Seminar by Prof. Roger T. Hanlon - "Rapid adaptive camouflage in cephalopods: linking neuroscience, ethology and imaging to bio-inspired materials and engineering"

 

Roger Hanlon of MBL, Wood's Hole: http://www.mbl.edu/bell/current-faculty/hanlon/
 

is one of the world's leading experts on cephalopods, and co-star of this episode of the US television show NOVA (the star is the octopus).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPWXOlCiEgg
check out the first 20 or 30 seconds of the video by clicking on the link.

 

He will be visiting the Physics and Biology Unit for ten days starting next Monday, and will present a seminar:

 

 

Venue: Seminar Room C209, Center Bldg.

 

Nature has evolved elegant solutions for manipulating ambient light to create patterns and coloration for a wide range of functions such as communication, camouflage and thermoregulation. Nowhere is the diversity and speed of change in body patterning better developed than in the cephalopods (squid, octopus, cuttlefish). I will describe mechanisms of visual sensing of the ambient light field and subsequent neural control of skin patterning. I will illustrate how body patterns are used functionally in the behavioral ecology of various cephalopods. Then I will describe various details of the biophotonic structures of the skin that produce such remarkable visual diversity, with emphasis on the principles involved and how they might provide bio-inspired approaches to materials science and engineering.