That's wild!!!

B R U H

(dana carvey) I did not know that!

It's always great to be some of the day's lucky 10,000! Apparently most vertebrates have the type of lens shape you'd expect (the fact that they are flexible and adjust their shape to focus vision was also a new one on me), but fish specifically have spherical lenses that focus by moving closer to and further from the retina!Vision in fish - Wikipedia

It looks like lenses are made mostly of proteins, so it's also wild that the "pearls" are still translucent after being boiled in milk, and I'm now full of questions about use cases in areas devoted to marine industries where they would have been a byproduct!

It sounded hard and heavy when it fell on the floor, too! How durable are they over time? Did jewelry get made out of them, and if so, did their relative fragility and ready availability in marine industries mean they weren't economically important enough to be mentioned much in Western literature, or are they there under a non-obvious name?

This needs to be in all resource-scavenging games as a craftable item now.

I'm just so amazed that it never turned up in "use all parts of the resource" homesteading/crafting content I've read over the decades.

All the rock-tumbling, shell-polishing, bead-carving stuff traders carried around with the nails and needles and scrimshaw and rope. Surely these are things sailors and fishers could save from their larger catches.

But it feels wilder that I don't remember this coming up in the commentaries any time I read The Tempest.

As far as I can remember, if that line gets a footnote at all, it's usually explained as a general part of the sea-change metaphor.

ooh interesting

(also eyes are especially weird in biology, they've done a TON of divergent and convergent evolution)

(oh, I bet! that sounds like a fascinating rabbithole to jump into someday. )