Honeybees Vision
Recent Discoveries
Published on 23. October 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
26 pages
978-1-914934-15-5 (ISBN)
Description
Professor Adrian Horridge has thoroughly enjoyed a long and productive career in scientific research. At 17 he won a scholarship to St John's College Cambridge, where he spent 10 years, from student to a fellowship, ending in the Zoology Department working with new techniques of recording from nerve cells. Some of this time was spent at the Naples Marine Laboratory and at the Dept. of Structures in the Royal Aircraft Establishment. at Farnborough, designing reinforced plastic structures, like rockets and pilot ejector seats, for the military.
In 1956, he took a lectureship in Zoology at St Andrew's, Scotland, from where he collaborated with Prof Ted Bullock on a 2-volume book on "The Structure and Function of the Nervous Systems of Invertebrates", an enormous project that took him and family to California for 2 years.
His research group at the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St Andrews concentrated on all aspects of the arthropod compound eye, on which he subsequently published about 250 papers and book chapters. In 1969, he was elected to the Royal Society, and that year became one of four Founder Professors of Biological Sciences in the Australian National University, where the work on insect vision continued.
His recent book on "The Discovery of a Visual System. The Honeybee" is a summary of new findings, based on hundreds of hours of training bees and testing them to see what features they really detect. The results show that parts of all textbooks on this topic will have to be revised. Bees see neither colours nor shapes of flowers.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Hebden Bridge
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 170 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
88 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-914934-15-5 (9781914934155)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Born 1927, after wartime schooling, then 4 years as a scholar at St John's College, Cambridge, Adrian spent 10 years working out details of nervous systems and nervous control of movement in the phylum Coelenterata, including jellyfish, medusae, and corals, and also Ctenophores. There followed a year at the Center for Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, with Ted Bullock, writing a huge two-volume work on Invertebrate Nervous Systems (1965).When Adrian returned to St. Andrews, Scotland, he had decided to concentrate on all aspects of the arthropod compound eye. His first students recorded from the photoreceptors, and described the basic optics of the locust and fly eyes and their capture of single photons at extremely low light levels. He subsequently published about 250 papers on the compound and optic lobes of many kinds of insects. In 1969 he was elected to the Royal Society and in that year became one of four Founder Professors of Biological Sciences in the Australian National University where the work on insect vision continued. In 1990, discoveries of how insects pilot themselves in flight, together with his early experience working at Farnborough, led to applications in drone helicopters and planes, with computer and vision on board, supported by American funds. For more detail, see his web page at Adrian-Horridge.orgAdrian retired in 1992 and turned to the analysis of what bees see, by using a Y-choice maze. This analysis led to the discovery of feature detectors for combinations of edges, circles and spokes in one channel for green contrast at edges, and for content and height of blue in a separate channel. Left/right polarity between an area of blue and of green contrast was also detected, learned, and used as a signpost. The UV receptor in each ommatidia seems to be used only for registering the direction of the sky as an escape route. Hundreds of hours training bees and testing them for what they had learned led to a book "The Discovery of a Visual System: The Honeybee" (2019). Adrian is also known for his books and papers which record the lost maritime ethnology of Indonesia. In the 1970's and 80's he made a unique photographic record of many local types on many distant islands. That World Heritage fleet of thousands of fishing boats and outrigger canoes has now become motorised, designs changed, and rigging gone. There is little improvement in the catch because there was always overfishing and depletion, and now there is carbon dioxide emission from the engines.