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STOMATOPOD crustaceans, commonly named mantis shrimps, have compound eyes of unique design. A central band composed of six parallel rows of ommatidia separates two peripheral ommatidial groups, and all three regions view the same area of visual space^1–3. In the central bands of members of the stomatopod superfamily Gonodactyloidea, four of the ommatidial rows are built of tiers of photoreceptors; in two of these rows, the photoreceptors themselves contain coloured filters⁴. Such a design could in principle produce many spectral classes of photoreceptors using only a single visual pigment^4,5. We measured the absorption spectra of the coloured filters and the visual pigments in frozen sections of retinae of a typical species, Pseudosquilla ciliata, using end-on microspectrophotometry. The retina contains not one, but as many as ten visual pigments, each in a distinct photoreceptor class, having …