scholarly journals Anguilliform Locomotion across a Natural Range of Swimming Speeds

Fluids ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Nils B. Tack ◽  
Kevin T. Du Clos ◽  
Brad J. Gemmell

Eel-like fish can exhibit efficient swimming with comparatively low metabolic cost by utilizing sub-ambient pressure areas in the trough of body waves to generate thrust, effectively pulling themselves through the surrounding water. While this is understood at the fish’s preferred swimming speed, little is known about the mechanism over a full range of natural swimming speeds. We compared the swimming kinematics, hydrodynamics, and metabolic activity of juvenile coral catfish (Plotosus lineatus) across relative swimming speeds spanning two orders of magnitude from 0.2 to 2.0 body lengths (BL) per second. We used experimentally derived velocity fields to compute pressure fields and components of thrust along the body. At low speeds, thrust was primarily generated through positive pressure pushing forces. In contrast, increasing swimming speeds caused a shift in the recruitment of push and pull propulsive forces whereby sub-ambient pressure gradients contributed up to 87% of the total thrust produced during one tail-beat cycle past 0.5 BL s−1. This shift in thrust production corresponded to a sharp decline in the overall cost of transport and suggests that pull-dominated thrust in anguilliform swimmers is subject to a minimum threshold below which drag-based mechanisms are less effective.

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Hein ◽  
Katrina J. Keirsted

Understanding the effects of water temperature on the swimming performance of fishes is central in understanding how fish species will respond to global climate change. Metabolic cost of transport (COT)—a measure of the energy required to swim a given distance—is a key performance parameter linked to many aspects of fish life history. We develop a quantitative model to predict the effect of water temperature on COT. The model facilitates comparisons among species that differ in body size by incorporating the body mass-dependence of COT. Data from 22 fish species support the temperature and mass dependencies of COT predicted by our model, and demonstrate that modest differences in water temperature can result in substantial differences in the energetic cost of swimming.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell T Johnson ◽  
Nicholas August Bianco ◽  
James Finley

Several neuromuscular impairments, such as weakness (hemiparesis), occur after an individual has a stroke, and these impairments primarily affect one side of the body more than the other. Predictive musculoskeletal modeling presents an opportunity to investigate how a specific impairment affects gait performance post-stroke. Therefore, our aim was to use to predictive simulation to quantify the spatiotemporal asymmetries and changes to metabolic cost that emerge when muscle strength is unilaterally reduced. We also determined how forced spatiotemporal symmetry affects metabolic cost. We modified a 2-D musculoskeletal model by uniformly reducing the peak isometric muscle force in all muscles unilaterally. We then solved optimal control simulations of walking across a range of speeds by minimizing the sum of the cubed muscle excitations across all muscles. Lastly, we ran additional optimizations to test if reducing spatiotemporal asymmetry would result in an increase in metabolic cost. Our results showed that the magnitude and direction of effort-optimal spatiotemporal asymmetries depends on both the gait speed and level of weakness. Also, the optimal metabolic cost of transport was 1.25 m/s for the symmetrical and 20% weakness models but slower (1.00 m/s) for the 40% and 60% weakness models, suggesting that hemiparesis can account for a portion of the slower gait speed seen in people post-stroke. Adding spatiotemporal asymmetry to the cost function resulted in small increases (~4%) in metabolic cost. Overall, our results indicate that spatiotemporal asymmetry may be optimal for people post-stroke, who have asymmetrical neuromuscular impairments. Additionally, the effect of speed and level of weakness on spatiotemporal asymmetry may explain the well-known heterogenous distribution of spatiotemporal asymmetries observed in the clinic. Future work could extend our results by testing the effects of other impairments on optimal gait strategies, and therefore build a more comprehensive understanding of the gait patterns in people post-stroke.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohui Wei ◽  
Yongjun Long ◽  
Chunlei Wang ◽  
Shigang Wang

Transverse gallop is a common gait used by a large number of quadrupeds. This paper employs the simplified dimensionless quadrupedal model to discuss the underlying mechanism of the transverse galloping pattern. The model is studied at different running speeds and different values of leg stiffness, respectively. If the horizontal running speed reaches up to a critical value at a fixed leg stiffness, or if the leg stiffness reaches up to a critical value at a fixed horizontal speed, a key property would emerge which greatly reduces the overall mechanical forces of the dynamic system in a proper range of initial pitch angular velocities. Besides, for each horizontal speed, there is an optimal stiffness of legs that can reduce both the mechanical loads and the metabolic cost of transport. Furthermore, different body proportions and landing distance lags of a pair of legs are studied in the transverse gallop. We find that quadrupeds with longer length of legs compared with the length of the body are more suitable to employ the transverse galloping pattern, and the landing distance lag of a pair of legs could reduce the cost of transport and the locomotion frequency.


