The Xeno peckii, a tiny parasite that sees the light of day for just a few hours to look for a mate, has some of the strangest eyes ever seen, scientists said November 4. The raspberry-like eyes each have 50 lenses, and each lens forms its own little image of the insect's world, the team at Cornell University in New York said. A 3D reconstruction of part of the parasite's visual system is shown. In contrast to the conventional compound eye that samples the visual world point by point, in Strepsiptera optic units sample "shunks" of the image. The lenses are represented in yellow, the retinae in red, the receptor cells and the lamina in blue, and the tissue between the eyelets in green. A picture of the lenses is shown alongside the reconstructed lenses.