Often the size of an insects eyes, give a clue as to how important vision is to them, although it is difficult to imagine quite what an insect see once it has converted the many images that its compound eye sees into something useful.
Before We Had Brains 2 – Of Arthropods and Other Things.
Long before humans developed the brains they have today, a great many other animals had already evolved co-ordinated nerve centres completely effective in directing their everyday lives. In 'Before We Had Brains 1', I considered what might have been our earliest vertebrate ancestor - probably a worm-like creature that lived in the sea; and before that we must have passed through a variety of preceding invertebrate stages - it's been a long road. Almost as extraordinary is that while we were on the evolutionary march from comparative simplicity to our present complexity, many other animals hardly changed at all. Once a…