Project: Collaborative Research: Navigating through space in turbulence tubes: Copepod responses to Burgers' vortex

Copepods are ubiquitous animals in marine environments and play a critically-important function in the food web of the world's oceans. The ability of a copepod to sense fluid motion provides an advantage for critical survival tactics such as finding food, finding mates, and avoiding predators. This project will examine the capability of copepods to detect turbulent flow. A turbulent-like flow will be mimicked in a laboratory aquarium as a small vortex (i.e., swirling motion like a tornado), and copepod swimming behavior will be observed in and around the vortex. The goal is to understand the variations in the sensory ecology of three species of copepods with three representative sensor arrays to better explain their temporal and spatial distribution in the ocean in response to turbulence conditions. The project also has a strong education and outreach plan. It will provide interdisciplinary training for graduate and undergraduate students in fields such as engineering, biology, and computational sciences. Further, research results will provide context for planned outreach efforts to educate the general public at local high schools and aquariums.

The project will deconstruct the turbulence-copepod interaction by performing detailed kinematics analysis of swimming in three species of copepods in and around a laboratory realization of a Burgers' vortex that mimics in situ turbulent vortices in the dissipation range of scales. The goal is to test the hypothesis that the copepods Acartia tonsa, Temora longicornis, and Calanus finmarchicus detect hydrodynamic cues related to vortices in turbulent flows and actively respond via changes in swimming kinematics. Using a custom designed and calibrated apparatus, a turbulent-like vortex will be created in the laboratory. By holding the turbulent vortex stable in space, cameras will be focused on a small region of the feature to record the animal behavior relative to well-quantified flow characteristics. The approach has the advantage of eliminating the time-varying and stochastic nature of turbulent flows that make such mechanistic understanding so challenging to achieve. Hypotheses will address questions about the influence of swimming style, setal array architecture, and the interaction of chemical and hydrodynamical cues on the turbulence-copepod interaction. Specifically, the investigators will examine how copepod species with different sensory structures and swimming orientation respond to a stable well-defined laboratory stimulus to determine how copepods exploit the shape and orientation of turbulent features. The species of copepods chosen for this work provide a range of sensory architectures, swimming orientations, sizes, and mate tracking abilities.