Meeting Abstract
It has long been appreciated (and celebrated) that certain species have sensory capabilities that humans do not share, for example ultraviolet vision and magnetoreception. What is less appreciated however, is that our position as terrestrial human scientists can significantly affect our study of animal senses and signals, even within modalities that we do share. For example, our acute vision can lead us to over-interpret the relevance of fine patterns in animals with coarser vision, and our Cartesian heritage as scientists can lead us to divide sensory modalities into orthogonal parameters (e.g. hue and brightness for color vision, angle and degree for polarization vision), even though this division may not exist within the animal itself. In addition, we often use lab-based assays to make ecological predictions, even though the sensory environment is completely different. Finally, we may assume that what is salient and striking to us must be so to other animals. This talk examines two cases from marine visual ecology where a reconsideration of our biases as sharp-eyed Cartesian land mammals can help address questions in visual ecology. The first case examines the enormous variation in visual acuity among animals with image-forming eyes, and focuses on how acknowledging the typically poorer resolving power of animals can help us interpret the function of color patterns in cleaner shrimp and their client fish. The other case examines the how the typical division of polarized light stimuli into angle and degree of polarization is problematic, and how a Stokes vector interpretation is both closer to the physiological truth and resolves a number of issues, particularly when considering the propagation of polarized light underwater and whether polarization vision can be used to break camouflage.
