Meeting Abstract
Fishes of the family Echeneidae, colloquially known as the Remoras, have evolved a unique and complex cranial adhesive disc from dorsal fin spines, which allows the remora to successfully adhere to different surfaces under high drag conditions. After examining the 9 known species of extant and extinct remoras in context of their phylogeny, we observed a trend in which species thought to have evolved later have more lamellae comprising their adhesive disc. We hypothesize that adhesive performance increases with number of lamellae, thus favoring selection for more lamellae over time. To investigate the effect of lamellae number on performance, we designed and fabricated a simplified remora disc model, in which we could modify the number of lamellae, and attached the disc to a variety of different roughness surfaces under varied shear conditions. We found that the number of lamellae in the disc had a nonlinear positive correlation to time to failure, suggesting that selection for adhesive performance may have contributed to variation of lamellar number among remora species.
