The dorsal compound eye of simuliid flies: an eye specialized for the detection of small, rapidly moving objects

The highly specialized dorsal compound eye of male Simuliids is especially adapted to detect during flight the females which are very small animals (1X3 mm). At dawn, the eye functions close to the physical limit imposed by the quantum fluctuations of light. In birght illuminations, light-qauntum noise is not a limiting factor as can be shown by behavioural experiments.