Tool Hammer Head Shark Art Pun a Horse Fly Art Pun
Trilobites
The Pros and Cons of Pond With a Hammerhead
A new study suggests that the ocean'due south strangest-looking headgear is difficult to tote around.
People joke about asking horses, "Why the long face?" We should redirect this question to hammerhead sharks. Their famous head extensions, called cephalofoils, can measure iii feet from heart to center. And scientists are still trying to blast down exactly what purposes they serve.
A study published before this calendar month in Scientific Reports explored how the sharks' strangely shaped craniums bear on how they swim. Although the cephalofoil helped with maneuverability, the researchers found, it did not seem to generate elevator. In fact, it added a lot of elevate — then much that some hammerheads may need to use roughly x times as much force equally other sharks just to get through the water, said Glenn R. Parsons, a biological oceanographer and shark specialist at the University of Mississippi and ane of the new paper'southward authors.
There are some benefits to having a hammer for a head. Most experts agree that the widely-spaced optics, nostrils and electroreceptors enabled by the cephalofoil's shape allow the hunters to better pinpoint their prey. The heads can besides serve as weapons — biologists accept observed a female great hammerhead use her noggin to bludgeon a stingray.
But yous have to wonder what it's like to swim effectually with that thing. In his forty-odd years of shark watching, Dr. Parsons has noticed that hammerheads are peculiarly nimble. "They make these real quick, kind of jerky turns," he said. Maybe, he thought, the head shape improved maneuverability. Or perhaps information technology helps them fight gravity by providing elevator, like an airplane wing.
To investigate, Dr. Parsons and his colleagues turned to computational fluid dynamics — a method familiar to aircraft and submarine designers, and now used by biologists to look into everything from insect flying to the wobbles of boxfish.
Paradigm
There are at least 8 hammerhead species, enough to fill up a tool belt. Some, like the winghead shark, have faces as large as racecar spoilers. Others sport more subtle shapes: The bonnethead'southward face looks like a shovel, and the scoophead's resembles a mushroom slice.
The researchers included all eight species in their study, laser-scanning the heads of preserved museum specimens to "capture the concrete shape in minute detail," Dr. Parsons said. Each digitized head was so placed in a virtual underwater surround, assuasive the researchers to measure h2o pressure level, elevate and period. They and so did the same for a few shark species with more than typical pointy heads.
When a hammerhead'due south cephalofoil was level — as is typical when they are pond — information technology did not generate elevator, the researchers found.
Merely as before long as the cephalofoil was tilted upwardly or downwards, the force quickly came into play, enabling a rapid ascent or descent. This helps to explicate why hammerheads are "much more maneuverable than a typical shark," said Dr. Parsons, who thinks the skill may assistance them snap upward food from the sea flooring.
The researchers as well measured how much drag the cephalofoils produced. The winghead shark, which has the largest hammer, appears to be dealing with "20 to 40 times the corporeality of elevate" every bit a typical fish, Dr. Parsons said.
Such a head, he added, seems similar "a hurting in the butt," although the benefits it provides must outweigh the costs.
Analyzing then many species is "a real push forrard" for hammerhead hydrodynamics, said Marianne Porter, a biologist at Florida Atlantic Academy who was not involved with the research. "We tin showtime to report the variation amongst them."
But, she added, "there are some limitations with computational models." In the existent earth, sharks swim with their whole bodies, through constantly changing sea conditions. When you are trying to recreate such things in models, and focusing on one body part at a time, "things go muddy really fast," she said. (Indeed, in a similar study published in 2018, Dr. Porter found that the hammerhead torso overall does produce lift.)
"The hammer is, at all angles of attack, producing a lot of drag," Dr. Parsons said in reply. "But it might be possible to recover some of that lost momentum past appropriately placed fins and structures" elsewhere on the shark.
He said he hoped that other researchers would continue to investigate the outcome: "The best research questions are the ones that generate x more."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/science/hammerhead-sharks-cephalofoil.html
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