Swimming Trick Of Jellyfish And Lampreys Holds Key To Better Underwater Robots

Marine animals will typical create what are known as “high-pressure zones” by pushing against water, but jellyfish and lampreys work differently, creating areas of low pressure that forces water past their bodies and propelling them forward.

Dabiri, an engineer, and a team of biologists made a close study of the motion of jellyfish and lampreys.

“Now we realize we’ve had it backward, and so the search is on for ways to generate low-pressure suction to achieve more efficient underwater propulsion”, he added. According to senior author John Dabiri, a fluid dynamicist at Stanford, the findings present a whole new range of possibilities for studying jellyfish locomotion.

Before the new study, researchers used to think that sea creatures like fish swings its tail back and forth to push against the water. Given the way in which that we transfer, it appears to make intuitive sense.

However Dabiri started to suspect that one thing else was happening in sure extremely environment friendly swimmers whereas learning the wakes of jellyfish a number of years in the past.

Lampreys and jellyfish – two creatures you wouldn’t normally associate together.

Their recent experiments, recounted in a paper just published in Nature Communications, aimed at better understanding lamprey and jellyfish locomotion by observing lampreys swimming through a tank of water containing tiny glass beads that were illuminated with a laser. Then the water in front of the lampreys moves to fill that pocket.

Most fish and marine animals propel themselves through the water by pushing for the most part, but the lampreys and jellyfish actually pull themselves, according to a Los Angeles Times report. Using an 18th-century formula devised by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and building a sophisticated computer algorithm that could make the required calculations, the scientists were able to use the flow measurements to map out the water pressure around the animals’ bodies.

Lampreys swimming in undulating movements are making a low-pressure water pocket inside the bends of their body. In fact, these ocean denizens can go from point A to point B using less energy than any other swimmer, runner or flier ever measured. By creating these low-stress areas, the animals basically had been sucking their our bodies ahead by the water. This highly efficient swimming technique puts them even above humans. They also said that the research could provide help in designing bioinspired swimming robots in near future.

It’s an exciting finding that could lead to tremendous advances in marine swimming, as well as the understanding of marine mammal evolution.