the short answer is no, but for the explanation on why this is, we’re going to take a quick (AND VERY SIMPLIFIED) jaunt into optical physics! HOLD ONTO YOUR BUTTS.
so ants do have eyeballs, like lots of animals including you and me. and while your eyes and an ant’s may seem very different, they work using the same fundamental principles.
an eyeball, whether from an ant, human, giant squid or sea scallop, works in pretty much the same way. light enters through an opening in the front, gets focused through some kind of lens of varying complexity and power, and is projected onto a layer of light-sensitive cells which transmit the incoming image to the brain, or whatever you might have instead of that. (see: Box Jellyfish)
the true limiting factor here is the lens! because of how light physics works, lenses actually decrease in power as they get smaller. this means that no matter how complex or advanced an insect’s eyeball is, it’s never going to have the basic ability of an eye with a larger and more powerful lens. some ants can see pretty well! lots of spiders can see pretty well, too. but they just aren’t on a human’s level any more than a human is going to be on an eagle’s level. (there are other factors at play here like the general structure of the eyeball, but there’s only so much you can do with a handful of tiny lenses in each compound eye. sorry, ants!)
it is possible to get around that limitation by just kind of stacking a bunch of lenses on top of each other and calling it a day. this is the driving principle behind microscopes, telescopes, and your dad’s binoculars. as far as I know, we have yet to discover an animal with microscope eyeballs but that would be rad!
but even those wouldn’t be able to see things on the molecule level, because molecules are just too tiny for us to see with light in the first place! the only way to visually see a molecule right now is with an electron microscope, which functions more like a radar scanner than an eyeball. the electron microscope bombards the target with a beam of electrons and reads the scatter pattern they produce as an image.
the result looks like this:
YES, THOSE ARE ATOMS.
so until we find an animal with electron-beam eyeballs, I gotta say there’s nothing out there able to see actual molecules with the naked eye.
this concludes our jaunt into physics! I hope you enjoyed it.
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ifesbob 