Professor John Charles Montgomery

Fish have a range of interesting sensory systems in addition to vision. These include the mechanosensory hearing and lateral line systems, and in some fishes, a system to detect weak electric fields. My research has covered a wide range of fishes, from nocturnal sharks and rays, and Antarctic fish which feed in winter darkness, to New Zealand native freshwater fish and coastal reef fishes. We use field and laboratory studies to understanding the natural history and behaviour of these fish and neurophysiology to investigate the underlying neural and sensory basis of these behaviours - an approach known as neuroethology. In a collaborative study with David Bodznick at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory we have been examining the hindbrain processing of electrosensory information, which allows rays to distinguish between their own electric fields and the fields of their prey. We have demonstrated a sophisticated adaptive filter which learns to cancel any input associated with the animal's own movement.

Many interesting and important fish behaviours, such as migration, habitat selection, and feeding, involve sensory biology. We are putting our knowledge of sensory biology to use by contributing to a range of applied problems in freshwater and marine fish biology and fisheries. Of recent note is our work on the use of acoustic clues for pre-settlement reef fish to find their way back to the reef.