Same principle used in self driving cars. #MantisShrimp #Science #NatureScience #Biology #Evolution

A mantis shrimp has 16 types of photoreceptors. You have 3. That alone should stop you. But it gets significantly more extraordinary than that. Your three photoreceptors detect red, blue, and green, and from those three channels your brain constructs the entire visual world you experience. Every color you have ever seen. Every sunset, every face, every screen you have ever looked at, all of it built from just three types of light receptors. The mantis shrimp has 16. For context, the best multispectral cameras NASA uses on its satellites, the most advanced imaging technology humanity has ever built for observing Earth from space, have between 10 and 12 spectral bands. The mantis shrimp has 16. A creature that fits in the palm of your hand is outperforming NASA's best imaging technology in raw spectral detection. But the photoreceptors are not even the most extraordinary part. You need two eyes to perceive depth. Your entire ability to judge distance, to catch something thrown at you, to navigate a room, to drive a car, depends on both eyes working together. This is why stereoscopic 3D cameras need two lenses. Depth perception requires two separate viewpoints. A mantis shrimp perceives depth with one eye. Each eye is divided into three independent sections, all focusing on the same point simultaneously. This gives the mantis shrimp trinocular vision inside a single eye. And because both eyes move completely independently of each other, it has almost 300 degree spatial awareness of everything happening around it at all times. In camera engineering terms, imagine two independently gimballed camera systems, each with built-in depth sensing, ultraviolet vision, and 6 channel polarization analysis running simultaneously. That is what a mantis shrimp is carrying around in its head. And that head contains a brain the size of a grain of rice. So how does it process all of this data? 16 channels of color information. 6 channels of polarization. Trinocular depth perception. 300 degree spatial awareness. All of it happening simultaneously, inside a brain smaller than a single grain of rice. It does not send the data to a central processor. It processes everything locally, inside the eye itself. Raw visual data is analysed at the sensor level before it ever reaches the brain. This eliminates the processing delay that would occur if all that information had to travel to a central system first. Engineers call this edge computing. It is the exact same principle used in self driving cars, where data is processed locally at the sensor level to reduce reaction time and allow the vehicle to respond faster than a centrally processed system ever could. Humanity spent decades developing edge computing as a technological breakthrough. The mantis shrimp has been running it for 500 million years. #MantisShrimp #Science #NatureScience #Biology #Evolution