Many eyes or fewer?
I'm designing a sentient, aquatic creature, and trying to decide how many eyes it should have.
This creatures biological strategy is one of redundancy - it has multiple mouths, multiple tentacles, multiple...well, lots of multiples of lots of things. I was thinking of giving it multiple relatively primitive eye-patches scattered across its 'head', but I also want it to have something close to human-level vision. I'm afraid I don't quite follow the quality differences between compound eyes vs complex eyes, so:
Is it plausible for a creature with many small eyes to have vision as good as a human? If not, how good would each individual eye have to be to roughly match human sight?
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1 answer
I don't think there is any inherent reason why a large number of "eyes" would necessarily have to imply the downsides of compound eyes.
For an extreme example, you could consider each cone or rod in the human eye to be a separate organ. (Stay with me!) In the case of humans, they all share only two openings for the light to pass through, but there's little reason why it has to be that way.
Your creature could have a large area covered with rods and/or cones, and a large number of small openings to let light in and focus it on the rods and/or cones. This would resemble a grille more than it would resemble human eyes, but the basic biology could still be very similar.
The obvious downside seems to me to be that the creature would be highly vulnerable to physical trauma to that part of its body, much more so than creatures that only have a pair of eyes. This is because its skull would be comparatively weak in that area, as it cannot be particularly thick without restricting the creature to a particular field of vision. An adaptation in the direction of reinforcing the skull could visually resemble something like a VISOR, only integrated into the skull instead of outside of it.
I'm at a loss to explain how something like that would evolve in a natural setting, but...
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