What Scientists Learned From Putting 3-D Glasses on Praying Mantises
The insects have a kind of stereovision that works in a completely different way than ours.
Praying mantises spend most of their lives being still. But to put 3-D glasses on these insects, Vivek Nityananda had to get them to stay really still.
He would put their cages in a freezer for five minutes, to quite literally chill them out, before sticking their legs down with tiny blobs of Plasticine. He then put a little drop of beeswax between their eyes, and pushed two tear-shaped colored filters into the wax. These bespoke glasses allowed Nityananda and his colleagues to show a different image to each of the mantis’s bulbous eyes. And by doing that, he that these animals have a unique kind of stereovision. “It’s a completely different mechanism than what we’ve seen in any other animal,” Nityananda say.
