Ctenophores are the largest animals on Earth that use cilia as their primary swimming mechanism. These animals possess useful swimming abilities, such as high maneuverability. We are interested in exploring the advantages of primarily swimming with cilia at larger Reynolds numbers. We used two flow tanks to investigate how ctenophores altered their swimming behavior in response to fluid motion. The first tank was a water flume designed to allow observation of the motion of the animals’ cilia in varying mean flow speeds. The second tank created turbulent flow using underwater speakers, with no background current; we tracked the motion of freely-swimming ctenophores in different levels of turbulence to find potential differences in overall swimming behavior. We found that the animals tended to increase their excursion durations as turbulence increased, and that the path of their swimming excursions tended to be less vertical as turbulence increased.
