Here's why you should get married and have children. They ask questions like, "Daddy, can ants see?"

My son Max, 8, just wanted to know. I wasn't sure, so naturally, we had to find out. The answer is yes, but not so well. The Straight Dope has more:

In terms of distance, an ant can see the sun, just like you can. That's what, 93 million miles away?

(But)..."a focused image".....isn't possible given the nature of the insect compound eye. Ants don't HAVE a focal distance, since they don't have a lens and retina arrangement...an ant (or any insect or crustacean with compound eyes) can presumably see exactly as well as a digital camera that has only a few thousand pixels resolution, so distance from the eye is irrelevant. Each individual facet of the compound eye corresponds to a single pixel. That's not going to be a very detailed image, no matter what. Something like a dragonfly or horsefly, on the other hand, has tens of thousands of facets, giving much better resolution.

There we have it. So, Max helps educate me. And he makes a mean bean dip.

UPDATE: Mike in Sheboygan, at het2blog, observes that his seven-year-old had a sorta similar question: where do carrot seeds come from? This sorta stuff keeps us parents on our toes, if we're paying attention. And here's the answer, BTW.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 28, 2005 04:14 PM

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