compound eyes consist of thousands of ommatidia which are the individual eye component ... these animals determine direction of movement of their prey in the la

compound eyes consist of thousands of ommatidia which are the individual eye component ... these animals determine direction of movement of their prey in the layer of neurons directly attached to each of these ommatidia ... each ommatidia has 6 immediate neighbor ommatidia ... leaving a given ommatidia are 6 optic neurons connecting that ommatidia with each of its neighbor ommatidia ... when a prey moves across the field of view directly in front of a given ommatidia a signal spike is transmitted in all directions outward through these 6 outgoing optic neurons ... interesting aspect is these neurons incur an intentional time delay in this spike signal ... when the time it takes a prey to move from being in front a given ommatidia to being in front of a neighbor ommatidia matches this optic neuron time delay the neighbor ommatidia senses this as a doubly large spike signal ... this gives the animal information as to the direction of prey movement across its visual field ... this optical computation directly is this simple layer of neurons gives the compound eye animal extremely fast response time when hunting down a moving prey ... think of watching a dragon fly chase down a flying mosquito