Eyes yet again

[ffutures]

I've been reading through Flatland again to make sure I'm getting things right, and finally found the bit I thought I remembered. Annoyingly it's only in chapter 4:

when the end containing her eye or mouth--for with us these two organs are identical--is the part that meets our eye, then we see nothing but a highly lustrous point

So in other words I was right to say that Flatlanders have a single mouth / eye organ; there really are all sorts of evolutionary snags, but if Abbott actually says it I suppose I have to go with it. I should have checked it the first time it came up.

Fortunately I haven't said much about this yet, so it won't be too hard to change things. There can still be specialised parts of the mouth for different purposes - transparent jaws, optical sensors around the perimeter, and some sort of vacuole system to get the food out of the way. I know it sounds a bit icky, and I'll try not to get too gross, but it looks like I'm stuck with it.

Comments

Rationale

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

How would this develop?

Suppose proto-Flatlanders developed light-sensitive bits on their tasting organs, as another way of obtaining information about whether something was edible or not. (Not entirely unreasonable; light-sensitivity is fairly common, for example, some butterfly genitalia!) Colour vision would be most useful at close range, so let's make this colour vision.

Opening the mouth wwould give the equivalent of the cup eye. Almost closing it would give a pinhole camera and an actual image, but only with enough sensitivity.

Adding a lens would improve things. Maybe a clear tongue?

Eating is still a vulnerable moment, but better to be blind while eating than blind all the time. Having mates to watch while you chewed would be a spur to social organization.

Re: Rationale

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's very nice - thanks, I'll steal it!