Special sensory cells in fish respond reliably to swirly wakes, allowing fish to hunt down prey or join a friendly school by reading the watery traces, a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters suggests.
As fish, and other objects, move through water, they leave behind long-lasting vortices, or wakes, says study coauthor Jacob Engelmann of Bonn University in Germany, like the residual swirls left by a canoe paddle in a lake.
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