George Owen Mackie FRSC FRS (October 20, 1929 – August 25, 2023) was a British–Canadian zoologist who was a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Victoria.
He was born in Lincolnshire, England on October 20, 1929, the youngest son of Frederick Percival Mackie.
[4] Mackie worked on jellyfish and other marine invertebrates, exploring the role of excitable epithelia as signalling pathways and analysing the neuromuscular basis of behaviour.
He and Robert Meech discovered axons in Aglantha that conduct two sorts of action potential: sodium-based in fast swimming and calcium-based in slow.
With Sally Leys he found that hexactinellid sponges conduct electrical impulses throughout their bodies, regulating the activity of the flagella that produce the feeding current.