My pronouns are he/him
The study of animal colouration dates back over a century, and has attracted multidisciplinary attention from physicists, evolutionary biologists, and psychologists. Animals use colouration and patterning to trick and exploit the visual systems of others in diverse ways. Yet no established theories can explain why individuals within collectively moving groups often have such striking colouration. This is particularly pertinent in fish; across the 34,000 known species of fish, there is extensive interspecific colour variation, including peculiar and highly conspicuous markings, as well as some of the best examples of highly coordinated group movement. With a particular focus on freshwater fish, I aim to tackle this question by running an interdisciplinary program, incorporating cutting-edge visual modelling, lab and field-based behavioural experiments, and staged interactions with bio-mimetic robotic fish.
