{"id":488,"date":"2008-06-25T04:50:06","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T09:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=488"},"modified":"2008-06-25T04:50:06","modified_gmt":"2008-06-25T09:50:06","slug":"surfing-solves-puzzle-of-water-snail-locomotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=488","title":{"rendered":"Surfing solves puzzle of water snail locomotion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/snail-surfing.jpg\" title=\"Snail surfing\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/snail-surfing.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"Snail surfing\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Snails move using a mechanism called adhesive locomotion. Through muscular contraction and expansion of their foot, they transmit a force to the ground through a thin layer of mucus which is adhesive at low strains but otherwise flows like a liquid.<\/p>\n<p>But what of water snails that move upsidedown along the underside of a liquid surface? Water snails seem to move their foot in the same undulating way as their terrestrial cousins but adhesive locomotion can&#8217;t answer for their albeit small, velocity because there&#8217;s nothing to stick to.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Sungyon Lee, an engineer at\u00a0 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge\u00a0 and a few pals put forward their own suggestion. Their idea is that the undulating motion of the foot deforms the surface of the water. And this generates a pressure that causes the mucus, which is sandwiched between the foot and water surface, to flow.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, water snails surf on waves of their own making.<\/p>\n<p>Neat idea but Lee and company have more work to do to make their argument water tight.<\/p>\n<p>First, it isn&#8217;t clear whether their model can account for the kinds of speeds water snails actually achieve (whatever these are).<\/p>\n<p>And second, the model assumes that water snail mucus is newtonian. That&#8217;s probably wrong. Terrestrial snail mucus is non-newtonian and that is crucial for locomotion.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d be willing to bet a bowl of steaming <em>escargot a la poulette<\/em> that water snail mucus also turns out to be non-newtonian and that this is crucial for amplifying whatever forces snails use to surf.<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0806.3651\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0806.3651<\/a>: Crawling Beneath the Free Surface: Water Snail Locomotion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Snails move using a mechanism called adhesive locomotion. Through muscular contraction and expansion of their foot, they transmit a force to the ground through a thin layer of mucus which is adhesive at low strains but otherwise flows like a liquid. But what of water snails that move upsidedown along the underside of a liquid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-seaside","category-slimey-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}