Compound Eyes

Apr 04, 2018 • 9:28 PM UTC

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140x Magnification

Microorganisms

Ronak Hati

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Unlike us gigantic creatures, arthropods do not have just two simple eyes. Everything is compound in the microscopic world. A post dedicated to some of the compound eyes I have observed as per instructions in the post https://microcosmos.foldscope.com/?p=29111
and also by sandwiching the specimens between a coverslip and a cavity slide.
1. Housefly :

The dangerous thing about this, is what it did to my room. A fly before may have laid eggs in one of the cracks in the wall that occured due to a water leakage. Several flies came out of the crack and occupied my room for a total of 6 hours. It was horrible to deal with them. I caught one and saw its compound eyes at 140x magnification.

Hexagonal-shaped ommatidia could be observed with a surface view.
2. Unidentified mosquito species :
This one was flying around in my room. Caught it in a zipper bag and observed its head under foldscope.

The thing here of interest is the yellow region. Any idea what function it has?
3. Ensign wasps :

This one has nice bluish-green eyes. A surface scan reveals compound eyes.

4. Pupa of black ants :
At first what I thought were white eggs carried by worker ants, turned out to be pupae. Ants living in cracks in concrete walls usually come out if the nest inside gets overheated. That’s what happened, and I could see a large number of such ants.

Foldscoped the pupa at low and high magnification, a bright source of light was needed to reveal the compound eyes. The pupa was taken in a cavity slide.
Keep foldscoping!
Ronak Hati,
Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous College, Mumbai.