Research on sensory processing or the way animals see, hear, smell, taste, feel and electrically and magnetically sense their environment has advanced a great deal over the last fifteen years. This book discusses the most important themes that have emerged from recent research and provides a summary of likely future directions. The book starts with two sections on the detection of sensory signals over long and short ranges by aquatic animals, covering the topics of navigation, communication, and finding food and other localized sources. The next section, the co-evolution of signal and sense, deals with how animals decide whether the source is prey, predator or mate by utilizing receptors that have evolved to take full advantage of the acoustical properties of the signal. Organisms living in the deep-sea environment have also received a lot of recent attention, so the next section deals with visual adaptations to limited light environments where sunlight is replaced by bioluminescence and the visual system has undergone changes to optimize light capture and sensitivity. The last section on central co-ordination of sensory systems covers how signals are processed and filtered for use by the animal. This book will be essential reading for all researchers and graduate students interested in sensory systems.

This volume is a compilation of the papers presented at a meeting that took place in April 1980 at the Mote Marine Laboratory, Sarasota, Florida. The meeting and this volume are outgrowths of two earlier international meetings on marine bio-acoustics that occurred in 1963 and 1966 (Tavolga 1964, 1967). The first meeting took place at the Lerner Marine Laboratory of the American Museum of Natural History, while the second meeting was at the American Museum itself, and was under the sponsorship of the Department of Animal Behavior. It is apparent that these two volumes have had immense impact on the current study of marine bio-acoustics, and particularly on fish audition. In a preliminary conference in Sarasota in 1979 we decided that it was time for another such meeting, to bring together as many as possible of the investigators interested in fish acoustics in order to assess the current state of our knowledge and predict directions for research for the next several years. Such a meeting appeared par ticularly timely, since over the past four or five years there have been many new studies that have provided new empirical and theoretical work on basic mechanisms of fish audition. Furthermore, it became evident, as we made up preliminary lists of possible participants, that few of the currently active workers were in the field back in 1966. In fact, of the current participants, only Drs."

The past two decades have seen an extraordinary growth of interest in the auditory mechanisms of a wide range of vertebrates and invertebrates. Investigations have ranged from auditory mechanisms in relatively simple animals where just a few cells are em ployed for detection of sound, to the highly complex detection and processing systems of man and the other mammals. Of particular significance to us has been the growing interest in general principles of vertebrate auditory system organization, as opposed to a specific and limited concern for the mammalian or even human systems. Some of the interest in nonmammalian systems has risen from the desire to fmd simpler experi mental models for both the essential components (e. g. , the hair cell receptor) and the more complex functions (e. g. , frequency analysis) of all vertebrate auditory systems. Interest has also risen from questions about the evolution of hearing and the covariation (or lack of it) in structure and function in a wide variety of biological solutions to the problems of acoustic mechanoreception. Of course, the desire to fmd simpler experi mental models and the need to answer questions about the evolution of hearing are not unrelated. In fact, detailed analyses of a variety of systems have led several times to the realization that some of the "simple systems" are more complex than initially thought.