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Abstract

Cuttlefish are masters of disguise. They can change their colour and texture almost instantly and have a remarkable ability to blend in to their underwater environment. Dr How has been studying a particularly flashy attribute of these species, the ability to create patterns that move across their skin. In this talk, Dr How will describe how his team is attempting to discover why these animals use these patterns, culminating in the ‘mesmerising’ hunting display of broadclub cuttlefish.

Biography

Martin has spent his career trying to see the world from the perspective of invertebrates. For his PhD he studied the visually guided behaviour of fiddler crabs at the Australian National University by filming and processing natural scenes of signalling fiddler crabs from a crab’s perspective. Then studying the communication signals of the giant cuttlefish, which uses chromatophore organs to produce moving body patterns. He subsequently moved to the University of Queensland (UQ) to investigate the remarkable visual system of mantis shrimps. These crustaceans possess one of the most complex eyes in the natural world, with 12 different colour receptors and at least 6 different polarization channels. Here, he contributed to the ground-breaking discovery that these animals use a serial colour vision system unlike any known in nature (Science 343:411-413). In recent years he has become fascinated by why some animals have opted to use the polarization of light instead of colour. His recent work has shown that some species of crustacean use a sensitive polarization vision system instead of colour. This is a new and exciting field of visual ecology offering multiple avenues of research at the anatomical, physiological, behavioural and ecological scales.

Furthermore, he is now beginning to identify a number of biologically inspired technological applications for these findings in the fields of neuroscience, medicine, material science, sensor design, and image processing.