Pubblicazione scientifica

Passive drift or active swimming in marine organisms?

FILONE TECNOLOGICO	TEMA
economia circolare e sostenibilità
produzione e cattura

RIASSUNTO

Predictions of organismal movements in a fluid require knowing the fluid's velocity and potential contributions of the organism's behaviour (e.g. swimming or flying). While theoretical aspects of this work are reasonably well-developed, field-based validation is challenging. A much-needed study recently published by Briscoe and colleagues in Proceedings of the Royal Society B compared movements and distribution of satellite-tracked juvenile sea turtles to virtual particles released in a data-assimilating hindcast ocean circulation model. Substantial differences observed between turtles and particles were considered evidence for an important role of active swimming by turtles. However, the experimental design implicitly assumed that transport predictions were insensitive to (i) start location, (ii) tracking duration, (iii) depth, and (iv) physical processes not depicted in the model. Here, we show that the magnitude of variation in physical parameters between turtles and virtual particles can profoundly alter transport predictions, potentially sufficient to explain the reported differences without evoking swimming behaviour. We present a more robust method to derive the environmental contributions to individual movements, but caution that resolving the ocean velocities experienced by individual organisms remains a problem for assessing the role of behaviour in organismal movements and population distributions.

DATA

Data di pubblicazione: 14/12/2016

AUTORI

PUTMAN NATHAN F
LUMPKIN RICK
SACCO ALEXANDER E
MANSFIELD KATHERINE L

ENTE DI AFFERENZA

COOPERATIVE INST MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC STUDIES ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE UNIV MIAMI MIAMI FL 33149 USA
ATLANTIC OCEANOGRAPHIC & METEOROLOGICAL LAB
DEPT BIOLOGY UNIV CENTRAL FLORIDA ORLANDO FL 32816 USA

RIVISTA

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 283(1844), 20161689

IMPACT FACTOR

4,240

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