Abstract
Living in the marine environment poses challenges that are markedly different from those we experience on land.  While the chemical challenges of maintaining salt balance and gaining oxygen are more familiar, the physical attributes of water create strong selective pressure for generating locomotor forces, which are reflected in the diversity of morphologies exhibited by fishes.  While knowing the forces acting on the bodies of swimming fishes would be valuable to our understanding of their life histories and evolution, measuring these forces in an experimental setting is difficult.  By applying principles from fluid dynamics, we can instead estimate these forces based on the pressure in the water around a swimming fish's body, and in this way, begin to fully understand the mechanisms that enable swimming movements.

Hosts: Dr. Jeannette Yen and Dr. Donald Webster