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Under a magnification of 1414X, this scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image depicted the compound eye morphology of an insect suspected to be an ant, which was caught in the tangled web of a brown recluse spider, Loxosceles reclusa. Note the repeating hexagonal pattern on the eye’s surface. The compound eye is actually a single large eye, made up of many repeating units known as ommatidia, each composed of a photoreceptor cell, support cell, and pigment cells. Though each of these visual mechanisms functions as a separate organ, together they provide the organism with a compound picture of its environment. Referred to as the flicker effect, the compound eye is made very sensitive to movement, with each ommatidium turning on and off, as objects pass across its field of view. The bilateral anatomical placement of the insect's eyes provides the organism with a very wide range of visual sensitivity.
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