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We examine the motion of rigid, ellipsoidal swimmers subjected to a steady vortex flow in two dimensions. Numerical simulations of swimmers in a spatially periodic array of vortices reveal a range of possible behaviors, including trapping…
The relative importance of Lagrangian and population dynamics on spatial pattern formation in the distribution of plankton near the ocean's surface is investigated. Phytoplankton and zooplankton are treated as biologically interacting…
Social organisms which construct nests consisting of tunnels and chambers necessarily navigate confined and crowded conditions. Unlike low-density collectives like bird flocks and insect swarms, in which hydrodynamic and statistical…
Planktonic organisms, despite their passive drift in the ocean, exhibit complex responses to fluid flow, including escape behaviors and larval settlement detection. But what flow signals can they perceive? This paper addresses this question…
Marine microorganisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies…
Flapping insects are remarkably agile fliers, adapted to a highly turbulent environment. We present a series of high resolution numerical simulations of a bumblebee interacting with turbulent inflow. We consider both tethered and free…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…
Marine organisms manipulate their surrounding flow through their swimming dynamics, which affects the transport of their own odor cues. We demonstrate by direct numerical simulations how a group of swimmers, moving at intermediate Reynolds…
The combined effect of tidal forcing and aquifer heterogeneity leads to intricate transport patterns in coastal aquifers that impact both on solute residence times and mixing dynamics. We study these patterns through detailed numerical…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
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…
Empirical observations in marine ecosystems have suggested a balance of biological and advection time scales as a possible explanation of species coexistence. To characterise this scenario, we measure the time to fixation in neutrally…
We consider a predator-prey model of planktonic population dynamics, of excitable character, living in an open and chaotic fluid flow, i.e., a state of fluid motion in which fluid trajectories are unbounded but a chaotic region exists that…
Fish in schooling formations navigate complex flow-fields replete with mechanical energy in the vortex wakes of their companions. Their schooling behaviour has been associated with evolutionary advantages including collective energy…
In windy conditions, the air is turbulent. The strong and intermittent velocity variations of turbulence are invisible to flying animals. Nevertheless, flying animals, not much larger than the smallest scales of turbulence, manage to…
Organisms often grow, migrate and compete in liquid environments, as well as on solid surfaces. However, relatively little is known about what happens when competing species are mixed and compressed by fluid turbulence. In these lectures we…
Fish schools are ubiquitous in marine life. Although flow interactions are thought to be beneficial for schooling, their exact effects on the speed, energetics, and stability of the group remain elusive. Recent experiments suggest that flow…
Fish schooling is often modeled with self-propelled particles subject to phenomenological behavioral rules. Although fish are known to sense and exploit flow features, these models usually neglect hydrodynamics. Here, we propose a novel…
Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…
We present and analyze a theoretical model for the dynamics and interactions of "capillary surfers," which are millimetric objects that self-propel while floating at the interface of a vibrating fluid bath. In our companion paper [1], we…