The swim-and-sink behaviour of copepods: a revisit to mechanical power requirement and a new hypothesis on function

The swim-and-sink behaviour of copepods: a revisit to mechanical power requirement and a new hypothesis on function

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Many copepods display a swim-and-sink behaviour, which is not rosy teacup dogwood energetically efficient but probably aids in perceiving and capturing diatom chains.Here, computational fluid dynamics was employed to calculate the mechanical power required by a negatively buoyant, self-propelled copepod in swim-and-sink versus hovering.The results show that upward swim-and-sink about a fixed depth always demands more power than hovering.

Subsequently, high-speed microscale imaging was employed to observe the copepod Centropages sp.in swim-and-sink, specifically its encounter and handling of diatom chains for capture, along with the measured alternating swimming and sinking currents imposed by the swim-and-sink copepod.The findings suggest that during upward swimming, the copepod uses its swimming click here current to scan the fluid for detecting embedded diatom chains, presumably through chemoreception.

Once a diatom chain is perceived, the copepod sinks and uses its sinking current to manipulate the orientation of the diatom chain before swimming upward to capture it.Overall, these results propose a hypothesis that swim-and-sink is an innate behaviour that assists copepods in perceiving and manoeuvring diatom chains for capture.In contrast with near-spherical algae, diatom chains predominately exhibit a horizontal orientation in the ocean, necessitating vertically oriented copepods to possess a handling behaviour that manoeuvres diatom chains for capture.