SURF PERCHES STAY AEROBIC IN HIGHER SPEED GAITS

摘要

All animals shift gear as they speed up. Horses switch from walking to trotting to galloping. They do this to conserve energy, changing to a higher gear when the cost of transport becomes too high. Fish also change gait as they speed up. Surf perches start out swimming with their pectoral fins at low speeds, before shifting to tail swimming and finally the burst and coast gait – where they intersperse swimming, using the tail, with coasting, using the pectoral fins – but no one knew the cost of transport of these gaits. According to Jon Svendsen, Eliot Drucker and Jeff Jensen put striped surf perches through their paces in the 1990s and suggested that the fish switch from aerobic respiration (fuelled by oxygen) to anaerobic respiration (not fuelled by oxygen) as they switch from one gait to another, but no one had tested the idea. Discussing the problem at a Friday Harbor Laboratories (University of Washington) Fish Swimming Class in 2005 with fellow students and mentors, Cristian Tudorache, Anders Jordan, John Steffensen and Paolo Domenici, the team decided to find out find out how striped surf perches manage their metabolism as they speed up through higher gaits (p. 2177).