The Jumping Spider: What a blurry vision

The jumping spider family contains over 600 described genera and more than 5800 described species, making it the largest family of spiders with about 13% of all species and has a special vision system that enables it to calculate the precise distance it needs to jump. How does it?

To measure its distance from an object, the jumping spider exploits a unique feature of its two principal eyes, each of which has a "staircase" retina with multiple layers. While one layer receives green light in sharp focus, another receives green light in sharp focus, another receives it as a blurry image. The more out of focus an image appears in that layer, the closer the object is to the spider's eye. This simple fact enables the spider to calculate the exact distance it has to jump to catch its prey.

Researchers would like to copy the jumping spider's technique in order to create 3-D cameras and even robots that can measure the distance to an object. According to Science-NOW, the jumping spider's vision provides an exciting example of how half a centimeter long animals with brains smaller than those of house flies still manage to gather and act on complex visual information.

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