• Question: do fly's see ?

    Asked by A'Mari to Greg, Jen, Laura, Mobeen, Paul on 10 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Laura Haworth

      Laura Haworth answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Yes flies can see but not by the same process as we did. They see light differently to ourselves. Their eyes are made up of thousands of individual visual receptors, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is a functioning eye in itself, and thousands of them together create a broad field of vision for the fly. A fly’s eyes are immobile, but because of their spherical shape and protrusion from the fly’s head they give the fly an almost 360-degree view of the world. Flies are also short sighted.

    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      They sure do. Their eyes are actually segmented in to lots of individual eyes (called a compound eye) and this gives the fly a really wide field of vision. It also allows then to detect motion much better than humans do, so they can fly out of the way of things very quickly.

    • Photo: Jen Lowe

      Jen Lowe answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Oh yes. Fly eyes have the fastest visual responses in the animal kingdom.
      http://phys.org/news/2012-10-eye-mystery-insight-flies-fastest.html

      If you google for fly eye and look at the ‘images’ tab there are some very cool pictures. Then try adding ‘microscope’ to your image search.

    • Photo: Greg Melia

      Greg Melia answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Like the others have said, the fly can see but its eyes work in a different way to ours. There are actually several different types of eyes in the animal kingdom, that work in different ways. We think that these different types of eyes evolved separately, from different ancestors. Each has evolved to suit the animal’s own environment and requirements.

      Here are some of them: http://listverse.com/2010/12/12/10-animals-with-incredible-eyes/

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