Editing Eye (section)

====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.<ref name=Land1992/>

Many small organisms such as [[rotifer]]s, copepods and [[flatworm]]s use such organs, but these are too small to produce usable images. Some larger organisms, such as [[scallop]]s, also use reflector eyes. The scallop ''[[Pecten (bivalve)|Pecten]]'' has up to 100 millimetre-scale reflector eyes fringing the edge of its shell. It detects moving objects as they pass successive lenses.<ref name=Land1992/>

There is at least one vertebrate, the [[Brownsnout spookfish|spookfish]], whose eyes include reflective optics for focusing of light. Each of the two eyes of a spookfish collects light from both above and below; the light coming from above is focused by a lens, while that coming from below, by a curved mirror composed of many layers of small reflective plates made of [[guanine]] [[crystal]]s.<ref name="wagner et al">{{cite journal |author1=Wagner, H.J. |author2=Douglas, R.H. |author3=Frank, T.M. |author4=Roberts, N.W. |author5=Partridge, J.C. |name-list-style=amp|title=A Novel Vertebrate Eye Using Both Refractive and Reflective Optics |journal=Current Biology |volume=19 |pages=108–114 |date=Jan 27, 2009 | pmid=19110427 | doi=10.1016/j.cub.2008.11.061 |issue=2
|s2cid=18680315 |doi-access=free |bibcode=2009CBio...19..108W }}</ref>