An official website of the United States government
Finlets are a series of small non-retractable fins common to scombrid fishes (mackerels, bonitos and tunas), which are known for their high swimming speed. It is hypothesized that these small fins could potentially affect propulsive performance. Here, we combine experimental and computational approaches to investigate the hydrodynamics of finlets in yellowfin tuna ( Thunnus albacares ) during steady swimming. High-speed videos were obtained to provide kinematic data on the in vivo motion of finlets. High-fidelity simulations were then carried out to examine the hydrodynamic performance and vortex dynamics of a biologically realistic multiple-finlet model with reconstructed kinematics. It was found that finlets undergo both heaving and pitching motion and are delayed in phase from anterior to posterior along the body. Simulation results show that finlets were drag producing and did not produce thrust. The interactions among finlets helped reduce total finlet drag by 21.5%. Pitching motions of finlets helped reduce the power consumed by finlets during swimming by 20.8% compared with non-pitching finlets. Moreover, the pitching finlets created constructive forces to facilitate posterior body flapping. Wake dynamics analysis revealed a unique vortex tube matrix structure and cross-flow streams redirected by the pitching finlets, which supports their hydrodynamic function in scombrid fishes. Limitations on modelling and the generality of results are also discussed.
more »
« less
Comparative Kinematics and Hydrodynamics of Mysticete Cetaceans: Morphological and Ecological Correlates with Swimming Performance
The scale-dependence of locomotor performance has long been studied in comparative biomechanics, but how animals move in their natural environment remains poorly understood. At the upper extreme of body mass, baleen whales (Mysteci) are predictably among the most efficient swimmers in terms of cost of transport through a combination of low mass-specific metabolic rate and high hydrodynamic efficiency. Such efficiency enables these oceanic giants to migrate vast distances and thus underlies a major component of their life history and functional ecology. However, we lack even basic kinematic data for most species. Here we combine morphometric data from flyover drone photography, whale-borne inertial sensing tag data, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to study the locomotion of four rorqual species. Focusing on fundamental kinematic parameters such as tailbeat frequency and forward speed, we quantified spatial and temporal changes in swimming performance for individual whales and compared these metrics across a wide body mass range. We also calculated thrust and drag using lunate tail hydrodynamic modeling (Fish 1993), and compared these values against those from CFD simulations carried out with realistic rigid-body models. Differences in excess of 100% between the two approaches point to the significant contributions of tail and head heaving to overall drag, and thus the need to account for them in rigid-body CFD simulations. Together these kinematic data and CFD modeling inform a new parametric factor designed at multiplying the rigid-body drag equation to predict the contribution of body heaving unsteady hydrodynamics in cetaceans.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1656691
- PAR ID:
- 10087939
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
High efficiency lunate-tail swimming with high-aspect-ratio lifting surfaces has evolved in many vertebrate lineages, from fish to cetaceans. Baleen whales (Mysticeti) are the largest swimming animals that exhibit this locomotor strategy, and present an ideal study system to examine how morphology and the kinematics of swimming scale to the largest body sizes. We used data from whale-borne inertial sensors coupled with morphometric measurements from aerial drones to calculate the hydrodynamic performance of oscillatory swimming in six baleen whale species ranging in body length from 5 to 25 m (fin whale, Balaenoptera physalus; Bryde’s whale, Balaenoptera edeni; sei whale, Balaenoptera borealis; Antarctic minke whale, Balaenoptera bonaerensis; humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae; and blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus). We found that mass-specific thrust increased with both swimming speed and body size. Froude efficiency, defined as the ratio of useful power output to the rate of energy input (Sloop, 1978), generally increased with swimming speed but decreased on average with increasing body size. This finding is contrary to previous results in smaller animals, where Froude efficiency increased with body size. Although our empirically parameterized estimates for swimming baleen whale drag were higher than those of a simple gliding model, oscillatory locomotion at this scale exhibits generally high Froude efficiency as in other adept swimmers. Our results quantify the fine- scale kinematics and estimate the hydrodynamics of routine and energetically expensive swimming modes at the largest scale.