Biomechanics of Aquatic Micro-Organisms

Abstract

Aquatic micro-organisms play a major role in ocean ecology, the global carbon cycle and bioreactor engineering. The complex foodweb of an oceanic ecosystem may be modelled in terms of a few species of different types whose population densities obey coupled differential equations. However the functions and constants that appear in those equations depend in a complex way on the details of the dynamics of individual organisms and how they interact in larger scale phenomena. This talk will survey some of the following topics: (1) the fluid dynamics of micro-organism swimming, (2) the effect on nutrient uptake of an organism’s swimming motions, (3) chemotaxis in bacteria, (4) capture rate of phytoplankton by zooplankton when they all swim in a turbulent environment, (5) pattern-formation (e.g. bioconvection) in suspensions of upswimming micro-organisms (algae and bacteria), (6) the hydrodynamic interactions between swimming model micro-organisms and (7) their effect on the rheology and transport properties of the suspension as a whole. The long-term goal is to formulate a continuum model for concentrated suspensions of swimmers; this is not yet realised and may be impossible!