swim in Biological News

To swim or to crawl: For the worm it's a no brainer

A study at the University of Leeds has shown, for the first time, that C. elegans worms crawl and swim using the same gait, overturning the widely accepted belief that these two behaviours are completely different. The findings have important implications for biologists and geneticists using C...

Microbot motors fit to swim human arteries

A range of complex surgical operations necessary to treat stroke victims, confront hardened arteries or address blockages in the bloodstream are about to be made safer as researchers from the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia's Monash University put the final touches to the design...

To swim or not to swim?

Concerns about water quality at beaches along the Great Lakes have prompted the need to better understand when waters are safe for recreation. A new collaborative project is aimed at improving information for beach managers when they are faced with deciding whether to close beaches to protect publ...

Even fish don't swim well when they're young!

Do you remember learning to swim? Thrashing around, floundering, until suddenly it all clicks into place and a few feeble strokes of doggy-paddle propel you away from your parent's arms. Surely, you think, fish must be born as expert swimmers. Actually, fish larvae are pretty feeble when it comes t...

Holding breath for several minutes elevates marker for brain damage

... More recently, breath-hold diving has become a competitive sport. Competitive events include how long divers can remain underwater, how far they can swim underwater and how deep they can dive. Participants must undergo intense training to increase their lung capacity while learning crucial safety measur...

Discovery of a water snake that startles fish in a way that makes them flee into its jaws

... turn to flee, most of them turn toward the snake's head and many literally swim into its jaws! In 120 trials with four different snakes, in fact, he discov...e opposite the snake's head, this reflex action drives the fish to turn and swim directly toward the snake's mouth. "Once the C-start begins, the fish ca...

Common fish species has 'human' ability to learn

...n more worms than the one the fish previously got their food from or giving roughly the same or less. In the second test, the fish were again free to swim around and choose their feeder. Around 75 per cent of fish were 'clever' enough to know from watching the other fish that the rich feeder, previo...

Manatees can probably hear which directions boats approach from

...ert, Joseph Gaspard 3rd, Gordon Bauer and Roger Reep trained the animals to swim to a specific stationing platform in their enclosure where they could liste...e manatees responded to less complex sounds. Having trained the manatees to swim to the speaker that they thought the sound came from, the team then played ...

Laughing hyenas, wailing levees, the sound of cheese and blaring bagpipes

...in surface waters. Some of these deep-sea fish have adaptations similar to those of surface fish with heightened hearing: a connection between the swim bladder and the ears, which may help to amplify sounds to the ears; and elaborately-oriented hair bundles in the inner ear, which suggests better hear...

Researchers report 'moderately large' potential for red tide outbreak in Gulf of Maine region

...um bloom. With the onset of spring and its warm temperatures and increased light, the cysts are already beginning to germinate, liberating cells that swim to the surface waters. Under the right conditions, a single cell can then divide into several hundred cells within a few weeks. But where and when the...

Marine scientists warn of potential for spring, summer red tide outbreak in Gulf of Maine

...ium bloom. With the onset of spring and its warm temperatures and increased light, the cysts are already beginning to germinate, liberating cells that swim to the surface waters. Under the right conditions, a single cell can then divide into several hundred cells within a few weeks. But where and wh...

Genes from tiny algae shed light on big role managing carbon in world's oceans

...ced to date, these swift swimmers can cut through the water column at a rate of 50 body lengths per second, and are phototactic, meaning that they can swim towards the sunlight from which they derive their energy. In previous studies, Worden and her colleagues showed that picoeukaryotes such as Micro...

New tracking tags are providing fish-eye views of ways to manage depressed fisheries

...esearchers estimate geo-locations and track each fish's daily movements. According to the study, new TAG data have revealed that as tuna grow, they swim all over the Atlantic, and that the fish from the two stocks commingle. Past failure to account for this mixing of the two stocks has led to unsustain...

'Freaks' help scientist unravel nature and nurture

...umberg said. But there was no specific gene to tell the Dutch goat to walk upright, or to teach the Hensel twins to coordinate their motions when they swim or play piano. "Genes are only part of the answer, and so my argument in ' Freaks of Nature ' is that we need a more balanced approach," Blumberg ...

