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Since the discovery of a single white‐eyed male in a population of red eyed flies over 100 years ago (Morgan, 1910), the compound eye of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has been a favorite experimental system for identifying genes that regulate various aspects of development. For example, a fair amount of what we know today about enzymatic pathways and vesicular transport is due to the discovery and subsequent characterization of eye color mutants such as white. Likewise, our present day understanding of organogenesis has been aided considerably by studies of mutations, such as eyeless, that either reduce or eliminate the compound eyes. But by far the phenotype that has provided levers into the greatest number of experimental fields has been the humble “rough” eye. The fly eye is composed of several hundred unit‐eyes that are also called ommatidia. These unit eyes are packed into a …