Caterpillar eyes

It is easy to think that the two large orbs at the eating end of a caterpillar are its eyes, in fact they are not. If you look more closely, you will see a series of spots that look more like damage or an infection, these are the caterpillars eyes.

Most capterpillars have twelve eyes, six each side, some have only ten eyes. In the blip, you can clearly see a group of four eyes and a fifth slightly offset. The sixth eye is the point of light just to the left of the offset eye. Unfortunately it fell just outside the focal plane.

These eyes (ocelli or stemmata) are simple eyes as opposed the multi cell compound eyes that the butterfly will end up with. These ocelli can sense light and dark but cannot form an image.

The image is at maximum macro and maximum crop, so this is as close as I can get with this lens.

I can feel a series of eye shots coming on, but I am not committing to a daily thing, let's just go with the flow.

Dave