Hydrodynamic Trails Produced by Daphnia: Size and Energetics

This study focuses on quantifying hydrodynamic trails produced by freely swimming zooplankton. We combined volumetric tracking of swimming trajectories with planar observations of the flow field induced by Daphnia of different size and swimming in different patterns. Spatial extension of the planar flow field along the trajectories was used to interrogate the dimensions (length and volume) and energetics (dissipation rate of kinetic energy and total dissipated power) of the trails. Our findings demonstrate that neither swimming pattern nor size of the organisms affect the trail width or the dissipation rate. However, we found that the trail volume increases with increasing organism size and swimming velocity, more precisely the trail volume is proportional to the third power of Reynolds number. This increase furthermore results in significantly enhanced total dissipated power at higher Reynolds number. The biggest trail volume observed corresponds to about 500 times the body volume of the largest daphnids. Trail-averaged viscous dissipation rate of the swimming daphnids vary in the range of [Image: see text] to [Image: see text] and the observed magnitudes of total dissipated power between [Image: see text] and [Image: see text], respectively. Among other zooplankton species, daphnids display the highest total dissipated power in their trails. These findings are discussed in the context of fluid mixing and transport by organisms swimming at intermediate Reynolds numbers.