New paper on stomatopod colour preference

Many animals show innate colour preferences which may act to enhance the fitness of a naive animal during visual tasks such as predator avoidance, mate choice and foraging.

Our recent paper on the colour preference of the mantis shrimp Odontodactylus. scyllarus explores the relevance of colour preferences to behavioural tasks. Thanks to Lego for providing the coloured stimuli!

The paper can be found here

Two New Papers! The Optics of Oil Droplets and Fish Coloration

Two new papers from the group in this month's issue of JEB!  

A new paper from David Wilby (and a front cover) on the optics of oil droplets - Wilby, D.Roberts, N.W. 2017 Optical influence of oil droplets on cone photoreceptor sensitivity. Journal of Experimental Biology 220: 1997-2004 

And a lovely new paper from Martin How on disruptive coloration in reef fish - Phillips, G.A.C. How, M.J., Lange, J.E., Marshall, J., Cheney, K. 2017 Disruptive coloration in reef fish: does matching the background reduce predation risk? Journal of Experimental Biology 220: 1962-1974

 

Animal coloration: production, perception, function and application

New themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B is out - Animal coloration: production, perception, function and application’ compiled and edited by Tim Caro, Mary Caswell Stoddard and Devi Stuart-Fox

Check out our paper on the selection of different optical properties in mechanisms of structural colouration.

Selection of the intrinsic polarization properties of animal optical materials creates enhanced structural reflectivity and camouflage

Kathryn D. Feller, Thomas M. Jordan, David Wilby, Nicholas W. Roberts

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2017 372 20160336; DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0336. Published 22 May 2017

 

Lots of new papers out from the group!

The first quarter of the year has seen another 6 papers come out from the group.

Two new ones in print this week are: 

Ilse's paper on the eye movements of stomatopods and their different levels of independence depending on the visual task (and a front cover too! Wonderful photo by Mike Bok)

Daly, I.M., How, M.J., Partridge, J.C., and Roberts, N.W.  2017 The independence of eye movements in a stomatopod crustacean is task dependent. Journal of Experimental Biology 220: 1360-1368; doi: 10.1242/jeb.153692

And Dan's new paper on how plant viruses affect the polarization of light reflected from leaves. 

Maxwell, D.J., Partridge, J.C., Roberts, N.W., Boonham, N. and Foster, G.D. 2017 The effects of surface structure mutations in Arabidopsis thaliana on the polarization of reflections from virus-infected leaves. PLoS ONE 12(3): e0174014. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0174014

See the publication page for full details