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GarryB wrote:Perfectly smooth skin is not so important for hydrodynamics (moving through water).
Actually that's quite an accurate observation on your part, case-in-point Sharks are some of the most hydrodynamic efficient fish within Earth oceans, and shark's skin is made of tiny teeth making shark skin like sand paper that actually makes sharks like the Mako Shark more hydrodynamic efficient:
Speedy sharkskin
Tiny, toothlike bumps boost sharks’ swiftness
Slicing through the water at speeds exceeding 45 miles per hour (72 kph), the shortfin mako shark is one of the fastest fish in the sea. A team of Harvard biologists has made a surprising discovery about what feature gives the mako, like all other sharks, its incredible swiftness — its sandpapery skin.
It may look sleek and smooth, but a shark’s skin is actually rough. That’s because sharkskin is covered with millions of microscopic, toothlike bumps called denticles. Scientists have long recognized that denticles help reduce drag. Drag is a force in the direction opposite to an animal’s movement. Drag slows an animal down.
Water is hundreds of times denser than air, and this, in part, explains the greater drag objects moving through water experience compared to objects moving through air. You can experience this difference by waving your hand in the air, and then waving your hand in a tub full of water. Denticles help minimize drag by changing the way water flows over a shark’s body.
But the new study by Johannes Oeffner and George V. Lauder shows that the rough surface of sharkskin also increases thrust. Thrust is a force in the direction an animal is moving, and it helps swimming and flying animals overcome drag.
“Sharkskin denticles seem to provide a clever boost,” explains Lauder. This increase in thrust due to skin may help push sharks even more quickly through the water, he and Oeffner say.
Their experiments show that denticles generate tiny swirls around a shark’s body as it wriggles in the water. This creates a small suction effect — the thrust — that helps drive the fish’s body forward.
Importantly, the Harvard team’s tests investigated how sharkskin performs when attached to a stiff plate, as well as when attached to a piece of flexible material. The flexible material mimics the actual motion of a shark’s skin — and its millions of denticles — as the fish swims. It was only when studying the flexible sharkskin that the scientists discovered the role of denticles in generating thrust.
Denticles have other helpful properties, too. Unlike whales, sea turtles and many other large animals that live in the ocean, sharks rarely have barnacles, algae or other sea creatures attached to and living on the surface of their skin. How do sharks stay so clean?
Scientists suggest that at the microscopic level, denticles make the surface of sharkskin too rough and uneven for other organisms to attach to it. It’s a property some medical device manufacturers have adopted: Medical equipment with a sharkskin-like surface slows or stops bacterial growth, which could help reduce the spread of bacterial infections. That’s an important factor in settings like hospitals and doctors’ offices.
Sharkskin-like coatings also help to keep boats free of marine algae and other clingy organisms.
But one thing sharkskin-inspired materials probably don’t do is improve the speed of a human swimmer. In their experiments, the scientists found that sharkskin-like features woven into the high-tech suits worn by competitive swimmers offer the fabric no performance advantage. That doesn’t mean the swimsuits don’t offer swimmers a competitive edge; it just means other aspects of the suits, such as the compression they provide, probably explain their performance.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/speedy-sharkskin
