“We’re interested in developing the next generation of underwater vehicles so we’re trying to understand how dolphins and whales swim as efficiently as they do,” says Keith W. Moored. The tail fins of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) come in a wide variety of shapes. The way these animals move their fins, or their kinematics, also varies. Some cetaceans may flap their fins at a greater amplitude, or pitch them at a steeper angle. Moored and his team wanted to better understand this interplay between the two variables to determine if tail fin shape was tailored to a specific set of kinematics. “This fish swimming problem is a really exciting problem because it’s so complicated,” he says. “It’s fascinating to take this chaos of variables and see order in it, to see the structure in it, and to understand what’s fundamentally happening.”
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