Let’s be honest, chameleons have weird eyes. They can dart in any direction, unlike most animal eyes, and they’re just odd to look at. The reason behind this has mystified scientists for decades. However, thanks to 3D modeling and CT scans, scientists have now revealed the secret behind the chameleon’s weird, multidirectional eyes: spiral-shaped optic nerves.
New CT scans and 3D models reveal that chameleons’ eyes are wired differently from every other reptile’s, giving them the ability to look in two directions at once. Basically, they’re like tiny security cameras. Pretty neat, right?
The discovery was made by Dr. Juan Daza of Sam Houston State University and Dr. Edward Stanley of the Florida Museum of Natural History, who published their findings in Scientific Reports. They and their team took a look deep inside a leaf chameleon’s head (Brookesia minima) and found optic nerves coiling like an old-school landline telephone cord.
That looping structure is the secret behind the chameleon’s freakishly independent eyeball movement.
Scientists Finally Figured Out Why Chameleons Have Those Weird Eyes
Chameleon’s crazy eyes are an evolutionary advantage that allows them to scan for food more easily. Each eye can sweep the environment separately, but when something edible enters the frame, they both snap in together to calculate the perfect angle the chameleon needs to fire off its famously lightning-fast tongue strike.
Good thing, too, because for whatever reason, evolution gave them stiff necks that hardly articulate. By developing special spiral nerves, their eyes can do all the swiveling and environment scanning for them.
Researchers have been trying to pinpoint the specific reason their eyes can do all this they just haven’t had the technology we now have today. Aristotle once famously claimed that chameleons’ eyes could move all crazy like because they had no optic nerves at all. Man, what a moron Aristotle was, huh?
When Daza and Stanley checked scans from several other species, they found all chameleons shared this spiral wiring. Embryos even start with straight optic nerves that loop as they grow. They’re maximizing the range of motion of the eye by creating this coiled structure,” Daza said.
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