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.
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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.
00:14This is a close-up image of the Alseopid polychaete worm.
00:17Experts say its eyes weigh 20 times the weight of the rest of its head, or what Science Alert
00:22reports would be about the same if our human eyes weighed around 110 pounds each.
00:27The wildest thing is that the worms feed in the middle of the night, at the bottom
00:31of the ocean, meaning experts really didn't understand why they would need such big eyes.
00:35But now we might finally have an idea.
00:37A new study discovered that this particular marine worm is able to not only see small
00:41and distant objects, but also track them.
00:43This is sort of a huge find considering previously only vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopods
00:49were believed to have the ability to do so.
00:51Most other worms only have extremely low-resolution basic vision or direction photoreception,
00:56which is essentially just being able to track the direction light is coming from.
00:59The researchers concluded that this extremely small, almost transparent worm has eyesight
01:04that is essentially on par with mice or rats.
01:07Previous studies have concluded that their eyes are also able to pick up ultraviolet
01:10wavelengths particularly well, meaning these deep-sea worms might still be hiding some
01:14tricks up their ocular sleeves.