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Thomas Noergaard
As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by animal behaviour, and it was this interest that caused me to become a biologist in the first place. I studied biology up to MSc level at the University of Aarhus and then went on to do a PhD at University of Zürich. During my PhD study I worked on the long-distance homing navigation of the Dancing White Lady spider (Leucorchestris arenicola, Sparassidae) which is only found in the Namib Desert. For three years I lived at the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre in the middle of the Namib Desert and it is now one of my favourite places to be.
One of the main results of my PhD study was that although the spiders are strictly nocturnal and able to navigate even during moonless nights, vision is still the key sensory modality used. Studying what the animals are doing, and why they are doing it inevitably leads to the question: how are they actually doing it? The drive to find answers to questions like: ”How can these spiders see at night?” and “What are they actually seeing?” have now brought me to the Vision Group in Lund where I hold a post-doc position supported by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation. Here I will also be working on the visual abilities of fast running nocturnal camel spiders and develop a tracking system for real-time tracking of these intriguing arachnids.
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Last modified 16 Jan 2012
Thomas Nørgaard
Postdoc
Functional zoology
Phone:
+46 46-2228629
E-mail:
Thomas.Norgaard@biol.lu.se
