Project Title: Morphological and Performance Diversity in Suction Feeding Fishes
This project is awarded under the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biological Informatics Program for 2006. The research will relate the details of movements of the fish skull to feeding performance as quantified by the peak speed of fluid motion and the volume flow rate generated during suction feeding. A 3-D kinematic analysis of the movements of the mouth as fish feed will document the details of the volume, shape change and velocity of oral expansion. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) will be used to visualize and quantify the flow generated by the feeding fish. The study represents a novel effort to simultaneously measure buccal cavity expansion, suction pressure and fluid movement in suction feeding fishes. The data relating morphology and kinematics to performance will be used to create a computational model that uses the change in shape of the buccal cavity to predict the magnitude of subambient pressure at the mouth opening, and the flow field in front of the mouth. This model relating morphology and kinematics to suction performance will be used to test hypotheses about the relative feeding performance of diverse, living suction feeders, as well as investigate the mechanical limits of the suction feeding mechanism. The interactive simulations and 3-D visualizations will be made publicly available as a web-database via an existing digital library project for educational and research purposes.
The proposed project will be carried out in the lab of Peter Wainright at the University of California at Davis where the fellow will augment her skills in 3-D kinematics with experience in computational modeling of fluid dynamics and PIV experiments. The research program couples an interest in biological fluid-solid interactions and the evolutionary mechanisms that produce novelty and diversity.
