Jumping spiders use blurry vision to judge distance

We don’t like blurry vision, and we go out of our way to correct it with glasses and contact lenses. But some animals aren’t so fussy. The jumping spider not only tolerates blurry images, it deliberately produces them.

Jumping spiders, as their name suggests, leap onto their prey from afar. They judge their jumps using the two huge (and rather beautiful) eyes on the front of their faces. And to gauge how far away their targets are, they use special retinas that produce sharp images and out-of-focus ones at the same time.

Other animals have many different ways of judging depth, but none of them apply to jumping spiders. Humans mostly rely on our two eyes. Each gets a slightly different view of the world and our brain uses these differences to triangulate the distance to objects in front of us. But this ‘binocular vision’ only works if the two eyes see overlapping parts of the world. Those of jumping spiders do not.

Chameleons can judge distance by sensing how much they have to focus their eyes to bring an object into sharp relief.  But jumping spiders have no way of actively focusing their eyes. Finally, some insects judge distance by shaking their heads from side to side, which makes nearby objects move further across their field of view than far ones. But jumping spiders can accurately pounce onto their prey without moving their heads.

Without any of these three methods, how could they possibly gauge their precise killing pounces with any sort of accuracy? Takashi Nagata from Osaka City University has the answer.

Each of the front eyes has a unique staircase-shaped retina, with four layers of light-sensitive cells lying one over the other. By contast, our retinas only have one such layer. Scientists have known about the staircase retinas since the 1980s, but Nagata has finally shown exactly what they do.  He found that the top two layers are most sensitive to ultraviolet light. The two on the bottom have a penchant for green.

And that’s a bit odd. The way the layers are stacked means that green light only ever focuses sharply on the bottom one (layer 1). Blue light focuses on the one above it (layer 2), but those cells aren’t sensitive to blue. Instead, they see the world in fuzzy out-of-focus green.

Nagata thinks that this fuzzy vision isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. The amount of blur depends on an object’s distance from the spider’s eye. The closer it is, the more out of focus it is on the second retina. Meanwhile the first retina always gets a sharp image. By comparing the images on both layers, the spider can gauge depth with a single unmoving eye.

To test this idea, Nagata placed Adanson’s house jumpers in a special arena where they had to leap at prey. If the arena was flooded with green light, the spiders made accurate jumps. If Nagata used red light of equal brightness, they fell short of the mark. Nagata even created a mathematical model for the spider’s eye to predict how far it would miss its jump under different wavelengths of light. The model’s predictions matched the animal’s actual behaviour.

Humans actually do something similar. We can use the blurry nature of background images to get a sense of distance, even if all other cues are removed. Indeed, photographers often use blurry backgrounds to create a greater sense of depth. But this is just one of the tricks we use to judge depth, and perhaps a minor one. For the jumping spider, it seems to be the only trick in the playbook.

Reference: Nagata, Koyanagi, Tsukamoto, Saeki, Isono, Shichida, Tokunaga, Kinoshita, Arikawa & Terakita. 2011. Depth Perception from Image Defocus in a Jumping Spider. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1211667

Photo by Alex Wild

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