Different aspects of swimming and schooling in fish

Benjamin Thiria – PMMH, Paris

In this talk, I will show three different experiments on live fish swimming and schooling. I will first try to bring some answers to the old fundamental question raised by fluid dynamicists: is there a hydrodynamic advantage of swimming in schools? I will then give some details about the intermittent dynamics that characterize the swimming of small and medium size fish and discuss the dependence of the global cost of transport to the parameters of the swimming. At last, I will show the role of vision in the formation of spontaneous global behavior in a large population of fish.