Tuesday April 9, 2024
EurekAlert! —
Swimming in schools makes fish surprisingly stealthy underwater, with a group able to sound like a single fish.
The new findings by Johns Hopkins University engineers working with a high-tech simulation of schooling mackerel, offers new insight into why fish swim in schools and promise for the design and operation of much quieter submarines and autonomous undersea vehicles.
“It’s widely known that swimming in groups provides fish with added protection from predators, but we questioned whether it also contributes to reducing their noise,” said senior author Rajat Mittal. “Our results suggest that the substantial decrease in their acoustic signature when swimming in groups, compared to solo swimming, may indeed be another factor driving the formation of fish schools.”
The work is newly published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.