A fascinating aspect of fish swimming is the so-called rheotaxis, the ability of fish to orient themselves against the flow. This phenomenon is often associated to multi-sensorial inputs, which are used by the fish to understand the direction of the current in which they swim.
In their new paper published in journal eLife, our own Prof. Maurizio Porfiri, in collaboration with Prof. Sean Peterson from University of Waterloo (Canada) and our Research Assistant Prof. Peng Zhang, utilized a simple and elegant model to explain how fish can orient against the flow in a channel from a purely hydrodynamic perspective. In other words, the study shows that fish can perform rheotaxis passively, if the speed of the flow is high enough.
Read the article “Hydrodynamic model of fish orientation in a channel flow” here.
Image credit: Peng Zhang, Anna Sawulska, and Maurizio Porfiri.