The mysterious creature was only a single-celled organism; yet looked like an eye and, on closer examination, had most of the features associated with a human eye such as a lens, cornea and retina. The odd microscopic animal was, National Geographic reports, detected by Greg Gavelis of the University of British Columbia. Gavelis and colleagues proceeded to study this odd, alien looking creature in more detail.
The creature is a type of warnowiid called “dinoflagellates,” and these microscopic life forms are rare indeed. They are types of predatory marine plankton, feeding off smaller cellular organisms. The few cases of these algae-like creatures over the past 100 years have been off the coasts of Canada and Japan. Studying warnowiids has proved difficult because they fall apart and proceed to disintegrate when removed from salt water.
Warnowiids are rare enough, but coming across one that resembles the eye of a mammal was unprecedented. In a research note, Gavelis explains the structure with enthusiasm: “It’s an amazingly complex structure for a single-celled organism to have evolved. 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.”
Expanding on this, Professor Leander, who heads up the research lab where the discovery was made, told Science News: “The internal organization of the retinal component of the ocelloid is reminiscent of the polarizing filters on the lenses of cameras and sunglasses. It has hundreds of closely packed membranes lined up in parallel.”
Further examination revealed more of the eye-embedded creatures. Examination showed that the structures are not exactly eyes as we would know them, but they do serve the same purpose. The structure has been termed “ocelloid.”
It is thought that the ocelloid that enables the warnowiid to “see” transparent cells for it to feed on; on detection, the eye trigger various chemicals which causes the creature to alter direction. The next phase of the research, Cosmos reports, is to determine if the ocelloid allows the warnowiid to differentiate between different shapes.
The findings have been published in the science journal Nature. The paper is titled “Eye-like ocelloids are built from different endosymbiotically acquired components.”
