出大小多态性。以前的工作受到确定眼睛 3D 结构的困难的限制。我们开发了一种基于 X 射线微断层扫描的新方法，用于测量昆虫眼睛的 3D 结构，并计算它们视觉能力的预测。我们使用该方法研究了大黄蜂中的视觉生长比例，发现大小会影响视觉的特定方面，包括双目重叠、光学灵敏度和额前背侧视觉分辨率。这表明眼睛区域之间的差异缩放提供了灵活性，提高了较大大黄蜂的视觉能力。
