Abstract
Systematic experiments on European eel (Anguilla anguilla) in their juvenile, early life stage (glass eel), were conducted to provide new insights on the fish swimming performance and propose a framework of analysis to design swimming-performance experiments for bottom-dwelling fish. In particular, we coupled experimental and computational fluid dynamics techniques to: (i) accommodate glass eel burst-and-coast swimming mode and estimate the active swimming time (t(ac)), not considering coast and drift periods, (ii) estimate near-bottom velocities (U(b)) experienced by the fish, rather than using bulk averages (U), (iii) investigate water temperature (T) influence on swimming ability, and (iv) identify a functional relation between U(b), t(ac) and T. Results showed that burst-and-coast swimming mode was increasingly adopted by glass eel, especially when U was higher than 0.3 ms(-1). Using U rather than U(b) led to an overestimation of the fish swimming performance from 18 to 32%, on average. Under the range of temperatures analyzed (from 8 to 18 °C), t(ac) was strongly influenced and positively related to T. As a final result, we propose a general formula to link near-bottom velocity, water temperature and active swimming time which can be useful in ecological engineering applications and reads as [Formula: see text].