Amoeboid swimming: Crawling in a fluid

Researchers have developed a particularly simple model that reproduces the swimming mechanism of amoebas. They show that, by changing shape, these single cell organisms propel themselves forward in a viscous fluid at the same speed as when they crawl on a solid substrate. The way microorganisms swim is fundamentally different to that of fish since, at their scale, viscosity effects dominate and make fins totally inefficient.

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