Efficient mate finding in planktonic copepods swimming in turbulence.

ABSTRACT: Zooplankton live in dynamic environments where turbulence may challenge their limited swimming abilities. How this interferes with fundamental behavioral processes remains elusive. We reconstruct simultaneously the trajectories of flow tracers and calanoid copepods and we quantify their ability to find mates when ambient flow imposes physical constrains on their motion and impairs their olfactory orientation. We show that copepods achieve high encounter rates in turbulence due to the contribution of advection and vigorous swimming. Males further convert encounters within the perception radius to contacts and then to mating via directed motion toward nearby organisms within the short time frame of the encounter. Inertial effects do not result in preferential concentration, reducing the geom

SUBMITTER: Michalec FG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7688315 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature