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Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs
Animals exhibit various physiological and behavioural strategies for minimizing travel costs. Fins of aquatic animals play key roles in efficient travel and, for sharks, the functions of dorsal and pectoral fins are considered well divided: the former assists propulsion and generates lateral hydrody...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4963531/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27457414 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12289 |
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author | Payne, Nicholas L. Iosilevskii, Gil Barnett, Adam Fischer, Chris Graham, Rachel T. Gleiss, Adrian C. Watanabe, Yuuki Y. |
author_facet | Payne, Nicholas L. Iosilevskii, Gil Barnett, Adam Fischer, Chris Graham, Rachel T. Gleiss, Adrian C. Watanabe, Yuuki Y. |
author_sort | Payne, Nicholas L. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Animals exhibit various physiological and behavioural strategies for minimizing travel costs. Fins of aquatic animals play key roles in efficient travel and, for sharks, the functions of dorsal and pectoral fins are considered well divided: the former assists propulsion and generates lateral hydrodynamic forces during turns and the latter generates vertical forces that offset sharks' negative buoyancy. Here we show that great hammerhead sharks drastically reconfigure the function of these structures, using an exaggerated dorsal fin to generate lift by swimming rolled on their side. Tagged wild sharks spend up to 90% of time swimming at roll angles between 50° and 75°, and hydrodynamic modelling shows that doing so reduces drag—and in turn, the cost of transport—by around 10% compared with traditional upright swimming. Employment of such a strongly selected feature for such a unique purpose raises interesting questions about evolutionary pathways to hydrodynamic adaptations, and our perception of form and function. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4963531 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-49635312016-09-06 Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs Payne, Nicholas L. Iosilevskii, Gil Barnett, Adam Fischer, Chris Graham, Rachel T. Gleiss, Adrian C. Watanabe, Yuuki Y. Nat Commun Article Animals exhibit various physiological and behavioural strategies for minimizing travel costs. Fins of aquatic animals play key roles in efficient travel and, for sharks, the functions of dorsal and pectoral fins are considered well divided: the former assists propulsion and generates lateral hydrodynamic forces during turns and the latter generates vertical forces that offset sharks' negative buoyancy. Here we show that great hammerhead sharks drastically reconfigure the function of these structures, using an exaggerated dorsal fin to generate lift by swimming rolled on their side. Tagged wild sharks spend up to 90% of time swimming at roll angles between 50° and 75°, and hydrodynamic modelling shows that doing so reduces drag—and in turn, the cost of transport—by around 10% compared with traditional upright swimming. Employment of such a strongly selected feature for such a unique purpose raises interesting questions about evolutionary pathways to hydrodynamic adaptations, and our perception of form and function. Nature Publishing Group 2016-07-26 /pmc/articles/PMC4963531/ /pubmed/27457414 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12289 Text en Copyright © 2016, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Payne, Nicholas L. Iosilevskii, Gil Barnett, Adam Fischer, Chris Graham, Rachel T. Gleiss, Adrian C. Watanabe, Yuuki Y. Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
title | Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
title_full | Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
title_fullStr | Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
title_full_unstemmed | Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
title_short | Great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
title_sort | great hammerhead sharks swim on their side to reduce transport costs |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4963531/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27457414 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12289 |
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