Meeting Abstract
Biologists studying fish locomotion have had a preoccupation with producing classifying schemes.For example, the classical scheme of Breder divides undulatory fish kinematics into categories based on modes of locomotion named after exemplar species.Fishes that are believed to swim with relatively large undulations of the entire body are referred to as “anguilliform” after the eel Anguilla, while fishes with progressively longer wavelength undulations are termed “subcarangiform”,” carangiform”, and “thunniform” (after tuna, Thunnus).Under this scheme, lateral amplitude oscillations of the anterior body decrease progressively from eels to tuna. In order to provide data for a comparison of undulatory swimming kinematics in fishes, we have assembled a quantitative data set of midline body bending kinematics across 34 species including amphioxus, eels, sharks, and tuna.High-speed video data were obtained from both controlled laboratory flow tanks and a field-based high-speed flow tank where fish can exhibit natural high-speed migratory locomotor behavior. We measured 200 body midline coordinates from head to the tail throughout one tail beat cycle.Analysis of midline kinematics shows that, at slow swimming speeds, there is considerable similarity among species even as diverse as eel and tuna.At high swimming speeds, kinematics often change with higher amplitude motion of the head.In the future we plan to create an open-access multi-species kinematics database for use in comparative studies of fish swimming kinematics and for programming fish robotic systems.
