Ecological Fluid Mechanics - Interactions among Organisms and their Fluid Environment

The presentation will introduce the focus session and define the topic of "Ecological Fluid Mechanics", which broadly is the study of how fluid motion and scalar transport mediate and influence the ecology of organisms. The session specifically addresses the role that fluid motion, flow gradients, and chemical stirring play in shaping organism behavior, interactions, recruitment, reproduction, and community structure. Relevant studies address a broad range of taxonomic groups and span topics of biomechanics, transport and settling, propulsion, and sensory ecology. Themes include the influence of instantaneous flow patterns, the influence of extreme physical events, the influence of scale on biological-physical coupling, and biological/ecological advantages mediated by flow and chemical transport. Methods span experimental, modeling, and computational efforts with flow regimes spanning creeping, laminar, unsteady, wavy, and turbulent flows.