Fruitfly - compound eyes

Yousef Alhabshi · Post by **Yousef Alhabshi** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 12:16 pm

Hi,

This is a stack for the fruit fly compound eyes. It was interesting for me to see all these colors not coming out from the compound eye itself but the sides. Any further information in this regards would be appreciated here

Fruitfly - compound eyes by Yousef Al-Habshi, on Flickr

Crop 100%

160 shots using Sony A6000, Nikon 50X CFI & twin flashes.

Cheers,

BugEZ · Post by **BugEZ** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 1:16 pm

Yousef,

Do you have an image of the whole fly?

The boundary of each ommatidia appears to be quite reflective. Is this fly active in the day or at night?

There are many configurations of compound eyes and some fly species use highly reflective surfaces at the walls between each ommatidium to increase light transmission to the sensors buried beneath. On the dolichopodidae that I photograph the boundary areas appear black. My dolis are active during daylight. I suspect black boundaries are a bit like the flocking in our lenses and tend to prevent off-axis light from reaching the sensing cells. For bugs that are active during the day a non-reflective boundary may be helpful. The reflectors on the walls (like your fruit fly) tend to blur the image slightly, but in dim light it might be preferred to have a fuzzy image rather than no image at all.

If you wish to read about this (from a credentialed scientist) I suggest "Animal Eyes" by Land and Nilsson.

Keith

Yousef Alhabshi · Post by **Yousef Alhabshi** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 1:32 am

Hi Keith,

Thank you for the very useful information.. certainly learned a new info today

Back to your questions, I found it during the day & I just got a 2nd confirmation from one of my friends as well as he managed to find another active fly in a different city during the day light.

the book seems a very interesting refernce, I believe I'll order a copy

Thanks again

Yousef