Vanderbilt scientists invent world's smallest periscopes

...participated in the development with Janetopoulos, Seale and Reiserer. So far, the researchers have used the mirrored wells to examine how protozoa swim and cells divide. "The method is particularly well suited for studying dynamic processes within cells because it can follow them in three dimensions,"...

DNA evidence is in, newly discovered species of fish dubbed H. psychedelica

...th so little control they look intoxicated and should be cited for DUI. Members of Histiophryne psychedelica , or H. psychedelica , don't so much swim as hop. Each time they strike the seafloor they use their fins to push off and they expel water from tiny gill openings on their sides to jettison the...

Swimmers at public beaches show increased risk of exposure to contagious staph bacteria

...or exposure to staph organisms, and may increase their risk for potential staph infections once they enter the water. "Our study found that if you swim in subtropical marine waters, you have a significant chance -- approximately 37 percent - of being exposed to staph -- either yours or possibly that f...

WWF seeks innovative solutions to bycatch through worldwide competition

...ntic cod. The device works by taking advantage of the haddock's tendency to swim upward when encountering the net, while other fish, which have a tendency to swim downwards, are directed through an escape hatch. The design is now being us...

Cost of hatchling turtles' dash for freedom

... A newly hatched sea turtle's first swim is the most critical of its life. Having run the g...rch station, he fitted each hatchling with a lycra swim suit with a chord attached to a force transducer, ... that the hatchlings consumed during their 18hours swim (4.79kiloJoule), Booth realised that the turtles c...

Caltech researchers get first look at how groups of cells coordinate their movements

... converges as it goes. Thus, the mesoderm--which sits atop the ectoderm--passively rides the downward wave of ectodermal movement, but has to actively swim against the tide to spread outward. "It's as if the mesodermal cells are on a moving sidewalk," says Stathopoulos, "but as they're being moved alon...

Transporting juvenile salmon hinders adult migration

...stream to the ocean, where they live most of their adult lives. Adults then swim back up the river to mate, lay eggs and finally die in the same area where ...o slow down the barges so the trip resembles the time it takes juveniles to swim to the ocean. But boats are a stressful environment for fish, and the close...

Dolphin population stunted by fishing activities, Scripps/NOAA study finds

...s in which a dolphin school is chased by speedboats and encircled in a large "purse-seine" net in order to capture the large yellowfin tuna that often swim with dolphin schools. While such fishing led to high dolphin mortalities after purse-seine fishing was launched in the eastern tropical Pacific in the...

Animal and biological science highlights: San Antonio Fluid Dynamics Conference, Nov. 23-25

...ir James Gray, who first noted it). That led biologists to speculate that dolphin skin must have unusual turbulence-reducing properties which let them swim fast. Now, with the aid of a digital flow-tracking technology, fluid dynamicist Timothy Wei and his colleagues have, for the first time, directly a...

How do bacteria swim? Brown physicists explain

...more to the physical vagaries of the fluid around them. "For bacteria to swim in water," explained Jay Tang, associate professor of physics at Brown University, "it's like us trying to swim through honey. The drag is dominant." Tang and his team at Brown have ju...

Lead-flapping objects experience less wind resistance than their trailing counterparts

...cant drag increase. If this effect applies to fish schools and bird flocks, the leaders would also have a reduced burden and spend less energy as they swim or fly." The finding is the first of its kind on fluid flow. All previous studies on rigid objects in a moving fluid show the exact opposite result...

Zoologists: Sea snakes seek out freshwater to slake thirst

...rs, then weighed them again. None gained appreciably, indicating they didn't drink, despite their thirst. But when the researchers freed the snakes to swim in freshwater tanks, most immediately drank significant amounts. More experiments revealed the snakes would drink only freshwater or highly diluted sa...

1,000 tags reveal mysteries of giant bluefin tuna

...e and sunset data, revealing the migratory track of individual fish as they swim throughout the North Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas. The longest migrati...ery. Data from the tagged fish have revealed that bluefin tuna routinely swim across the Atlantic, with fish tagged off the coast of North America visiti...

