Vortex Ring-Mediated Jellyfish Feeding

As a continuation of my previous jellyfish work with the MIT SPUR program, we continued studying vortex-ring-mediated nutrient uptake in swimming jellyfish. We studied the trade-off between prey capture rates and the energy expended to generate the inertial flows leading to this prey consumption. We found an energy-efficient landscape to predict an optimal swimming paramter regime that agreed well with data from a host of different jellyfish species. This regime coincides well with the transition from a “Stokes pumping” flow to a vortex-ring dominated flow, which matched our experimental observations of A. Aurita.