The effect of temperature on swimming kinematics and hydrodynamics of barnacle cyprids Amphibalanus amphitrite

A barnacle cyprid uses six pairs of thoracic appendages in a metachronal wave to swim through the water. These cyprids are a fraction of a millimeter and move at a Reynolds number that typically ranges from one to ten, so viscosity is potentially important to their swimming performance. Here we observe free swimming cyprids with high-speed imaging to investigate how temperatures ranging from 10 to 40 degrees Celsius affect their swimming. We are able to capture multiple continuous strokes for several individual cyprids at a known temperature and viscosity. For these strokes, we separate the timescales for the power stroke, the recovery stroke, and the time between the strokes, and investigate how the fluid properties including those influenced by temperature impact those time scales.