Image: Ted & Dani Percival/Flickr
First it was rats, and now cockroaches have their very own virtual reality set-up.In order to gain a deeper understanding of cockroach super-vision, a team of researchers designed and built a tiny cockroach VR system. Roaches navigate with a lot of help from touch and smell, but they also come armed with fairly bonkers visual abilities, thanks to clusters of photoreceptor cells thousands-deep. These dense clusters act to pool and amplify even the tiniest shards of light.The VR experiment consisted of a roach placed on a trackball, a situation designed to nullify its non-visual senses. White lights of varying intensity were then spun around the bug, forcing the bug to itself rotate in order to stabilize its vision. What the researchers found is that cockroaches can detect light with intensities as low as .005 lux, equivalent to a single photon every 10 seconds.Usually, we experience light as absolute torrents of light particles, where a single cubic-centimeter of sunlight might contain some 100,000,000 photons. Absorbing just a single one is known as a "quantum bump" and how it's processed by the roach brain is an intriguing mystery.A paper published in Experimental Biology describing the experiment notes that, "Massive temporal and spatial pooling takes place throughout the eye under dim conditions, involving currently unknown neural processing algorithms."