The apposition compound eyes of stomatopod crustaceans contain a morphologically distinct eye region specialized for color and polarization vision, called the mid-band. In two stomatopod superfamilies, the mid-band is constructed from six rows of enlarged ommatidia containing multiple photoreceptor classes for spectral and polarization vision. The aim of this study was to begin to analyze the u...

In most, possibly all, Crustacea the heart beat is neurogenic. Each beat is initiated by a burst of impulses from a small group of neurones whose cell bodies lie grouped in the ganglionic nerve trunk (g.n.t.) in the heart wall and whose axons run to the heart muscle. Many attempts have been made by electrophysiologists to discover how these neurones are integrated to fire rhythmic bursts (for e...

Polarisation sensitivity (PS) - the ability to detect the orientation of polarised light - occurs in a wide variety of invertebrates [1] [2] and vertebrates [3] [4] [5], many of which are marine species [1]. Of these, the crustacea are particularly well documented in terms of their structural [6] and neural [7] [8] adaptations for PS. The few behavioural studies conducted on crustaceans demonst...

In interactions, many tropical stomatopod species display conspicuous colored body spots that can communicate information about the sender's state (e.g., sex, aggressiveness, etc.). Species inhabiting a variety of depths experience large differences in illumination spectrum and intensity due to filtering of light by water and its constituents. Stomatopod spectral sensitivity is known to vary ph...

Many crustaceans detect odors from distant sources using chemosensory sensilla (aesthetascs) on their antennules. The greater the flow of water through arrays of aesthetascs, the faster the access of odorant to receptors inside the aesthetascs. Stomatopods facilitate odorant access by flicking their antennules, thus increasing the relative velocity of the water reaching their aesthetascs. We us...

Many species of stomatopod crustaceans have multiple spectral classes of photoreceptors in their retinas. Behavioral evidence also indicates that stomatopods are capable of discriminating objects by their spectral differences alone. Most animals use only two to four different types of photoreceptors in their color vision systems, typically with broad sensitivity functions, but the stomatopods a...

8 The polarisation of light is used by many species of cephalopods and crustaceans to discriminate 9 objects or to communicate. Most visual systems with this ability, such as that of the fiddler crab, 10 include receptors with photopigments that are oriented horizontally and vertically relative to the 11 outside world. Photoreceptors in such an orthogonal array are maximally sensitive to polari...

The lighting of the underwater environment is constantly changing due to attenuation by water, scattering by suspended particles, as well as the refraction and reflection caused by the surface waves. These factors pose a great challenge for marine animals which communicate through visual signals, especially those based on color. To escape this problem, certain cephalopod mollusks and stomatopod...

The complex hierarchical structure in biological and synthetic fibrous nanocomposites entails considerable difficulties in the interpretation of the crystallographic texture from diffraction data. Here, we present a novel reconstruction method to obtain the 3D distribution of fibres in such systems. An analytical expression is derived for the diffraction intensity from fibres, explaining the az...

The zebra mantis shrimp (Lysiosquillina maculata) is actually a stomatopod with turreted eyes (Fig A). white spots are pigments which thought to be for camouflage but may act as high-pass filter. Note the mirror-image symmetry of pigments. individual hexagonal units this eye known ommatidia (sg: ommatidium). dark B, arrow) represent pseudopupil, in incoming light completely absorbed within that...