Eyes in the Night

Julia Schuckel, a postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) from Sweden’s Lund University is spending time in Panama’s Soberania National Park but she isn’t vacationing and trying to avoid the insects as most people do. Instead, she is spending time in a muddy, pool-filled Pipeline Road trying to catch insects, specifically the M. genalis, a nocturnal bee unlike any other.

The M. genalis eyes are built much like the diurnal bee, but studies show that they rely on eyesight to leave and return to its nest in almost complete darkness. Schuckel also found that the M. genalis only receive light through one less unlike other nocturnal creatures that receive light thought multiple lenses. This is very baffling to scientist like Schuckel because the M. genalis vision is unlike any other creature and she intends to find out how they do it.

Read more on this experiment here.