Dragon fly eye, lens very precise?

[Spinnor]

Is the exact shape of the lens of a dragon fly ommatidium genetically encoded?

I guess that the radius of curvature for both the front and back surfaces of the lens is somehow genetically encoded, call them r_f and f_b? I guess nature has come up with an optimal design for the dragonfly lens, in principle could genetic variations give rise to an infinite combination of values for r_f and f_b?

How nature forms those seemingly perfect lenses seems quite some trick, see,

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/517/justeyevj5.jpg/sr=1

Thanks for any help!

 

[Spinnor]

On closer look I guess they are not so perfect, see,

http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/153459/enlarge

or

http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/micro_11_14/m19_compeye.jpg

Still pretty incredible.

 

[Andy Resnick]

http://cronodon.com/BioTech/Insect_Vision.html

AFAIK, each omnatidium can be considered a point detector, not an image-forming system- what matters more is the efficiency of light collection, and isolated non-functional cells do not materially degrade the overall image-forming ability of the compound eye. The spatial arrangement of omnatidiums (?) can be explained by basic physics- hexagonal packing is the most efficient (AFAIK).