Author(s):  
Promode R. Bandyopadhyay

The top 200 meters of oceans abound in life forms since photosynthesis is possible in that layer. Competition and predator-prey (swordfish-flying fish, 102–104 to 1 mass ratio) interactions are intense here. Chased by predators, a flying fish (FF) — a pleuston — frantically escapes from the water and becomes airborne. Here we report the visual observations of oceanic surface and body distortions of FF to surmise the mechanisms of propulsion during taxiing and landing. FF leaps, not when it is chased, but when the additional energy required for further increase in speed underwater exceeds that required to leap.1 The higher metabolic cost of transport of regular flapping flight in air than in water is circumvented by gliding. We examine the BBCTV video2 by Richard Attenborough, the noted naturalist. An FF may camber its wings like parafoils and may also twist the outer half of the wings during taxiing and climbing. To produce thrust during taxiing, the FF sculls with the lower lobe of the tail fin to produce a reverse Karman vortex jet; there is rapid flicking of the lower lobe of the tail fin tangentially over the surface. The body acts as a chaotic damped and driven pendulum to produce the high-velocity wide flick. To damp after takeoff, it becomes a single asymmetric pendulum. Unpowered (foil) gliding follows. For descent, the wings are shaped, untwisted parafoils and, just prior to touchdown, travelling waves are superimposed, producing, in contrast to taxiing, an impressively smooth small-angle-of-attack tail touchdown on water without any nose-down. The spiked crowns of Richtmyer-Meshkov interface instability are visible on the ocean surface during leaping but not during landing. Trailing hydraulic jumps are observable during landing but not during leaping. The leap is a high-acceleration and Weber number dominated (inertia/capillary forces) phenomenon, but the landing involves little impact force and is dominated by Froude number forces (inertia/gravity forces). The evidence suggests that, prior to leaping and while still underwater, the FF reads the surface wind direction to align the flight path.


Author(s):  
Raphael A. Cadenhead

Although the reception of the Eastern father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought, particularly in relation to the contentious issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. The Body and Desire sets out to retrieve the full range of Gregory’s thinking on the challenges of the ascetic life through a diachronic analysis of his oeuvre. Exploring his understanding of the importance of bodily and spiritual maturation in the practices of contemplation and virtue, Raphael Cadenhead recovers the vital relevance of this vision of transformation for contemporary ethical discourse.


Biology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 672
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Young ◽  
Skye Greer ◽  
Michael Cramberg

In the viper boa (Candoia aspera), the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shows two stable overlapping patterns of pulsations: low-frequency (0.08 Hz) pulses with a mean amplitude of 4.1 mmHg that correspond to the ventilatory cycle, and higher-frequency (0.66 Hz) pulses with a mean amplitude of 1.2 mmHg that correspond to the cardiac cycle. Manual oscillations of anesthetized C. aspera induced propagating sinusoidal body waves. These waves resulted in a different pattern of CSF pulsations with frequencies corresponding to the displacement frequency of the body and with amplitudes greater than those of the cardiac or ventilatory cycles. After recovery from anesthesia, the snakes moved independently using lateral undulation and concertina locomotion. The episodes of lateral undulation produced similar influences on the CSF pressure as were observed during the manual oscillations, though the induced CSF pulsations were of lower amplitude during lateral undulation. No impact on the CSF was found while C. aspera was performing concertina locomotion. The relationship between the propagation of the body and the CSF pulsations suggests that the body movements produce an impulse on the spinal CSF.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Finley ◽  
Amy J. Bastian

Stroke survivors often have a slow, asymmetric walking pattern. They also walk with a higher metabolic cost than healthy, age-matched controls. It is often assumed that spatial-temporal asymmetries contribute to the increased metabolic cost of walking poststroke. However, elucidating this relationship is made challenging because of the interdependence between spatial-temporal asymmetries, walking speed, and metabolic cost. Here, we address these potential confounds by measuring speed-dependent changes in metabolic cost and implementing a recently developed approach to dissociate spatial versus temporal contributions to asymmetry in a sample of stroke survivors. We used expired gas analysis to compute the metabolic cost of transport (CoT) for each participant at 4 different walking speeds: self-selected speed, 80% and 120% of their self-selected speed, and their fastest comfortable speed. We also computed CoT for a sample of age- and gender-matched control participants who walked at the same speeds as their matched stroke survivor. Kinematic data were used to compute the magnitude of a number of variables characterizing spatial-temporal asymmetries. Across all speeds, stroke survivors had a higher CoT than controls. We also found that our sample of stroke survivors did not choose a self-selected speed that minimized CoT, contrary to typical observations in healthy controls. Multiple regression analyses revealed negative associations between speed and CoT and a positive association between asymmetries in foot placement relative to the trunk and CoT. These findings suggest that interventions designed to increase self-selected walking speed and reduce foot-placement asymmetries may be ideal for improving walking economy poststroke.


