How many eyes do flies have?

The compound eye: many eyes in one

• The strange looking eyes of the To fly basically consist of several eyes. This is called omatidia.
• The individual eyes form a connected complex, which is why one speaks in biology of either the compound eye or the complex eye. A compound eye therefore consists of several omatidia.
• Because of their individual eyes, flies process the visual stimuli from their environment differently than people who have lens eyes. With each omatidia, the animals perceive only one pixel of their environment. This form of visual processing is called "musical vision".
• This type of perception causes the flies to perceive their environment blurred. Clear pictures are also not important to their survival. It is crucial for them to be able to see fast movements in a targeted manner, and that is exactly what a compound eye enables.

Flies have an improved ability to react

• Many insects have compound eyes, because they depend on understanding their surroundings and, above all, quickly noticing the movements occurring in them. Their brains do not allow them to react too quickly, so nature has resorted to another trick.


Meat flies in the apartment - how to avoid them

You don't want to find large meat flies in your apartment? Then you can …

• The many omatidia provide thousands of individual images and therefore every part of the environment can be assessed. This means that flies see a movement that is normally fast for us, as if in slow motion.
• Even the quick hit with the fly swatter is slower for them than for humans. Expressed in numbers: while humans only process 24 images per second, flies have processed a quantity of 250 images in the same time.