Dynamic lighting and its impact on the behaviour of marine invertebrates
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All animals face the fundamental problem of extracting information from noisy environments. To mitigate or exploit the impacts that environmental noise may have on their sensory systems, many animals adapt their behaviour when exposed to environmental stimuli that interfere with their ability to detect information from their habitat. Understanding if and how animals are affected by environmental noise, therefore, allows us to understand the behavioural strategies that have evolved in response to perceptual challenges imposed on animals by their environment. One common form of environmental noise in shallow aquatic habitats comes from a form of dynamic lighting known as caustics, where refraction of light through surface waves creates fluctuations in the light intensity as well as false motion cues in the visual scene. While caustics impair the visual systems of teleost fishes, whether they impact other aquatic organisms with different visual systems remains unknown. In this thesis, I tested whether, and to what extent, dynamic lighting in the form of caustics affects information detection and behaviour of three marine invertebrates, the common cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, the shore crab Carcinus maenas, and the brown shrimp Crangon crangon. In Chapter 2, I investigated whether caustics impaired the hunting success of cuttlefish. By exposing cuttlefish to live prey in different caustic conditions, I found that cuttlefish maintained their hunting success irrespective of the prevailing caustic conditions, and these stable success rates were not caused by changes in the cuttlefish hunting behaviour in response to the caustic conditions. In Chapter 3, I tested whether cuttlefish, crabs or shrimp preferred or avoided areas with caustics. All three invertebrates did not select or avoid areas with caustic patterns, and there was limited evidence that these species adjusted their movements or exploration based on the prevailing caustic conditions. In Chapter 4, I investigated the temporal effects of caustic exposure on object detection in C. maenas. Prior exposure to caustics reduced crabs’ ability to detect intensity-based objects for at least 2 s after caustics had ceased, indicating that caustics can have a negative historical effect on visual perception. In Chapters 5 and 6, I investigated whether cuttlefish changed two aspects of their camouflage in caustics; the expression of body patterns and the erection of skin papillae. Cuttlefish adopted disruptive patterns and textured skin when exposed to caustics, and these camouflage responses were related to the increased contrast levels in the visual scene produced by caustics. Overall, my thesis documents if and how marine invertebrate behaviour is affected by dynamic lighting. I provide explanations for why caustics can affect some aspects of behaviour (e.g., intensity-based object detection and camouflage) but not others (e.g., hunting behaviour and habitat selection), and further explore the consequences this form of dynamic lighting can have on predator-prey interactions.