Meeting Abstract
How fishes move during locomotion determines their thrust production and overall swimming performance. Here we describe steady swimming kinematics in the Florida pompano (Trachinotus carolinus), a member of the Carangidae family, in order to better understand one of the four major modes of fish swimming, carangiform locomotion. Juveniles (total length, L, 4.9±0.9 cm; n=7) were collected from the beaches of St. Augustine, and swam in a flow tank. Using a high speed, high resolution camera we measured swimming kinematics at 5, 9, and 13.5 L s-1. We divided the fish into four sections; head, anterior body, posterior body, and caudal fin. We found that head, anterior body, and caudal fin motions can each be accurately modeled as a rigid line (maximum mean absolute error 7.09±2.43 %, 5.1±1.6 % and 12.8±3.97 %, respectively). We also found that the traveling wave equation, which has been traditionally used to describe swimming kinematics of fish in uniform flows, can also describe the bending of the posterior body (maximum mean absolute error was less than 7.4±3.6%). The traveling wave was initiated near the center of mass, which was 0.45 L from the snout of the fish, and did not change with swimming speed. Tail beat frequency increased with swimming speed (y=0.83x+3.63, R2=0.83, p<0.01), whereas tail beat amplitude slightly decreased with swimming speed (y =-0.01x+0.89, R2=0.21, p<0.01). Body wavelength remained constant (1.06±0.01 L). Our results suggest that our kinematic model can accurately describe swimming kinematics of carangiform locomotion regardless of swimming speed and provides a quantitative metric for biomimetic and field applications.
