The Visual System of Fish

✍ Scribed by Ellis R. Loew, William N. McFarland (auth.), Ron Douglas, Mustafa Djamgoz (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 530
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A question often asked of those of us who work in the seemingly esoteric field of fish vision is, why? To some of us the answer seems obvious - how many other visual scientists get to dive in a tropical lagoon in the name of science and then are able to eat their subjects for dinner? However, there are better, or at least scientifically more acceptable, reasons for working on the visual system of fish. First, in terms of numbers, fish are by far the most important of all vertebrate classes, probably accounting for over half (c. 22 000 species) of all recognized vertebrate species (Nelson, 1984). Furthermore, many of these are of commercial importance. Secondly, if one of the research aims is to understand the human visual system, animals such as fish can tell us a great deal, since in many ways their visual systems, and specifically their eyes, are similar to our own. This is fortunate, since there are several techniques, such as intracellular retinal recording, which are vital to our understanding of the visual process, that cannot be performed routinely on primates. The cold­ blooded fish, on the other hand, is an ideal subject for such studies and much of what we know about, for example, the fundamentals of information processing in the retina is based on work carried out on fish (e. g. Svaetichin, 1953).

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiii
The underwater visual environment....Pages 1-43
The optical system of fishes....Pages 45-61
Optical variability of the fish lens....Pages 63-80
Visual pigments of fishes....Pages 81-107
Retinal structure of fishes....Pages 109-157
Electrophysiological characteristics of retinal neurones: synaptic interactions and functional outputs....Pages 159-210
Neurotransmitters and neuromodulators of the fish retina....Pages 211-238
Tectal morphology: connections, neurones and synapses....Pages 239-277
The physiology of the teleostean optic tectum....Pages 279-343
The visual pathways and central non-tectal processing....Pages 345-372
Behavioural studies of fish vision: an analysis of visual capabilities....Pages 373-418
Development of the visual system....Pages 419-442
Haplochromis burtoni: a case study....Pages 443-463
Vision in elasmobranchs....Pages 465-490
Stimulus, environment and vision in fishes....Pages 491-511
Back Matter....Pages 513-526

✦ Subjects

Science, general