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)The largest animals are the rorquals, a group of whales which rapidly engulf large aggregations of small-bodied animals along with the water in which they are embedded, with the latter subsequently expulsed via filtration through baleen. Represented by species like the blue, fin, and humpback whales, rorquals can exist in a wide range of body lengths (8–30 m) and masses (4000–190,000 kg). When feeding on krill, kinematic data collected by whale-borne biologging sensors suggest that they first oscillate their flukes several times to accelerate towards their prey, followed by a coasting period with mouth agape as the prey-water mixture is engulfed in a process approximating a perfectly inelastic collision. These kinematic data, used along with momentum conservation and time-averages of a whale’s equation of motion, show the largest rorquals as generating significant body forces (10–40 kN) in order to set into forward motion enough engulfed water to at least double overall mass. Interestingly, a scaling analysis of these equations suggests significant reductions in the amount of body force generated per kilogram of body mass at the larger sizes. In other words, and in concert with the allometric growth of the buccal cavity, gigantism would involve smaller fractions of muscle mass to engulf greater volumes of water and prey, thereby imparting a greater efficiency to this unique feeding strategy.more » « less
-
The unique engulfment filtration strategy of microphagous rorqual whales has evolved relatively recently (<5 Ma) and exploits extreme predator/prey size ratios to overcome the maneuverability advantages of swarms of small prey, such as krill. Forage fish, in contrast, have been engaged in evolutionary arms races with their predators for more than 100 million years and have performance capabilities that suggest they should easily evade whale-sized predators, yet they are regularly hunted by some species of rorqual whales. To explore this phenomenon, we determined, in a laboratory setting, when individual anchovies initiated escape from virtually approaching whales, then used these results along with in situ humpback whale attack data to model how predator speed and engulfment timing affected capture rates. Anchovies were found to respond to approaching visual looming stimuli at expansion rates that give ample chance to escape from a sea lion-sized predator, but humpback whales could capture as much as 30–60% of a school at once because the increase in their apparent (visual) size does not cross their prey’s response threshold until after rapid jaw expansion. Humpback whales are, thus, incentivized to delay engulfment until they are very close to a prey school, even if this results in higher hydrodynamic drag. This potential exaptation of a microphagous filter feeding strategy for fish foraging enables humpback whales to achieve 7× the energetic efficiency (per lunge) of krill foraging, allowing for flexible foraging strategies that may underlie their ecological success in fluctuating oceanic conditions.more » « less
-
Fundamental scaling relationships influence the physiology of vital rates, which in turn shape the ecology and evolution of organisms. For diving mammals, benefits conferred by large body size include reduced transport costs and enhanced breath-holding capacity, thereby increasing overall foraging efficiency. Rorqual whales feed by engulfing a large mass of prey-laden water at high speed and filtering it through baleen plates. However, as engulfment capacity increases with body length (Engulfment Volume ∝ Body Length 3.57), the surface area of the baleen filter does not increase proportionally (Baleen Area ∝ Body Length1.82), and thus the filtration time of larger rorquals predictably increases as the baleen surface area must filter a disproportionally large amount of water. We predicted that filtration time should scale with body length to the power of 1.75 (Filter Time ∝ Body Length1.75). We tested this hypothesis on four rorqual species using multi-sensor tags with corresponding unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS) -based body length estimates. We found that filter time scales with body length to the power of 1.79 (95% CI: 1.61 - 1.97). This result highlights a scale-dependent trade-off between engulfment capacity and baleen area that creates a biomechanical constraint to foraging through increased filtration time. Consequently, larger whales must target high density prey patches commensurate to the gulp size to meet their increased energetic demands. If these optimal patches are absent, larger rorquals may experience reduced foraging efficiency compared to smaller whales if they do not match their engulfment capacity to the size of targeted prey aggregations.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
