Sensory Performance, Behavior, and Ecology of Fish

Abstract

The interpretation of sensory performance requires some knowledge of the behavior of animals, the quality and amplitude of stimuli to which they respond under different conditions, the stimuli that they may ignore as having no "meaning", and the effect of habituation and motivation. Futhermore, the interface of sensory physiology with behavior, and so with ecology, is an essential area of study for explaining the mechanisms that regulate the responses of animals to their environment and their distribution in space and time. This chapter deals with certain comment themes that apply to vision, mechanoreception, and chemorecption of fish and their relation to behavior and ecology. These themes are (1) threshods, (2) problem of background "noise", (3) directional perception, (4) enhancement of sensory awareness, and (5) behavior controlled by multiple stimuli. These themes are picked out of a much wider scenario; important aspects such as electroreception and polarized light recpetion are omited. Some of these are dealt with other chapters.