ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Convergence of undulatory swimming kinematics across a diversity of fishes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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35 citing papers in PubMed.
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- A General Kinematic Model for Multimodal Locomotion in Bioinspired Robots.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Intraspecific and interspecific variations in the swimming characteristics of snakes according to their lifestyle.Zoological research · 2025Article
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- Skeletal Adaptations to Locomotion and Feeding in Mediterranean Batoids (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Predicting body length and assessing the shape of tail-propelled Mesozoic marine reptiles.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Bio-inspired multimodal soft actuator with environmental self-adaptation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Speed-dependent locomotor patterns during steady swimming in a demersal shark.Journal of fish biology · 2025Article
- Inherent instability leads to high costs of hovering in near-neutrally buoyant fishes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Backward swimming in elongated-bodied abyssal demersal fishes: Synaphobranchidae, Macrouridae, and Ophidiidae.Journal of fish biology · 2025Article
- Growth and mechanical correlations of calcified cartilage in Batoidea: A histomorphological study using the Raja asterias model.Journal of fish biology · 2025Article
- Ecological interactions and genomic innovation fueled the evolution of ray-finned fish endothermy.Science advances · 2025Article
- Swimming smarter, not harder: fishes exploit habitat heterogeneity to increase locomotor performance.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- The tuna keel is a mechanosensory structure.iScience · 2025Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Fishes exhibit an astounding diversity of locomotor behaviors from classic swimming with their body and fins to jumping, flying, walking, and burrowing. Fishes that use their body and caudal fin (BCF) during undulatory swimming have been traditionally divided into modes based on the length of the propulsive body wave and the ratio of head:tail oscillation amplitude: anguilliform, subcarangiform, carangiform, and thunniform. This classification was first proposed based on key morphological traits, such as body stiffness and elongation, to group fishes based on their expected swimming mechanics. Here, we present a comparative study of 44 diverse species quantifying the kinematics and morphology of BCF-swimming fishes. Our results reveal that most species we studied share similar oscillation amplitude during steady locomotion that can be modeled using a second-degree order polynomial. The length of the propulsive body wave was shorter for species classified as anguilliform and longer for those classified as thunniform, although substantial variability existed both within and among species. Moreover, there was no decrease in head:tail amplitude from the anguilliform to thunniform mode of locomotion as we expected from the traditional classification. While the expected swimming modes correlated with morphological traits, they did not accurately represent the kinematics of BCF locomotion. These results indicate that even fish species differing as substantially in morphology as tuna and eel exhibit statistically similar two-dimensional midline kinematics and point toward unifying locomotor hydrodynamic mechanisms that can serve as the basis for understanding aquatic locomotion and controlling biomimetic aquatic robots.
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