An alternative to a lens is to line the inside of the eye with "
mirrors", and reflect the image to focus at a central point. The nature of these eyes means that if one were to peer into the pupil of an eye, one would see the same image that the organism would see, reflected back out.

Many small organisms such as rotifers, copeopods and platyhelminths use such organs, but these are too small to produce usable images. Some larger organisms, such as scallops, also use reflector eyes. The scallop "Pecten" has up to 100 millimeter-scale reflector eyes fringing the edge of its shell. It detects moving objects as they pass successive lenses.

There is at least one vertebrate, the spookfish, whose eyes include reflective optics for focusing of light. Each of the two eyes of a spookfish collects light from both above and below; the light coming from above is focused by a lens, while that coming from below, by a curved mirror composed of many layers of small reflective plates made of guanine crystals.

Parabolic superposition
Other
Reflector eyes
Evolution