Surprisingly, fish tend to align against the current they face, not with it. Such behavior, called rheotaxis, is replicated in a variety of experiments in which the fish is deprived of several senses.
Our own Prof. Maurizio Porfiri, in collaboration with Prof. Sean Peterson from University of Waterloo (Canada) and our Research Assistant Prof. Peng Zhang write about this fascinating phenomenon in the new digest to their recently published study in journal eLife.
Read the full paper “Hydrodynamic model of fish orientation in a channel flow” here.
Image credit: Peng Zhang, Anna Sawulska, Sean Peterson, and Maurizio Porfiri.