Blurred Vision Helps Spiders See Clearly

Blurred Vision Helps Spiders See Clearly

Jumping spiders, which hunt by pouncing on their prey, gauge distances to their unsuspecting meals in a way that appears to be unique in the animal kingdom, a new study finds. The superability boils down to seeing green. Scientists in Japan discovered that the arachnids accurately sense distances by comparing a blurry version of an image with a clear one, a method called image defocus.

The research team doesn’t know if any other animals employ similar depth-perception techniques, though they think the findings could have important implications for the future design of visual systems in robots.