CAREER: Towards the Creation of a Dynamic Modeling Framework to Generate New Knowledge About Swimming Biological Systems

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research that will enable new understanding of the swimming mechanics of bottlenose dolphins. Researchers will gather information on the behavior of free-swimming bottlenose dolphins using electronic tags that are attached to the animal and that measure both movement and caloric expenditure. The collected information, combined with mathematical modeling, will lead to new understanding of dolphin swimming. Such an understanding is critical to policy and management practices that reduce the impact of human activities on these animals. This research will be integrated with education and outreach activities that are designed to inspire a new and diverse generation of students and engineers and to raise awareness of the social and environmental implications of bio-inspired engineered systems. This project will advance the current state of knowledge of the swimming mechanics of bottlenose dolphins by creating a novel diagnostic framework that will combine low-order mathematical models of swimming with kinematic data from biologging tags. The framework will lead to a fundamental scientific understanding of the impact of biomechanical parameters, like fluke flexibility and swimming gait, on the cost of locomotion. Importantly, this new bio-logging paradigm will enable us to obtain, using single-point kinematic measurements taken from free-swimming animals, estimates of the mechanical cost of swimming. This work will produce first-of-their-kind estimates of the energetic cost during free swimming. The new knowledge developed over the course of this project will impact the fields of biologging, biomechanics, and the modeling of dynamical systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.