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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 26, 2018 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Thomas W. Cronin

"Seeing Through Other Eyes"

ABSTRACT -- Many of us believe that humans eyes are the evolutionary apex of animal vision. Truth be told, various other animals greatly outperform us in every one of our cherished abilities: high acuity, wide visual fields, color vision, motion detection, and the ability to see a beach scene in full sunlight as well as in pure starlight. And some animals do better than we do at essentially all of these at the same time. New imaging technologies and high-speed computers now make it possible to enter the visual worlds of species who see things very differently from the way we do.

My talk will discuss the visual capacities of other species, ranging from animals that have essentially no optics in their eyes, to creatures that see ultraviolet light or polarization patterns in the natural world, to those with extreme color vision. Much of the talk will bring us back to the remarkable mantis shrimps, the only animals known to have color vision in the ultraviolet as well as the ability to see patterns of circularly polarized light. The talk will employ a variety of imaging techniques to attempt to reproduce how the world might appear an alien visual system.

SPEAKER -- Thomas W. Cronin received his PhD degree from Duke University in 1979. He then spent three years as a postdoc at Yale University before moving to the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has published research on animals ranging from sponges to humans, but he works primarily on marine invertebrate animals. He has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 2002 and is also a Fellow of the International Society for Neuroethology. He recently co-authored a book on his research area, Visual Ecology.

Dr. Cronin's laboratory studies the visual physiology of invertebrates, especially of marine and estuarine crustaceans. He also works with electrical engineering teams, using biological designs to inspire innovative imaging systems. Most of his recent work has been with the mantis shrimps, or stomatopods, a unique group of tropical crustaceans that have extremely complicated behavior and perhaps the most unusual eyes ever evolved. In recent years, his lab group has published papers on vision in squids, butterflies, fiddler crabs, cuttlefish, primates, dolphins, orioles, reef fishes, sponges, poison-dart frogs, fireflies, jumping spiders, deep-sea crabs, whooping cranes, right whales, and (of course) mantis shrimp. His lab group’s motto is "If it has eyes, we can study it!" 



Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov