Jellyfish have the lowest cost of transport of all metazoans and live in a wide range of ocean temperature, salinity, pH, and depth, due to their evolutionary success and adaptability. We study the performance envelope of Aurelia aurita jellyfish with embedded microelectronic swim controllers that manipulate the frequency of body contractions during swimming. Previous work has demonstrated enhanced jellyfish vertical swimming speeds of 2.8 times baseline speeds without swim controllers. Indirect measurements suggest that this enhanced swimming can be achieved without proportional increases in energy consumption. Manipulating the frequency of body contractions allows us to approach the animal’s biological velocity limits and better understand the role of swimming mechanics in the observed evolutionary success. We characterize the animal’s physiological limits to study the untapped potential for faster and more efficient swimming. These limits may be different from commonly observed swimming speeds due to impacts of feeding or other environmental variables. We then investigate stimulated animal swimming efficiency metrics. This will help to determine if these enhanced swimming speeds are energetically feasible for deploying stimulated jellyfish with attached sensors for ocean monitoring.

Primary Presenter: Simon Anuszczyk, California Institute of Technology (simona@caltech.edu)

Authors:

John Dabiri, California Institute of Technology  ()

Simon Anuszczyk, California Institute of Technology  (Simona@caltech.edu)