Michael Land obituary
The neuroscientist Michael Land, who has died aged 78 from respiratory disease, was the Marco Polo of the visual sciences. He visited exotic parts of the animal kingdom, and showed that almost every way humans have discovered to bend, reflect, shape and image light with mirrors and lenses is also used by some creature’s eye.
His research revealed the many different ways in which animals see their own versions of reality, often to find members of the opposite sex. His 1976 discovery that prawns focus light not by lenses, but with a structure of mirror-lined boxes, helped lead to the discovery of a method to focus X-rays, and in the 1990s he developed a simple device to track humans’ gaze as they move their eyes while doing everyday tasks.
Land’s PhD thesis at University College London in the early 1960s, on how scallops evade the attacks of predatory starfish, turned out to be a serendipitous choice. He was supposed to investigate what passes for the brain of this shellfish, but found its eyes far more interesting. Scallops have many pinhead-sized eyes, just inside the lip of the shell. Rather than focusing light with a lens as people do, they use a concave mirror in the manner of a Newtonian telescope.
Moving from UCL, with his first wife, Judith (nee Drinkwater), to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, he turned his attention to jumping spiders. These arachnids do not build webs but are visual hunters. Each of their four pairs of eyes has a different task, and Land showed how the most acute of these eyes moves to detect prey and mates.
When he took up a neurobiology lectureship at Sussex University in 1971, he joined a group of researchers assembled by the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith who were studying the brains and behaviours of simple animals to explore broad biological principles. Sussex was noted for its informality and openness to interdisciplinary collaboration, which suited Land well. He held a chair in neurobiology at Sussex from 1984.
He had two years before that (1982-84) at the Australian National University in Canberra as a senior research fellow. I was working there, and recall him in a heavy sweat one lunchtime – he had spent the morning observing the retina of a highly venomous red-bellied black snake, which, although sedated, was far too close for comfort.
Land invited a young Swedish researcher, Dan Nilsson, to join him in
Canberra. Together they found that under each facet lens in a butterfly’s eye was a complete Galilean telescope, collimating (making into a parallel beam) the incoming light by means of an extraordinarily powerful “eyepiece” lens with a focal length of a few millionths of a metre. Land and Nilsson went on to write the book Animal Eyes (2002), which encompasses most of what is known about how animals image their worlds.
Nowadays, science usually relies on large teams of specialists. Land followed the older tradition, where researchers often worked alone and made their own kit. In the early 1990s he turned his skills to the question of where humans look while doing their daily tasks. His eye tracker consisted of a small video camera and an arrangement of mirrors that recorded both the eye and the scene, and fitted on to the head.
Land and his colleagues studied where motorists look when they steer, the differences between first-class and village-green cricketers, how pianists move their gaze between music and keyboard, and where we look when we brew a pot of tea. They found subtle and specific rules about where people look and what they see, often unconsciously. This led to the book Looking and Acting (2009), co-authored with Ben Tatler. His final book, Eyes to See (2018), is part memoir and part guide to the science of vision, ranging from the physics of mirrors to the psychology of action.
Mike was born in Dartmouth, Devon, where his father, Frank Land, was an instructor lieutenant at the Royal Naval College; he had previously gained a doctorate in mathematics, and later became professor of education at Hull University. Mike’s mother, Nora (nee Channon), had also been a teacher.
After the second world war, the family moved to London and in 1950 to Birkenhead in Wirral. Mike attended Birkenhead school, where he led the choir and developed a love of hunting for rare local plants, especially orchids. Later in life he held an annual party to mark the flowering of the nationally rare lizard orchid, which grew wild in his Sussex downland garden.
In 1960 he won a scholarship to study natural sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge. After he graduated in zoology in 1963, his PhD at University College London was supervised by John Gray and the Nobel prize-winning physiologist Sir Andrew Huxley. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1982, at the age of 40, and was a member of the Academia Europaea from 1998. He became emeritus professor at Sussex in 2005, continuing to teach and write until recently. Generations of students and colleagues remember him for his turn of phrase, clarity of thought and deep understanding. His informality, kindness and enthusiasm benefited many.
Land and his second wife, Rosemary (nee Clarke), whom he married in 1980, found an Arts and Crafts house with a steep chalk garden overlooking Lewes, where they lived for many years. His musical interests developed into a passion for ancient instruments, especially renaissance woodwinds such as the bass curtal, cornamuse, crumhorn, rauschpfeife and shawm. He had a fine bass voice and joined the local West Gallery Quire, a choir devoted to church music of the 18th and 19th century, for which he sang or played his curtal. Although he had no time for God, he did enjoy God’s tunes.
He is survived by Rosemary and their daughter, Kate, and by his son, Adam, from his marriage to Judith, which ended in divorce, and four grandchildren. Another daughter, Penny, and a granddaughter predeceased him.
• Michael Francis Land, neuroscientist, born 12 April 1942; died 14 December 2020