ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
Polarization sensitivity as a contrast enhancer in pelagic predators: lessons from in situ polarization imaging of transparent zooplankton.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- End-to-End Segmentation and Classification of Zooplankton Using Shadowgraphy and Convolutional Neural Networks.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Transmission through muscle tissue shapes polarization signals during cuttlefish courtship.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Tunable Interference Colors in Nanofibril-Crystal Composite Films via Integrated Salt-Assisted Assembly.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Optical properties of the jellyfish surface above the waterline: microvillar array in pleustonic hydrozoans.Zoological letters · 2025Article
- Assessing the suitability of lakes and reservoirs for recreation using Landsat 8.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2023Article
- Scale space detector for analyzing spatiotemporal ventricular contractility and nuclear morphogenesis in zebrafish.iScience · 2022Article
- Polarization vision mitigates visual noise from flickering light underwater.Science advances · 2022Article
- Thresholds of polarization vision in octopuses.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Article
- Early Exposure to Water Turbidity Affects Visual Capacities in Cuttlefish (Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
- Correcting anisotropic intensity in light sheet images using dehazing and image morphology.APL bioengineering · 2020Article
- Spatial Contrast Sensitivity to Polarization and Luminance in Octopus.Frontiers in physiology · 2020Article
- Swimming behaviour tunes fish polarization vision to double prey sighting distance.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Polarisation vision: overcoming challenges of working with a property of light we barely see.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2018Review
- Can invertebrates see the e-vector of polarization as a separate modality of light?The Journal of experimental biology · 2016Review
- The copepod Calanus spp. (Calanidae) is repelled by polarized light.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Effects of stimuli shape and polarization in evoking deimatic patterns in the European cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, under varying turbidity conditions.Invertebrate neuroscience : IN · 2013Article
- A never ending race for new and improved fluorescent proteins.BMC biology · 2012Article
- The retinal topography of three species of coleoid cephalopod: significance for perception of polarized light.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Because light in the pelagic environment is partially polarized, it has been suggested that the polarization sensitivity found in certain pelagic species may serve to enhance the contrast of their transparent zooplankton prey. We examined its potential during cruises in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and at a field station on the Great Barrier Reef. First, we collected various species of transparent zooplankton and micronekton and photographed them between crossed polarizers. Many groups, particularly the cephalopods, pelagic snails, salps and ctenophores, were found to have ciliary, muscular or connective tissues with striking birefringence. In situ polarization imagery of the same species showed that, while the degree of underwater polarization was fairly high (approx. 30% in horizontal lines of sight), tissue birefringence played little to no role in increasing visibility. This is most likely due to the low radiance of the horizontal background light when compared with the downwelling irradiance. In fact, the dominant radiance and polarization contrasts are due to unpolarized downwelling light that has been scattered from the animal viewed against the darker and polarized horizontal background light. We show that relatively simple algorithms can use this negative polarization contrast to increase visibility substantially.
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