Compared to mammals, fish are often underestimated and dismissed as less complex organisms. To refute this hasty conclusion, Horst Bleckmann presents to you the highly developed cognitive abilities of fish.Did you know, for example, that fish are the largest group of all vertebrates, with about 30,000 species, and that they colonize all aquatic habitats? For this immense feat, they have evolved a variety of highly specialized sensory systems and behaviors. According to recent resea...

In this book, leading scientists in the fields of sensory biology, neuroscience, physics and engineering explore the basic operational principles and behavioral uses of flow sensing in animals and how they might be applied to engineering applications such as autonomous control of underwater or aerial vehicles.Although humans possess no flow-sensing abilities, countless aquatic (e.g. fish, cephalopods and seals), terrestrial (e.g. crickets and spiders) and aerial (e.g. bats) animals...

The Lateral Line System provides an overview of the key concepts and issues surrounding the development, evolution, neurobiology, and function of the lateral line, a fascinating yet somewhat enigmatic flow-sensing system. The book examines the historical precedence for linking the auditory and lateral line systems, its structure and development, use of the lateral line system of zebrafish as a model system, physical principles governing the response properties of the lateral line,...

An extensively revised third edition of this introduction to neuroethology - the neuronal basis of animal behaviour - for zoology, biology and psychology undergraduate students. The book focuses on the roles of individual nerve cells in behaviour, from simple startle responses to complex behaviours such as route learning by rats and singing by crickets and birds. It begins by examining the relationship between brains and behaviour, and showing how study of specialised behaviours reveals ne...

Neurosciences – a comprehensive approachThis textbook covers neuroscience from cellular and molecular mechanisms to behavior and cognitive processing. We also address evolution of the nervous system, computational neuroscience, the history of neuroscience as a discipline and neurophilosophy – to name but a few. The book provides the newest state-of-the-art knowledge about neuroscience from across the animal kingdom, with particular emphasis on model specie...

The hearing organs of non-mammals, which show quite large and systematic differences to each other and to those of mammals, provide an invaluable basis for comparisons of structure and function. By taking advantage of the vast diversity of possible study organisms provided by the "library" that is biological diversity, it is possible to learn how complex functions are realized in the inner ear through the evolution of specific structural, cellular and molecular configurations. Insights fro...

Fish Hearing and Bioacoustics is an anthology of review papers that were presented at a special symposium to honor Arthur Popper and Richard Fay on May 25th 2013 at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, FL. The research presentations at this conference spanned the range of disciplines covered by Fay and Popper during their long and productive careers. The book includes the following thematic areas for the papers in this special volume: morphology and anatomy of the inner ear and lateral ...

Contributions to Sensory Physiology: Volume 5 presents a theory about the physiological basis of sensation. It discusses some research made in microscopic anatomy and psychophysics. It addresses the functional significance and physiological mechanisms of the sensory systems. Some of the topics covered in the book are the simple cells of the striate cortex; the concept of a receptive field; definition of a unimodal simple cell; inhibitory components in the receptive field; stimulus contrast...

The collection of chapters in this book present the concept of matched filters: response characteristics “matching” the characteristics of crucially important sensory inputs, which allows detection of vital sensory stimuli while sensory inputs not necessary for the survival of the animal tend to be filtered out, or sacrificed. The individual contributions discuss that the evolution of sensing systems resulted from the necessity to achieve the most efficient sensing of vital information at ...

I have been asked to write a brief foreword to this volume honoring Hisako Ikeda, providing a review of the accomplishments in our field over the past four decades, when Hisako was an active participant. This I am delighted to do. It has been a most exciting time in vision research and Hisako has been right in the middle of much of the excitement, publishing on a wide variety of topics and providing much new data and many new insights. Hisako's research career can be divided by decades int...

First published in 1975. Because of its general importance to a number of related disciplines, students of the modern science of neurophysiology have benefited from time to time from an introductory survey presented at a more elementary level than is usually found in advanced textbooks. The dynamism of the field is such, however, that more up-to-date statements incorporating many of the exciting new findings concerning cellular neurophysiology are required periodically. This text is aimed ...

Advances in Physiological Sciences, Volume 31: Sensory Physiology of Aquatic Lower Vertebrates covers the proceedings of the symposia of the 28th International Congress of Physiology. The book presents 17 papers that detail advance findings in the sensory physiology of aquatic lower vertebrates. The coverage of the text includes electroreceptors in Indian catfish teleosts; electroreceptive microampulla in the African mudfish Clarias lazera; and species specificity of electric organ dischar...