Larry Rome's new technique measures swimming power in fish.
Fish use their heads when they swim.
Fish move through the water with a flip of the tail, but the tail fin itself is not muscular. Since it is impossible to measure the amount of work each muscle fiber does in a live cwimming fish biologists used the EMG recordings to build a mathematical model of swimming. The problem, Rome explains, is that muscles in the real world turn out to be more complicated than the muscles in the computer model. Rome's study also began with EMG recordings from live fish, but he went on to study the behavior of muscle fibers removed from the fish. One end of these isolated muscles was hooked to a device that drove muscles through the length changes and patterns of stimulation they undergo during swimming.