Sinking particles in marine, freshwater and man-made environments, including seawage treatment plants, are hot-spots of biological activity. The sinking rates and biological composition of these particles are important in understanding vertical material fluxes in the ocean that directly influence the planetary carbon cycle.
How does this biological activity affect the fate of these particles? How do protists including sessile filter feeders such as vorticella, change the flow and mass transport characteristics to these particles? What factors control the physical properties as well as biological communities aboard these sinking ecosystems? This is a fascinating problem at the interface of fluid mechanics, transport, protistology, microbiology and ecology. Here we leverage Scale-free vertical tracking micrpscopy aka Gravity machine and an experimental system for active sinking particles to capture the first-ever multi-scale glimpse into this complex system.
- Krishnamurthy, D., Li, H., Benoit du Rey, F. et al. Scale-free vertical tracking microscopy. Nat Methods (2020). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-0924-7
- https://gravitymachine.org/