Abstract
Despite the large evolutionary distance between vertebrates and insects, the visual systems of these two taxa bear remarkable similarities that have been noted repeatedly, including by pioneering neuroanatomists such as Ramón y Cajal. Fuelled by the advent of transgenic approaches in neuroscience, studies of visual system anatomy and function in both vertebrates and insects have made dramatic progress during the past two decades, revealing even deeper analogies between their visual systems than were noted by earlier observers. Such across-taxa comparisons have tended to focus on either elementary motion detection or relatively peripheral layers of the visual systems. By contrast, the aims of this Review are to expand the scope of this comparison to pathways outside visual motion detection, as well as to deeper visual structures. To achieve these aims, we primarily discuss examples from recent work in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) and the fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster), a pair of genetically tractable model organisms with comparatively sized, small brains. In particular, we argue that the brains of both vertebrates and insects are equipped with third-order visual structures that specialize in shared behavioural tasks, including postural and course stabilization, approach and avoidance, and some other behaviours. These wider analogies between the two distant taxa highlight shared behavioural goals and associated evolutionary constraints and suggest that studies on vertebrate and insect vision have a lot to inspire each other.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the members of the Portugues laboratory for helpful comments and discussions. R.T. was supported by EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship (ALTF732-2022) and HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship (LT0027/2023-L). R.P. was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) as part of the SPP 2205 — project 430156228. In addition, R.P. was supported by the DFG under the Excellence Strategy of Germany within the framework of the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (EXC 2145 SyNergy, identifier 390857198).
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Tanaka, R., Portugues, R. On analogies in vertebrate and insect visual systems. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 26, 456–475 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00932-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00932-3
