The movements of small crustaceans known as brine shrimp – they measure between 3 millimeters and a centimeter and a half long depending on their species and life phase – could influence the circulation of the oceans on a global scale, perhaps as much as the winds and the Moon.
This is the conclusion reached by a team of bioengineers and mechanical engineers from the California Institute of Technology who have studied how these arthropods move.
As highlighted in an article published in the journal Physics of Fluids , brine shrimp travel in large groups. When night falls, they approach the surface, while during daylight hours, they dive deeper. The researchers used laser beams to manipulate the movements of these animals in a water tank and recorded their movements with high-speed cameras.
Thus, they observed that each crustacean by itself barely generated a minimal downdraft, but when it did so together with other specimens, the one that originated was much more intense than the sum of those created by each of them separately.
John Dabiri, an expert in biological propulsion systems, who has participated in the study, points out that a mass of these animals in movement originates strong currents in their wake, to such an extent that they would alter those of the oceans and affect the distribution of the salt, the nutrients and even the heat in them, and with all this, to the climate. In this phenomenon, they suspect, other small marine organisms would also participate.
Photo: Hans Hillewaert
