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In our laboratory, we investigate fish, marine snails, and crustacea for their ability to use chemical signals under water. Many organisms and cellular processes use chemical signals as their main channel of information about the environment. All environments are noisy and require some form of filtering to detect important signals. Chemical signals are transported by turbulent currents, viscous flow, and molecular diffusion. Receptor cells extract chemical signals from the environment through various filtering processes. Currently, we use the lobster and its exquisite senses of smell and taste as our major model to study the signal-filtering capabilities of the whole animal and its narrowly tuned chemoreceptor cells. To understand the role of chemical signals in the sea we use real lobsters to design small untethered robots with specific lobster characteristics such as directional information extraction from odor plumes.
Research in our laboratory also focuses on the lobster as a model for complex social behavior that is dependent largely on pheromones. In contrast to the pheromone-regulated caste system of eusocial insects, lobsters are organized on an individual level including memory of individuals based on urine signals. We examine the function and chemistry of pheromones used in lobster courtship.
Finally, we study the sensory capabilities of larval reef fishes in order to understand how chemical and other sensory information may guide these centimeter-long fish in their return to the reef, a few weeks after birth. This work has implications for understanding the spatial scale of fish recruitment and thus fisheries management.
Adjunct Scientist Jelle Atema
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Education:
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| 1969 |
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Ph.D. Sensory Biology, University of Michigan |
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| 1966 |
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Doctorandus Sensory Biology & Physics, University of Utrecht, Netherlands |
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| 1962 |
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Candidate Biology, University of Utrecht, Netherlands |
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Recent Publications:
Kozlowski, C., K.Yopak, R.Voigt and J.Atema. 2001. An initial study on the effects of signal intermittency on the odor plume tracking behavior of the American Lobster, Homarus americanus. Biol. Bull. 201: 274-276.
Gray, P.M., B.Krause, J.Atema, R.Payne, C.Krumhansl and L.Baptista. 2001. BioMusic: the music of nature and the nature of music. Science 291: 52-54.
Bushmann, P. and J. Atema. 2000. Chemically-mediated mate location and evaluation in the lobster, Homarus americanus. J. Chem. Ecol. 26:883-899.
Basil, J.A., R.T.Hanlon, S.I.Sheikh and J.Atema. 2000. Three-dimensional odor tracking by Nautilus. J. Exp. Biol. 203:1409-1414.
Atema, J. 1999. Marine chemical signals: dispersal, eddy chemotaxis, urine pheromones, and the development of a chemotactic robot. In: Tastes & Aromas. The Chemical senses in Science and Industry. G. A. Bell and A. J. Watson, eds. UNSW Press, Sydney (220 pp.), 172-179. |
