What is it about?
Flagellated unicellular organisms play a key role in the biogeochemistry of the ocean. The composition and function of their communities are shaped by fundamental trade-offs between resource acquisition and predation risk. The flagellates gather resources by creating feeding currents by means of beating flagella, but the resulting fluid disturbance attracts flow-sensing predators, thus giving rise to a trade-off. We here quantify this trade-off by visualizing the fluid flow that the foraging activity generates. We show that the flow architecture relates to the arrangement and beat kinematics of their flagella in characteristic ways that can be predicted qualitatively from simple fluid mechanical models.
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This page is a summary of: Foraging trade-offs, flagellar arrangements, and flow architecture of planktonic protists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2009930118.
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