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Seminars

The Wild Antarctic Pteropod

A series of observations of swimming of a species of pteropod, a shell less mollusk, carried out in November-December 2000, at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, will be made during a seminar sponsored by the Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Friday, March 2, 11:30 a.m., in Cullimore Lecture Hall 2.

Steve Childress, of the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, will present "Stalking the Wild Antarctic Pteropod: A Preliminary Report of Observations of Bimodal Swimming at Intermediate Reynolds Numbers." Pterorpod, an organism equipped with bands of cilia, as an adult develops a pair of wings, which gradually come to provide the main mechanism for swimming.

Sometimes called the sea butterfly, this pteropod provides a means of studying emergence of flapping flight as the Reynolds number of swimming increases. Direct viscosity manipulation of the fluid was carried out to complement temperature mediated changes. Childress' results suggest that a crossover to flapping mechanisms occur in this organism at a swimming Reynolds number of about 10. He will also discuss some questions raised by the work, and the modeling of thrust produced by flapping in the presence of the body wall.

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