Tiny Glasses on a Praying Mantis to demonstrate 3D vision of insects

Read and her team designed an insect cinema and then fitted mantises with tiny glasses similar to the old-school ones used for 3-D movies.

The mantises had to be given a pair of miniature 3D glasses in order to perceive particular tests being shown in the tiny cinema and are thought to use their 3D vision for hunting prey.

When the bugs were in 2D, the mantises made no attempt to catch them.

While I don’t really enjoy seeing any living creature subjected to the rigors of science, this research is pretty incredible and follows up on the 1980s work by Samuel Rossel using prisms and occluders to prove the visual prowess of praying mantises.

Jenny Read added, “We can learn a lot by studying how they perceive the world”.

The study, which demonstrates how incredibly simple systems such as the brain of an insect can process sophisticated 3D information, could lead to new algorithms for 3D depth perception in computers. The images showed to the mantises were limited and the results of the process were not bright. This includes short videos of simulated bugs moving around a computer screen.

This is a mantis wearing 3D glasses.

When the researchers first began testing the insects, modern 3D technology, which uses circular polarization to separate the images from both eyes, failed to work because their eyes were so small.

The results could help to improve visual perception technology in robots and computers. This did not work, because the mantises were so near the screen that the glasses were unable to separate the two eyes’ images correctly.

But, when the bugs were played in 3D and appeared to float in front of the screen, the mantises went in for the attack.

Further examination of the algorithms used by mantises for depth perception could help researchers better understand the evolution of human vision.

But scientists at Newcastle University have discovered, with their novel experiment, that Mantises also have this ability.

Blobs of harmless beeswax are being used to fix green and blue lenses to praying mantises in experiments at Newcastle University.

‘Since red light is poorly visible to mantises, we used green and blue glasses and an LED monitor with unusually narrow output in the green and blue wavelength’. Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 18718 (2016).