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Muscles and Locomotion

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Physiology of Elasmobranch Fishes

Abstract

Like all fish, elasmobranchs swim in a dense viscous fluid which has at once profound effects upon the design of their locomotor system, and by buoying them up, enables them partially or completely to escape the effects of gravity. So far as the locomotor system is concerned, the main design constraint is that in such a fluid the drag opposing forward motion increases rapidly as swimming speed increases, so that to operate over a wide speed range, the locomotor muscle has to provide a rather wide range of power output. Just how wide this range may be is not certainly known for any elasmobranch species, since little information is available about the speed range over which any given species operates. In the small dogfish Scyliorhinus, minimum cruising speed (below which insufficient dynamic lift can be generated to maintain horizontal position) is around 25 cm s−1 whilst burst speed is probably around 1 ms−1. Like most sharks and rays, Scyliorhinus is relatively well-streamlined (though not so superbly as fast-swimming lamnids) and skin friction drag is much the most important drag component opposing forward motion: pressure drag and lift-associated vortex drag are of minor consequence.

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  1. The Laboratory, The Marine Biological Association of the UK, PL1 2PB, Citadel Hill, Plymouth, UK

    Q. Bone

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  1. Department of Physiology, The University of Rochester Medical Center, 601 Elmwood Avenue, 14642, Rochester, NY, USA

    Trevor J. Shuttleworth

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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bone, Q. (1988). Muscles and Locomotion. In: Shuttleworth, T.J. (eds) Physiology of Elasmobranch Fishes. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-73336-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-73336-9_4

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