These chitons, a species called Acanthopleura granulate, have hundreds of tiny eyes dotting the surface of their tough shells. They also showed that unlike the eyes of nearly all other living creatures, which are made primarily of protein, these eyes are made of the mineral aragonite, the same ceramic material as the rest of the creatures’ shells.
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To measure the eyes’ focusing potential, Li and her colleagues popped a few eyes out of the shell and put them under the microscope. They actually created a rather clear and focused image.
“Lots of folks believed the eyes were so little, there clearly was no way this little lens would be really capable of forming an image”, Connors says. “This will increase the overall defense performance”. It is able to strike this balance by building its lenses from minerals-primarily aragonite crystals-instead of proteins, which are the basis for most eyes in the tree of life, including our own.
For many animals the most important and the most used sense is the visual sense. “It can not just run away”. They found that the lens achieves its clarity via tweaks in structure and though the lens is made of aragonite, the incoming light has to pass through ewer grain-to-grain transitions and less of the material between grains. If we use specialized 3D printers in order to print ceramic armor with the same crystalline structure as the one found on the mollusk’s armor, we could create a type of smart material.
“The next step would be looking at the formation process of this system”, Li said. But regardless, the fact that this unassuming-looking mollusk might inspire sensory airplanes is a reminder that nothing can meet stringent design parameters more creatively than evolution. This is because they do not need to see all that well. Although many biological tissues serve more than one objective, rarely are tissues optimized to do multiple tasks well; doing one task efficiently typically comes at the expense of performing another at such a high level.
A chiton species, the Acanthopleura granulate belongs to a class of armor-clad marine mollusk.
Ling Li and other researchers studied the chiton Acanthopleura granula.
Although chitons look very simple, these mollusks have a very sophisticated shell.
Researchers hope their analysis might lead to material science applications in the military and heavy industry fields, where soldiers and workers operating under hazardous conditions could benefit from heavily protected eye wear.
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Joseph Scalise is an experienced writer who has worked for many different online websites across many different mediums.
