Mr William M Lunt

Natural selection has honed the ability of organisms to detect, process and respond to information about the world around them. As a sensory ethologist at heart, I am interested in how the behaviour of animals is shaped by environmental information. 

The adaptive camouflage behaviour of shell-less cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) is one such behaviour which demands the processing of vast quantities of visual data in order to coordinate the activity of millions of pigmented organs, known as chromatophores, distributed across the skin. 

In my PhD, I am adopting a three-pronged approach to understand how the visual environment shapes the camouflage patterns of cuttlefish, in order to inspire and design a wearable textile capable of adaptive camouflage. This approach utilises methods from 1) behavioural biology, 2) soft robotics and 3) mathematical modelling.