English: The lens on the right represents the arrangement of very long and thin eye lens cells laid down in layers like an onion. Ends of short fiber cells are washed by the aqueous humor full of nutrients and are drawn as green. As the cells lengthen the ends become proportionately less of the cell so very little cell surface has direct access to aqueous humor and are drawn yellow. By the time the cells reach their full length they become completely covered by many layers of other cells making their metabolite exchange completely reliant on communication with overlaying cells. Photos of sheep lens gap junction plaques labeled for a connexin (CX50) on the left are important structures for transport and substantially change in appearance with the changing nutritional environment including the distance from the cell ends. While drawn to give the impression of the length and width of the fiber cells the drawing only contains around 2000 cells whereas an actual one year old sheep lens is estimated to have over 3,000,000 cells