Related papers: Surfing on turbulence: a strategy for planktonic n…
Populations of swimming microorganisms produce fluid motions that lead to dramatically enhanced diffusion of tracer particles. Using simulations of suspensions of swimming particles in a periodic domain, we capture this effect and show that…
Phytoplankton are the foundation of aquatic food webs. Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton draw down CO2 at magnitudes equivalent to forests and other terrestrial plants and convert it to organic material that is then consumed by other…
Structures such as waves, jets, and vortices have a dramatic impact on the transport properties of a flow. Passive tracer transport in incompressible two-dimensional flows is described by Hamiltonian dynamics, and, for idealized structures,…
This research develops a novel sensor for aquatic robots inspired by the whiskers of harbor seals. This sensor can detect the movement of water, offering valuable data on speed, currents, barriers, and water disturbance. It employs a…
Due to its great efficiency and maneuverability, undulatory swimming is the predominant form of locomotion in aquatic vertebrates. A myriad of animals of different species and sizes oscillate their bodies to propel themselves in aquatic…
By means of a novel variational approach and using dual maps techniques and general ideas of dynamical system theory we derive exact results about several models of transport flows, for which we also obtain a complete description of their…
Microorganisms ofter move in confined, disordered environments, where hydrodynamic couplings can modify their transport behavior. Using extensive finite-element simulations, we investigate the dynamics of microswimmers -- modeled as…
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…
We consider a single kinematically controlled robot with a bounded control range. The robot travels in a two-dimensional region supporting an unknown unsteady scalar field. A single sensor provides the field value at the current location of…
Biological swimmers frequently navigate in geometrically restricted media. We study the prescribed-stroke problem of swimmers confined to a planar viscous membrane embedded in a bulk fluid of different viscosity. In their motion,…
Microswimmers in nature often experience spatial gradients of viscosity. In this work we develop theoretical results for the dynamics of active particles, biological or otherwise, swimming through viscosity gradients. We model the active…
Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…
Dinoflagellates are marine phytoplankton that emit flashes of light in response to flow-induced deformation; they are responsible for illuminating breaking-waves, wakes of ships, and other intensely turbulent spots of the upper ocean. Here,…
We claim that navigation in human environments can be viewed as cooperative activity especially in constrained situations. Humans concurrently aid and comply with each other while moving in a shared space. Cooperation helps pedestrians to…
Natural swimmers rely for their survival on sensors that gather information from the environment and guide their actions. The spatial organization of these sensors, such as the visual fish system and lateral line, suggests evolutionary…
In many sports, it is useful to analyse video of an athlete in competition for training purposes. In swimming, stroke rate is a common metric used by coaches; requiring a laborious labelling of each individual stroke. We show that using a…
This work investigates efficient routes to turbulence in quasi-two-dimensional shear flows. Two-dimensional disturbances require high Reynolds numbers to incite transition from a steady base flow, as transient growth is modest. With the…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
The motion, settling, and dispersion of microplastics in the ocean are determined by their rotational dynamics. We present experiments on elongated, large aspect ratio, and mildly curved plastic fibers slightly longer than the Kolmogorov…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…