Cyprinid swimming behaviour in response to turbulent flow

Abstract

Turbulence is a complex phenomenon which commonly occurs in river and fishway flows. It is a difficult subject to study, especially biologically, yet turbulence may affect fish movements and fish passage efficiency. Studies on quantifying fish responses to turbulence, particularly within fishways, are lacking. This study investigated the swimming behaviour of 140 adult Iberian barbel (Luciobarbus bocagei) of two size-classes (small fish: 15≤TL<25cm, large fish: 25<TL≤35cm) under turbulent flow conditions created by three submerged orifice arrangements in an experimental pool-type fishway: (i) offset orifices, (ii) straight orifices and (iii) straight orifices with a deflector bar of 0.5bo located at 0.2L from the inlet orifices, where bo is the width of the square orifices ranging from 0.18 to 0.23m and L is the pool length (1.90m). Water velocity and turbulence (turbulent kinetic energy, Reynolds shear stress, turbulence intensity and eddy size) were characterized using a 3D Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) and were related with fish swimming behaviour. The influence of turbulent flow on the swimming behaviour of barbel was assessed through the number of successful fish passage attempts and associated passage times. The amount of time fish spent in a certain cell of the pool (transit time) was measured and related to hydraulic conditions. The highest rates of passage and the corresponding lowest times were found in experiments conducted with offset orifices. Although size-related behavioural responses to turbulence were observed, Reynolds shear stress appeared as one of the most important turbulence descriptors explaining fish transit time for both size-classes in experiments conducted with offset and straight orifices; furthermore, swimming behaviour of larger fish was found to be strongly affected by the eddies created, in particular by those of similar size to fish total length, which were mainly found in straight orifices with a deflector bar arrangement. The results provide valuable insights on barbel swimming behavioural responses to turbulence, which may help engineers and biologists to develop effective systems for the passage of this species and others with similar biomechanical capacities.