Abstract
Our understanding of animal vision is dominated by examples of creatures that, like us, have a single pair of prominent eyes positioned on the head. However, a great diversity of invertebrates have approached vision with an entirely different strategy - using dozens or hundreds of eyes, often scattered across their entire bodies, in order to gather spatial information about light.

In some cases, these eyes are associated with robust and complicated visual tasks including navigation, predator avoidance and image-forming vision. These distributed approaches to vision necessarily demand unique sets of neurological circuits in order to accurately assess visual information despite this information being gathered by eyes that are often randomly arranged and may have overlapping fields of view.

How are neuronal signals from distributed visual systems transmitted, integrated, and consolidated into useful information about an animal’s world? How did these distributed visual systems arise; are they derived from existing chemo- or mechano-sensory systems, or did they evolve de novo? What can these flexible, resilient sensory arrays teach us about distributed networking and information processing?

Michael Bok is working towards answering these questions by delving into the weird and wonderful world of marine fan worms, which possess both distributed and consolidated eye arrangements governing a single conserved startle response.      

Biography
Michael is a a BBSRC Future Leaders Fellow in the Ecology of Vision Group.  He is interested in the evolution and function of visual systems in diverse marine invertebrates.

On his website you can view his professional research information and wildlife photography: https://www.michaelbok.com/