May 8, 2015 — How do you find out what a fish feels? For University of Florida researcher James Liao, the answer involves lasers, taxidermy and more than a few mathematicians.
In the late winter of 2013, Liao packed up his marine biological equipment from the UF’s Whitney Laboratory in St. Augustine, Florida, to visit New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematics.
The trip was part of a 10-year journey that started when Liao was a graduate student at Harvard. Liao was intrigued by the arrangement of the lateral line organ, a “sixth sense” used by fishes to detect water flow and pressure, which remains consistent across more than 33,000 species. Why? Was this sensor organization related to function, or a developmental constraint that occurs commonly in biology? In order to answer this, Liao knew that he needed to directly measure what a fish feels when it is swimming.
That’s where it got tricky.
“Putting sensors on a live fish makes it behave unnaturally,” he said.
Liao, whose expertise is in biomechanics and neuroscience, brought together a team of mathematicians and roboticists (then-postdoc Leif Ristroph and professor Jun Zhang) to answer the question, which resulted in a recent paper published by Physical Review Letters.