For the first time in history, researchers have successfully measured the forces that act on a swimming animal and the energy this animal needs to push through water.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Florida Atlantic University and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration were able to build mathematical models of swimming turtles that allowed them to "compute the energetics, behavior and distributions of a species anywhere on Earth now or in the future," said study leader Warren Porter.

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"If you've got mechanistic models, then whatever kind of scenarios you want to run for the environment, you can run these models and have a lot of confidence that they're giving you good numbers," said Porter, who previously developed a model for land animals.

A number of laboratories have attempted to model the movements of aquatic animals but "swimming animals are very, very difficult to measure experimentally," Porter said. "It's very difficult to get drag and thrust."

Prior to the study, no one had been able to record the energetics needed by the turtle to perform the work of moving through water, or the fluid dynamics of a swimming animal. The new method lets scientists record key aspects of turtle biology such as how much food the creature must eat to survive.

They connected newborn leatherback sea turtles to instruments that allowed researchers to measure the force the turtles produced while swimming. The instruments also measured the oxygen the turtles used and the heat they exchanged with the environment. Scientists took videos of the leatherbacks.

The team recreated a virtual environment with a swimming turtle. Their intent was to determine if they could predict how much energy a turtle was using. They then modeled the three-dimensional motion of swimming leatherbacks.

Researchers found that longer, slender turtles are less efficient swimmers compared to fatter turtles.

TagsUS Submarine Structures, swimming, marine life, Aquatic life, Energetics, paleoeologists, Biologist