Some preliminary results, and where I'm going from here

I'm at the point now where I can simulate little blobs of phytoplankton drifting toward my tintinnid! Which is good, because the little guy was HUNGRY.

The especially good news with this is that it pretty much hits experimental data spot-on. Well, at least from a physics theory perspective. For instance, the simulated flow at the top of the green dome is around 1.3 mm/s. In the experiments, flow in this region is around 0.6-0.8 mm/s. Being "right" on the first try to within a factor of 2 is great news. A little fiddling with parameters should take care of the difference!

So...what do I do now? Honestly, if I were to present my work at a conference next week, the response would probably be something like:

"So...you correctly calculated flows that were already experimentally measured. Congratulations?"

In short, this calculation doesn't really teach us anything new. The results of this simulation merely show that this method works. It's only calibration. But...what exactly am I calibrating?

Let's back up. The fundamental question this work is trying to address is "Why do tintinnids look like that, and why do they behave in that way?" This question is difficult to answer from an experimental perspective. Natural selection ensures that there simply aren't many "bad" specimens out there, so it's hard to say what exactly goes wrong if a tintinnid is not optimized for survival.

...until now!

Despite how hungry my little virtual tintinnid looks, he actually doesn't need any food to survive. I've given my code lots of versatility, so I can change all sorts of things about him, including (but not limited to) mouth radius, number of cilia, number of cilia "waves" around the mouth, cilia length (both during upstroke and downstroke), and cilia frequency. Now I can answer the question: "If the tintinnid doesn't look or behave correctly, what exactly goes wrong?" Time to break what nature worked so hard to perfect!

Ok, that sounded a little Frankenstein-y. But that's fine. Imagine if Dr. Frankenstein could just simulate his work. All the ethical dilemmas would be gone.

-Steve

P.S. My little tintinnid needs a name. I'm leaning toward Floaty McFloatface, but I'm open to suggestion.