Abstract
Ciliated microorganisms near the base of the aquatic food chain either swim to encounter prey or attach at a substrate and generate feeding currents to capture passing particles. Here, we represent attached and swimming ciliates using a popular spherical model in viscous fluid with slip surface velocity that affords analytical expressions of ciliary flows. We solve an advection–diffusion equation for the concentration of dissolved nutrients, where the Péclet number ( $Pe$ ) reflects the ratio of diffusive to advective time scales. For a fixed hydrodynamic power expenditure, we ask what ciliary surface velocities maximize nutrient flux at the microorganism's surface. We find that surface motions that optimize feeding depend on $Pe$ . For freely swimming microorganisms at finite $Pe$ , it is optimal to swim by employing a ‘treadmill’ surface motion, but in the limit of large $Pe$ , there is no difference between this treadmill solution and a symmetric dipolar surface velocity that keeps the organism stationary. For attached microorganisms, the treadmill solution is optimal for feeding at $Pe$ below a critical value, but at larger $Pe$ values, the dipolar surface motion is optimal. We verified these results in open-loop numerical simulations and asymptotic analysis, and using an adjoint-based optimization method. Our findings challenge existing claims that optimal feeding is optimal swimming across all Péclet numbers, and provide new insights into the prevalence of both attached and swimming solutions in oceanic microorganisms.
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