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Predator-prey plankton dynamics in turbulent flow past an obstacle

Alice Jaccod1,*, Stefano Berti2, Enrico Calzavarini2, and Sergio Chibbaro1

  • 1Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, F-75005 Paris, France
  • 2Univ. Lille, ULR 7512, Unité de Mécanique de Lille Joseph Boussinesq (UML), F-59000 Lille, France

  • *Corresponding author: alice.jaccod@upmc.fr
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Phys. Rev. Fluids 6, 103802 – Published 4 October, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.6.103802

Abstract

Plankton constitutes the productive base of aquatic ecosystems and plays an essential role in the global carbon cycle. The impact of hydrodynamic conditions on the biological activity of plankton species can manifest in a variety of different ways, and the understanding of the basic effects due to multiscale complex flows still appears incomplete. Here we consider a predator-prey model of plankton dynamics in the presence of a turbulent flow past an idealized island, to investigate the conditions under which an algal bloom is observed and the resulting patchiness of plankton distributions. By means of direct numerical simulations, we explore the role of the turbulent intensity and of the obstacle shape. In particular, we focus on population variance spectra, and on their relation with the statistical features of the turbulent flow, as well as on the correlation between the spatial distribution of the planktonic species and velocity field persistent structures. We find that both the average biomass and local plankton dynamics critically depend on the relation between advective and biological timescales, confirming and extending previous results obtained in simpler flow settings. We further provide evidence that, in the present system, due to local flow action plankton accumulates in localized filamentary regions. Small turbulent scales are found to impact the statistics of plankton density fields at very fine scales, but the main global features of the population dynamics only weakly depend on the Reynolds number and are also found to be remarkably independent of the geometrical details of the obstacle.

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 6, 103802– Published 4 October, 2021
  • Received 12 May 2021
  • Accepted 10 September 2021
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