(July 1, 2015) A
single-celled marine plankton evolved a miniature version of a multi-cellular
eye, possibly to help see its prey better, according to University of British
Columbia (UBC) research published today in Nature.
In fact, the ‘ocelloid’ within the planktonic predator looks
so much like a complex eye that it was originally mistaken for the eye of an
animal that the plankton had eaten.
“It’s an amazingly complex structure for a single-celled
organism to have evolved,” said lead author Greg Gavelis, a zoology PhD student
at UBC. “It contains a collection of sub-cellular organelles that look very
much like the lens, cornea, iris and retina of multicellular eyes found in
humans and other larger animals.”
Scientists still don’t know exactly how the marine plankton,
called warnowiids, use the eye. Warnowiids use small harpoon-like structures to
hunt prey cells in the plankton, many of which are transparent.