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."

To develop a science of hearing that is intellectu The five-day conference was held at the Mote ally satisfying we must first integrate the diverse, Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, May - extensive body of comparative research into an 24, 1990. The invited participants came from the evolutionary context. The need for this integra fields of comparative anatomy, physiology, biophys tion, and a conceptual framework in which it could ics, animal behavior, psychophysics, evolutionary be structured, were demonstrated in landmark biology, ontogeny, and paleontology. Before the papers by van Bergeijk in 1967 and Wever in 1974. conference, preliminary manuscripts of the invited However, not since 1965, when the American papers were distributed to all participants. This facilitated - even encouraged - discussions through Society of Zoologists sponsored an evolutionary conference entitled ''The Vertebrate Ear;' has there out the conference which could be called, among other things, "lively. " The preview of papers, along been a group effort to assemble and organize our current knowledge on the evolutionary-as with the free exchange of information and opinion, opposed to comparative-biology of hearing. also helped improve the quality and consistency of In the quarter century since that conference the final manuscripts included in this volume. there have been major changes in evolutionary In addition to the invited papers, several studies concepts (e. g., punctuated equilibrium), in sys were presented as posters during evening sessions."