Cornering in the Water: An Investigation of Dolphin Swimming Performance

This article provides new insights into dolphin maneuver strategies in lap swimming tasks. However, most existing research focuses on straight-line swimming leaving the study of dolphins' corning strategies an open area. Challenges for directly analyzing dolphins' turning behavior include difficulties in motion tracking underwater and the inability to directly measure the propulsive forces. This paper provides methodology and analyses of dolphins' swimming performance during lap swimming tasks. External camera detection and internal kinematics measured from wearable bio-tags are involved in this study to support accurate localization of the animals. A particle filter, which fuses the external and internal measurements, is implemented to provide accurate estimations of the trajectories, even when they swim deep below the water's surface. Thereafter, a hydrodynamic model is constructed to calculate the thrust power and energy cost of the animals. The energetic cost during lap swimming is calculated for the comparison between different corning behaviors. The results show that the implemented particle filter can provide precise and complete trajectories of the tested dolphins, providing fundamental for statistical study of the corning behavior. From the kinematic analysis, TT01 is the fastest lap swimmer, with the highest swimming speed for the whole lap while performing a sharp turn with small deceleration. TT02 performs greater energetic efficiency than TT01 by transferring more weight at high speed. TT03 shows the highest energetic efficiency by maintaining a slow underwater motion.