Appendix 7—figure 3. Photomechanical rhabdomere movements were localized inside those seven ommatidia that form the normal pseudopupil.

(A) High-speed video recordings in the Drosophila eye showed clear rhabdomere displacement before (marked blue) and after (marked red) a blue/green flash only within seven ommatidia (orange area). This was revealed by subtracting the corresponding frame contours. The rhabdomeres of these seven ommatidia aligned directly with the blue/green stimulus, which was carefully centered above in the microscope port (Appendix 7—figure 1). Marginal rhabdomere movements were further detected in six other neighboring ommatidia (yellow area). These results meant that only the rhabdomeres that faced the centered Orthodromic blue/green stimulus absorbed its light and contracted, while the rest of the eye reflected this stimulus and remained immobile. Note that this local rhabdomere activation pattern was restricted by the same eye design principle that causes the insect eye pseudopupil. (B) The Drosophila eye, in which photoreceptors were made to express green-fluorescence, displayed a green pseudopupil only form those seven ommatidia that directly faced the observer (and the blue light source through the microscope lenses). This happened because these ommatidia (their rhabdomeres) both absorbed the incident blue light and their GFP-molecules released green light back to the observer’s eye/camera, while the other ommatidia around reflected the blue light.