Eye Makeup Detail

A refractive cornea is only useful out of water; in water, there is no difference in refractive index between the vitreous fluid and the surrounding water. Hence creatures which have returned to the water—penguins and seals, for example—lose their refractive cornea and return to lens-based vision. An alternative solution, borne by some divers, is to have a very strong cornea.
• Reflector eyes
An alternative to a lens is to line the inside of the eye with " mirrors", and reflect the image to focus at a central point. The nature of these eyes means that if one were to peer into the pupil of an eye, one would see the same image that the organism would see, reflected back out.
Many small organisms such as rotifers, copeopods and platyhelminths use such organs, but these are too small to produce usable images. Some larger organisms, such as scallops, also use reflector eyes. The scallop Pecten has up to 100 millimeter-scale reflector eyes fringing the edge of its shell. It detects moving objects as they pass successive lenses.