Collaborative Research: Multisensory guidance of marine animal navigation and prey capture

了解动物如何在水下航行不仅本身就很吸引人，它还有助于水下航行器、机器人和水面船只的仪器设计，影响渔业管理，并有助于保护海洋环境。选择鲨鱼来展示它们是如何导航的。正如人们常说的那样，尽管一英里外的一滴血它们都察觉不到，但鲨鱼确实有令人印象深刻的猎物追踪能力。鲨鱼在世界范围内的渔业中很重要，近几十年来已经严重枯竭，经常被其他渔业作为不受欢迎的副渔获物。然而，它们是维持健康生态系统必不可少的顶级捕食者。这个研究项目将展示鲨鱼在捕猎行为中是如何运用它们所有的感官的，从最初的猎物探测开始，通过跟踪和定位，到最后打击猎物。为了更全面的理解，我们比较了几种鲨鱼，它们似乎使用不同的感官，主要是因为它们专门在不同的栖息地捕食不同的猎物。一个由感官和鲨鱼生物学专家组成的团队，利用马萨诸塞州和佛罗里达州独特的测试设施，已经集结起来，其中包括研究生，他们接受了活体鲨鱼工作所需的许多技术方法的培训。这项研究直接涉及本科生和高中生，并为所有年龄段的其他学生和公众提供广泛的服务。积累的知识应该会导致鲨鱼导航和捕食模型，可以用于保护鲨鱼，保护人类，以及水下转向算法的工程设计。这项研究不可避免地会出现在未来的电视节目和录像纪录片中，这将向广大公众传播新的知识，包括鲨鱼和严谨的科学。

Understanding how animals navigate under water is not only fascinating in its own right, it also contributes to instrumentation designs of underwater vehicles, robots and surface vessels, impacts management of fisheries, and helps protect the marine environment. Sharks have been chosen to demonstrate how they navigate. While they can not detect a drop of blood a mile away, as often stated, sharks do have impressive prey tracking capabilities. Sharks are important in fisheries worldwide and have been severely depleted in recent decades, often taken as unwanted by-catch in other fisheries. Yet, they are essential top predators needed to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. This research project will show how sharks use all their senses in hunting behavior, starting with initial prey detection, through tracking and locating, and ending with striking their prey. For more complete understanding, we compare a few shark species that appear to use their senses differently mostly because they specialize in different prey in different habitats. A team of experts in sensory and shark biology, using unique testing facilities in Massachusetts and Florida, has been assembled including graduate students being trained in the many technical approaches needed for work on live sharks. The research directly involves undergraduate and high school students and provides extensive outreach to other students of all ages and to the public in general. The accumulated knowledge should lead to a model of shark navigation and predation that can be used for the conservation of sharks, protection of humans, and the engineering design of underwater steering algorithms. The inevitable presentation of this research in future television programs and video documentaries will disseminate new knowledge to the public at large, both of sharks and of rigorous science.