Study sheds new light on dolphin coordination during predation

...ding was eye-opening. Initially a small group of about 20 dolphins would swim side-by-side in a straight line until finding concentrations of prey in th...heir prey, they would pull into a tight circular formation and sequentially swim up and down vertically, in essence, doing "the wave" like fans at a sportin...

Scientists call for protected 'swimways' for the endangered leatherback sea turtle

...er nesting on the beaches in Playa Grande, Costa Rica, Pacific leatherbacks swim toward the Galapagos Islands. See a copy of the IUCN resolution: http:/...yfish-rich waters off the west coast of North and South AmericaLeatherbacks swim over 6,000 miles within a single year - the largest geographic range of any...

Researchers study acoustic communication in deep-sea fish

... of Biology. Many fish use an organ known as a swim bladder to produce sound. According to Fine, the f...-like process,' forward. This action stretches the swim bladder. An antagonistic muscle pair then restores the swim bladder to its original position. In previous...

Genetics reveals big fish that almost got away

...earch . It turns out that goliath in the Atlanticwhich inhabit the tropical waters of the Americas and western Africaare not the same groupers that swim in Pacific waters, even though they look identical. "For more than a century, ichthyologists have thought that Pacific and Atlantic goliath groupe...

Signals from the Atlantic salmon highway

...ut fish movements that the acoustic tags do. The Ocean Tracking Network array works like the coastal network in Penobscot Bay. Once the tagged fish swim near passive acoustic receivers on the ocean floor, which are about 800 meters (2,500 feet) apart in a line 22 kilometers (about 14 miles) long, infor...

Robot vehicle surveys deep sea off Pacific Northwest

... extreme pressures, Sentry dove for as long as 18 hours and 58 kilometers, with the potential for longer trips in the future. Sentry is designed to swim like a fish or fly like a helicopter through the water. The sleek hydrodynamic design allows the vehicle to descend quickly from the sea surface to th...

'Top Secret' Technology To Help U.S. Swimmers Trim Times at Beijing Olympics

...r Nationals and be on deck with the swimmers. "How often does a researcher get to do something like this?" said Wei, whose young son and daughter also swim competitively. "It's been a journey into a world that someone like me would have never before gotten the privilege to see first-hand." Wei began his...

'Top secret' technology to help US swimmers trim times at Beijing Olympics

...ationals and be on deck with the swimmers. "How often does a researcher get to do something like this?" said Wei, whose young son and daughter also swim competitively. "It's been a journey into a world that someone like me would have never before gotten the privilege to see first-hand." Wei began hi...

Acidification of the sea hampers reproduction of marine species

...fertilised in the open water. However, in a more acidic marine environment, the sea urchin's ability to multiply goes down by 25 percent, as its sperm swim more slowly and move less effectively. If fertilisation is successful, their larval development is disturbed to the extent where only 75 percent of th...

From humming fish to Puccini: Vocal communication evolved with ancient species

...distinct groups of neurons in the brains of the larvae of midshipman fish, a species known for the loud humming sounds adult males generate with their swim bladders to attract females to their nests. With laser-scanning confocal microscopy, the research team observed clusters of cells in the larvae's dev...

Lionfish decimating tropical fish populations, threaten coral reefs

... fatalities for some people with heart problems or allergic reactions. "These are pretty scary fish, and they aren't timid," Hixon said. "They will swim right up to a diver in their feeding posture, looking like they're ready to eat. That can be a little spooky." Their rapid reproduction potential, ...

When fish talk, scientists listen

...st for his potential partner, he calls to nearby females by contracting his swim bladder, the air-filled sac fish use to maintain buoyancy. The sound he mak...adfish and midshipman orchestrate the movement of muscles attached to their swim bladder to produce grunts and hums. Using larval toadfish and midshipma...

Leatherback turtles' newly discovered migration route may be roadmap to salvation

...ven though only one of the 46 subjects of the study cruised the coastal areas, he said it might be a rare survivor of a larger population that used to swim in the coastal area, but could have been hit hard by human fishing pressure in the near shore areas. Gillnets and longlines are major threats to turtl...