ABSTRACT
Jewel beetles are colorful insects, which use vision to recognize their conspecifics and can be lured with colored traps. We investigated the retina and coloration of one member of this family, the flathead oak borer Coraebus undatus using microscopy, spectrometry, polarimetry, electroretinography and intracellular recordings of photoreceptor cell responses. The compound eyes are built of a highly unusual mosaic of mirror-symmetric or chiral ommatidia that are randomly rotated along the body axes. Each ommatidium has eight photoreceptors, two of them having rhabdomeres in tiers. The eyes contain six spectral classes of photoreceptors, peaking in the UV, blue, green and red. Most photoreceptors have moderate polarization sensitivity with randomly distributed angular maxima. The beetles have the necessary retinal substrate for complex color vision, required to recognize conspecifics and suitable for a targeted design of color traps. However, the jewel beetle array of freely rotated ommatidia is very different from the ordered mosaic in insects that have object-directed polarization vision. We propose that ommatidial rotation enables the cancelling out of polarization signals, thus allowing stable color vision, similar to the rhabdomeric twist in the eyes of flies and honeybees.
Footnotes
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: A.M., C.Q., G.B.; Methodology: A.M., C.Q., K.A., G.B.; Formal analysis: A.M., G.B.; Investigation: A.M., M.I., C.Q., K.A., G.B.; Resources: C.Q., G.B.; Data curation: G.B.; Writing - original draft: A.M., G.B.; Writing - review & editing: A.M., M.I., C.Q., K.A., G.B.; Supervision: G.B.; Project administration: G.B.; Funding acquisition: G.B.
Funding
This material is based upon work supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Award No. FA9550-19-1-7005, the Slovenian research agency ARRS (Javna Agencija za Raziskovalno Dejavnost RS grant P3-0333 to G.B.) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Kaken-hi 18H05273 and 18F18807 to K.A.). M.I. is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow. We are grateful to the Generalitat de Catalunya for financial support to C.Q.
Data availability
The original light micrographs in high resolution are available from figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12236195.v1
Supplementary information
Supplementary information available online at https://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.225920.supplemental
- Received March 30, 2020.
- Accepted June 3, 2020.
- © 2020. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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