Can we imitate organisms' abilities to decode water patterns for new technologies?

Researchers train AI to distinguish flow patterns created by swimmers

Date:  April 5, 2018

Source:  University of Southern California

The shape of water. Can it tell us about what drives romance? Among fish, it might. Eva Kanso, a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering studies fluid flows and almost like a forensic expert, Kanso, along with her team, is studying how aquatic signals are transported through the water.

When it comes to mating, tiny crustaceans called copepods are one of the most abundant multi-cellular organisms, says Kanso, the Zohrab Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering.

To locate their mate, male copepods search for and follow the hydrodynamic and chemical trail of the female. Scientists like Kanso believe aquatic organisms transmit and read information through the movements they make and the wakes they leave behind in the water. Harbor seals, for example, have been shown to track the wake of a moving object, even when the seal is blindfolded and initially acoustically-masked. Researchers believe the flow of water encodes a pattern of information -- a type of language by which an organism can call another to mate, use to avoid predators or even in the case of salmon, begin upstream migration.

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