In order to contribute to technical knowledge of using fish pumps in their versatile possibility, a number of tiny freshwater fish,
medaka, Aplocheilus latipes, were kept in an aquarium (75×40×50cm) at the authors' laboratory. The water was made to flow through a siphon system consisting of a glass tube, either 27 or 40mm. in diameter, 15cm. in length, and a vinyle hose, 10 or 15mm. in diameter, from 150 to 500cm. in length (Fig. 5). The velocity of the stream (
V) per second was equal to
Chm where
C is a constant depending on inner diameter and length of the tube,
m is a constant, and
h is a fall of water through the siphon. The value of
m was about 0.6 almost regardless of different falls of water (Figs. 1-4).
As a fish swims up against the current until the latter reaches to a maximum for the former, that current velocity may be regarded as an effective suction head or a limit of the swimming power of the fish. The swimming power was greater when a fish was larger in the body length, or smaller in the body height for the body length (Figs. 6-10). When the suction mouth was held either on a level with, downward over, or upward under, the fish, the swimming power was 42, 40, or 28.9cm. per second in this order (Table 1).
In testing the suction efficiency, a vinyle hose used was 15mm. in diameter and 10cm. in length; it had a cylindrical suction mouth, 86mm. in diameter and 86mm. in length, made of wire netting, 1.5mm. in mesh (Fig. 11). The suction efficiency varied with density of fish, direction and velocity of the current. The suction efficiency (
I) was rapidly decreased with the progress of time (Fig. 12) because the relationship between
I and density of fish (ρ) could approximately be expressed as
I=
C1emρ C1em ?? mρ where
C and
m are constants depending on a direction of the suction nozzle. The rela-tionship between
I and the current velocity as in Table 2 and Fig. 16 was
log
aI∝
V1/m. (
m ?? 0.6, a=constant)
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