Related papers: Clustering of gyrotactic microorganisms in turbule…
The motility of microorganisms is often biased by gradients in physical and chemical properties of their environment, with myriad implications on their ecology. Here we show that fluid acceleration reorients gyrotactic plankton, triggering…
We study the distribution of swimming micro-organisms advected by a model turbulent flow and attracted towards a localised light source through phototaxis. It is shown that particles aggregate along a dynamical attractor with fractal…
Gyrotactic algae are bottom heavy, motile cells whose swimming direction is determined by a balance between a buoyancy torque directing them upwards and fluid velocity gradients. Gyrotaxis has, in recent years, become a paradigmatic model…
We study the small scale clustering of gyrotactic swimmers transported by a turbulent flow, when the intrinsic variability of the swimming parameters within the population is considered. By means of extensive numerical simulations, we find…
We present an experimental study of the statistical properties of millimeter-size spheres floating on the surface of a turbulent flow. The flow is generated in a layer of liquid metal by an electromagnetic forcing. By using two magnet…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
We study the dynamics and the statistics of dilute suspensions of gyrotactic swimmers, a model for many aquatic motile microorganisms. By means of extensive numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations at different Reynolds numbers,…
Recent studies show that spherical motile micro-organisms in turbulence subject to gravitational torques gather in down-welling regions of the turbulent flow. By analysing a statistical model we analytically compute how shape affects the…
Bacteria and plankton populations living in oceans and lakes reproduce and die under the in- fluence of turbulent currents. Turbulent transport interacts in a complex way with the dynamics of populations because the typical reproduction…
We study, by means of extensive direct numerical simulations, the turbulent flow produced by a two-dimensional cellular forcing in a cubic box with periodic boundary conditions. In spite of the strong anisotropy of the forcing, we find that…
Biological functionality of cellular aggregates is largely influenced by the activity and displacements of individual constituent cells. From a theoretical perspective this activity can be characterized by hydrodynamic transport…
We study the effect of turbulence on marine life by performing numerical simulations of motile microorganisms, modelled as prolate spheroids, in isotropic homogeneous turbulence. We show that the clustering and patchiness observed in…
The experiments of Leptos et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 198103 (2009)] show that the displacements of small particles affected by swimming microorganisms achieve a non-Gaussian distribution, which nevertheless scales diffusively -- the…
We study experimentally how waves affect distribution of particles that float on a water surface. We show that clustering of small particles in a standing wave is a nonlinear effect with the clustering time decreasing as the square of the…
We consider inertial particles suspended in an incompressible turbulent flow. Due to inertia of particles, their velocity field acquires small compressible component. Its presence leads to a new qualitative effect --- possibility of…
We study gravitational clustering of mass points in three dimensions with random initial positions and periodic boundary conditions (no expansion) by numerical simulations. Correlation properties are well defined in the system and a sort of…
We demonstrate that diffusiophoretic, thermophoretic and chemotactic phenomena in turbulence lead to clustering of particles on multi-fractal sets that can be described using one single framework, valid when the particle size is much…
Phytoplankton patchiness, namely the heterogeneous distribution of microalgae over multiple spatial scales, dramatically impacts marine ecology. A spectacular example of such heterogeneity occurs in thin phytoplankton layers (TPLs), where…
For a freely evolving granular fluid, the buildup of spatial correlations in density and flow field is described using fluctuating hydrodynamics. The theory for incompressible flows is extended to the general, compressible case, including…
Thin vortex tubes, with core sizes within the dissipation range, profuse in a homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow. Their intersections with an arbitrary plane define, as a mathematical construct, a dilute gas of localized,…