Saccadic head movements in mantids

Saccadic tracking of targets mediated by the anterior-lateral eyes of jumping spiders

“…22%. This is remarkably similar to the 26% undershoot found for saccadic head movements in response to moving stimuli in mantids (Lea and Mueller 1977), which, unlike spiders, have compound eyes. Analogous to mantid compound eyes, the combined visual field of the forward-facing simple eyes of salticids has a relatively large acute zone, which might explain this "fixation deficit" (Mittelstaedt 1957): if the frontal acute zone of the eye is large enough, saccade magnitudes smaller than the lateral angular position of the stimulus are sufficient to bring it into a region of high acuity.…”

Response Properties of Visual Interneurons to Motion Stimuli in the Praying Mantis, Tenodera aridifolia

“…Praying mantises are predatory insects that detect potential prey primarily by means of vision. After detection of a potential prey, they sometimes fixate or track it with movements of their head and/or body (Levin and Maldonado, 1970;Lea and Mueller, 1977;Rossel, 1980;Liske and Mohren, 1984;Yamawaki, 2000b). During visual fixation and tracking, mantises try to keep the target image on a foveal region, which is a limited retinal zone particularly designed for high spatial resolution (Horridge and Duelli, 1979;Rossel, 1979).…”

Shrimps that pay attention: saccadic eye movements in stomatopod crustaceans

“…Because of their convergent prey-capture technique, praying mantids (the insects after which mantis shrimps were named) show a number of parallels to stomatopods. These raptorial insects will look at and align their bodies with rapidly moving prey before strikes [35]. They also show tracking eye movements, both smooth and saccadic, using rotational head movements.…”