![]() ![]() “If there’s no clogging, they don’t have to shut their mouth and try to clean off all these little particles,” Paig-Tran says. “Instead, they’re pushed away from the filter, so it remains clean.” ![]() “What’s unique about this particular mechanism is that the particles aren’t captured by the filter” like they would be in a colander, says coauthor James Strother, a theoretical biologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. But plankton (red dots) doesn’t get pulled into the filter, and instead bounces off the lobes toward the manta’s esophagus, to be swallowed. But bits of plankton, instead of getting sucked into these vortices, ricochet off the lobes back toward the manta’s esophagus, to be swallowed.Ī manta ray’s mouth filter is comprised of a series of parallel cartilaginous lobes, shown in this animation, that direct water into turbulent vortices (blue) before flushing it out of the animal’s mouth. When water comes into the manta’s mouth, it flows between the lobes forming swirling vortices before eventually swooshing out to exit the ray’s mouth. The filter is made of a series of long, cartilaginous lobes arranged in parallel, with tiny gaps in between. The manta ray’s mouth filter defies convenient kitchen analogies, the team found. BIG GULP A filter in the mouth of a giant oceanic manta ray ( Manta birostris) forces plankton to change direction, enabling the filter to capture tiny organisms that could just pass through its pores. Computer programs also helped calculate the trajectories of particles of different sizes. The team placed the model filter in a tank filled with dye to track how water and planktonlike particles move through it. Paig-Tran and her colleagues took CT scans of several manta ray species specimens from museums, then 3-D printed a replica of the filter found in one species, the giant oceanic manta ray ( Manta birostris).
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