Everything in an animal's surroundings that it can potentially detect and use — chemical gradients, water movement, light, vibration, the presence of other organisms. The rocky shore is saturated with it.

We use "environmental information" in the broad ecological sense — the structured variation in the environment that animals have evolved to respond to — rather than the narrower animal communication sense of intentional signals between organisms.

Variation in the environment that makes it harder to detect or use relevant information. Noise is not just sound, but any source of disruption, from turbulent water currents to chemical pollution to competing stimuli.

We distinguish natural noise — the background complexity animals have evolved within — from anthropogenic noise, which introduces novel disruption at intensities and frequencies outside evolutionary experience.

The physical structures an animal uses to detect the world — antennae, eyes, hairs, pores, and other specialised receivers. The morphology of these structures shapes what an animal can and cannot perceive.

We study sensory architecture at multiple scales — from gross appendage morphology to the microstructure of individual sensilla — using SEM imaging, morphometrics, and functional assays.

The active process by which animals gather information from their environment — not passive reception, but behaviour. A hermit crab flicking its antennules is actively sampling the chemical world around it.

We treat information acquisition as a trait subject to natural selection — with costs, limits, and individual variation that connect to biological performance, survival, and fitness.

What an animal does with the information it gathers. Every choice — which shell to move into, where to shelter, whether to flee — is a decision based on available information, often made under time pressure and uncertainty.

We study decision-making through behavioural assays that manipulate information availability, quality, and reliability — connecting sensory input to behavioural output and performance.

How well an animal does — its ability to survive, compete, reproduce, and cope with change. Sensory capacity and decision-making quality ultimately feed into performance, which is what natural selection acts on.

Performance links our mechanistic sensory work to ecological outcomes — connecting microstructural variation in sensilla to population-level consequences under environmental change.