Discussion of the Question 06/96

The question was:

Fish (left figure) are swimming by waving their tail left-and-right, while the spermatozoa (right figure) are spinning their tail. Why can't spermatozoa swim like fish?



Y. Kantor (3/97): Half-a-year after publication of the question we still did not get a satisfactory answer. It was correctly noted by several people that the size of spermatozoa is much smaller than that of the fish, and consequently the Reynolds number must be very different. Thus hydrodynamic equations describing the swimming must be quite different in those cases. So we are on the right track, and it seems that only few steps are missing in the solution...

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