2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 796-813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie LeBlanc ◽  
Richard Fortier ◽  
Michel Allard ◽  
Calin Cosma ◽  
Sylvie Buteau

Two high-resolution multi-offset vertical seismic profile (VSP) surveys were carried out in a permafrost mound near Umiujaq in northern Quebec, Canada, while performing seismic cone penetration tests (SCPT) to study the cryostratigraphy and assess the body waves velocities and the dynamic properties of warm permafrost. Penetrometer-mounted triaxial accelerometers were used as the VSP receivers, and a swept impact seismic technique (SIST) source generating both compressional and shear waves was moved near the surface following a cross configuration of 40 seismic shot-point locations surrounding each of the two SCPTs. The inversion of travel times based on a simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT) provided tomographic images of the distribution of seismic velocities in permafrost. The Young's and shear moduli at low strains were then calculated from the seismic velocities and the permafrost density measured on core samples. The combination of multi-offset VSP survey, SCPT, SIST, and SIRT for tomographic imaging led to new insights in the dynamic properties of permafrost at temperatures close to 0 °C. The P- and S-wave velocities in permafrost vary from 2400 to 3200 m/s and from 900 to 1750 m/s, respectively, for a temperature range between –0.2 and –2.0 °C. The Young's modulus varies from 2.15 to 13.65 GPa, and the shear modulus varies from 1.00 to 4.75 GPa over the same range of temperature.Key words: permafrost, seismic cone penetration test, vertical seismic profiling, seismic tomography, dynamic properties.


1982 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 1049-1068
Author(s):  
John Boatwright

abstract A model for the far-field acceleration radiated by an incoherent rupture is constructed by combining Madariaga's (1977) theory for the high-frequency radiation from crack models of faulting with a simple statistical source model. By extending Madariaga's results to acceleration pulses with finite durations, the peak acceleration of a pulse radiated by a single stop or start of a crack tip is shown to depend on the dynamic stress drop of the subevent, the total change in rupture velocity, and the ratio of the subevent radius to the acceleration pulse width. An incoherent rupture is approximated by a sample from a self-similar distribution of coherent subevents. Assuming the subevents fit together without overlapping, the high-frequency level of the acceleration spectra depends linearly on the rms dynamic stress drop, the average change in rupture velocity, and the square root of the overall rupture area. The high-frequency level is independent, to first order, of the rupture complexity. Following Hanks (1979), simple approximations are derived for the relation between the rms dynamic stress drop and the rms acceleration, averaged over the pulse duration. This relation necessarily depends on the shape of the body-wave spectra. The body waves radiated by 10 small earthquakes near Monticello Dam, South Carolina, are analyzed to test these results. The average change of rupture velocity of Δv = 0.8β associated with the radiation of the acceleration pulses is estimated by comparing the rms acceleration contained in the P waves to that in the S waves. The rms dynamic stress drops of the 10 events, estimated from the rms accelerations, range from 0.4 to 1.9 bars and are strongly correlated with estimates of the apparent stress.


2000 ◽  
Vol 203 (12) ◽  
pp. 1915-1923 ◽  
Author(s):  
L.L. Stelle ◽  
R.W. Blake ◽  
A.W. Trites

Drag forces acting on Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus) were investigated from ‘deceleration during glide’ measurements. A total of 66 glides from six juvenile sea lions yielded a mean drag coefficient (referenced to total wetted surface area) of 0.0056 at a mean Reynolds number of 5.5×10(6). The drag values indicate that the boundary layer is largely turbulent for Steller sea lions swimming at these Reynolds numbers, which are past the point of expected transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The position of maximum thickness (at 34 % of the body length measured from the tip of the nose) was more anterior than for a ‘laminar’ profile, supporting the idea that there is little laminar flow. The Steller sea lions in our study were characterized by a mean fineness ratio of 5.55. Their streamlined shape helps to delay flow separation, reducing total drag. In addition, turbulent boundary layers are more stable than laminar ones. Thus, separation should occur further back on the animal. Steller sea lions are the largest of the otariids and swam faster than the smaller California sea lions (Zalophus californianus). The mean glide velocity of the individual Steller sea lions ranged from 2.9 to 3.4 m s(−)(1) or 1.2-1.5 body lengths s(−)(1). These length-specific speeds are close to the optimum swim velocity of 1.4 body lengths s(−)(1) based on the minimum cost of transport for California sea lions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document