Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access published online on April 11, 2008
Integrative and Comparative Biology, doi:10.1093/icb/icn014
Modes and scaling in aquatic locomotion
Biology Department, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
Correspondence: 1E-mail: svogel{at}duke.edu
Organisms spanning a 107-fold range in length of the body engage in aquatic propulsion—swimming; they do so with several kinds of propulsors and take advantage of several different fluid mechanical mechanisms. A hierarchical classification of swimming modes can impose some order on this complexity. More difficult are the issues surrounding the different kinds of propulsive devices used by different organisms. These issues can be in part exposed by an examination of how speeds and accelerations scale with changes in body length, both for different lineages of swimmers and for all swimmers collectively. Clearly, fluid mechanical factors impose general rules and constraints; just as clearly, these only roughly anticipate actual scaling. Indeed, collections of data on scaling can serve as useful correctives for assumptions about functional mechanisms. They can also reveal size-dependent constraints on biological designs.
From the symposium "Going With the Flow: Ecomorphological Variation Across Flow Regimes" presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, January 2–6, 2008 at San Antonio, Texas.