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Our eyes are how we take in most of the world around us, but for one creature in the animal kingdom, its evolutionary path has literally put all of its survival eggs into optics. Experts say its eyes weigh 20 times the weight of the rest of its head and now they might know why.
Transcript
00:00Our eyes are how we take in most of the world around us, but for one creature in the animal
00:08kingdom, its evolutionary path has literally put all of its survival eggs into optics.
00:13This is a close-up image of the Alcyopid polychaete worm. Experts say its eyes weigh 20 times the
00:19weight of the rest of its head, or which Science Alert reports would be about the same if our
00:23human eyes weighed around 110 pounds each. The wildest thing is that the worms feed in
00:29the middle of the night, at the bottom of the ocean, meaning experts really didn't understand
00:33why they would need such big eyes. But now we might finally have an idea. A new study discovered
00:38that this particular marine worm is able to not only see small and distant objects, but
00:42also track them. This is sort of a huge find considering previously only vertebrates, arthropods
00:48and cephalopods were believed to have the ability to do so. Most other worms only have extremely
00:52low resolution basic vision, or direction photoreception, which is essentially just being able to track
00:58the direction light is coming from. The researchers concluded that this extremely small, almost
01:02transparent worm has eyesight that is essentially on par with mice or rats. Previous studies have
01:07concluded that their eyes are also able to pick up ultraviolet wavelengths particularly well,
01:12meaning these deep sea worms might still be hiding some tricks up their ocular sleeves.
01:16So, please add a few other minimizer points.
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