How and Why Fish School: An Information-theoretic Analysis of Coordinated Swimming

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This grant will support research that will contribute new knowledge related to fluid-structure interactions and collective dynamics, promoting the progress of science and empowering technological advancements. There is a dire need for advancements in the analysis of complex fluid-structure interactions and in the diagnostics of fluid coupling between solids, without having access to reliable mathematical models. Critical examples across engineering and science include human phonation, clusters of tall civil structures reacting to wind gusts, arrays of active materials for underwater sensing, nanomats of carbon nanotubes, arrays of cilia for fluid mixing and transport, and antennulary setal hairs of copepods. This award supports fundamental research to fill these gaps in knowledge, focusing on fish schooling, whose energy efficiency, geometric complexity, and visual allure have attracted the interest of the scientific community and general public for centuries. This research involves several disciplines bridging data-driven dynamical systems, experimental fluid mechanics, and experimental biology. The multi-disciplinary approach carries momentum in formal and informal learning, by training University students from underrepresented groups, exposing high school students from underprivileged communities to biology, engineering, and mathematics, and outreach to the general public.Recent experimental results demonstrate that at sufficiently large swimming speeds, schooling fish may prefer to swim in a "phalanx" formation, where there is no leader and every fish beats their tail almost in synchrony. The transition from the classical diamond formation to the phalanx challenges the present understanding of the role of vortex interactions in fish schooling, which might be superseded by other hydrodynamic or visual pathways. Yet, it is currently impossible to rigorously test this possibility, due to the lack of data-driven techniques to disentangle causes from effects in coordinated swimming. This project will contribute a mathematically-principled, experimentally-grounded approach to quantify information flow in ensembles of dynamical systems, interacting through multiple pathways that involve varying propagation times and physical variables. Hypothesis-driven, engineering-principled experiments will be conducted toward the discovery and exploration of dynamic structure, information pathways, and energetic mechanisms that underpin coordinated swimming.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.