Beach process – cellular automata

Here is a model I made of a beach. It was based on a talk by Alan Brampton at HR Wallingford. Alan explained how various sizes of particles in beaches are moved around by the action of the waves pumping the wet aggregate of sand pebble and rocks. […]

Poole harbour – manila clam models

The whole point of these models was to find out if it was plausible for manila clam larvae to move with the tides all the way from Poole Harbour to Southampton Water. Manila clam were introduced into Poole Harbour by the government to create a new fishery. They […]

Robot fish

I’ve made a few robot rays and robot fish. I originally started doing this while working at Animal Dynamics Limited and so my early innovations belong to them. I hope they use them well. All these new ones have been redeveloped and reimagined from scratch. I have applied […]

Whales and Krill

These studies obsessed me for a few years. There are two papers listed in the Scientific Research referenced on the right of this page. Basically I had the idea that Whales contributed to the high abundance of krill in the same way cows contribute to a high abundance […]

Climbing Loaches

Here we gave loaches the opportunity to climb a waterfall over a glass sheet. They were enthusiastic and climbed the sheet without any interference from us. We had been thinking of activities to avoid boredom in captive fish – but that’s another story – here we embedded a […]

Teddington weir pool water models

This was a model that I made of the water movements within Teddington weir pool. The main question was whether opening one small gate in the weir gate array would cause erosion of a gravel bank at the neck of the pool. It seemed reasonably unlikely that such […]

Simulated fish – agent based models

Here fish are simulated in a flow field – the tiny white bubbles are designed to show how the currents are moving in two Von Karman streets behind two circular obstructions. each fish looks at its nearest 3 neighbours and moderates its direction of travel based on three […]

Vectrino ADCP for flow imaging

Here we made a flume in which we could make water flow, 3D printed an enlarged scale model of a small fish (a hill stream loach), and made an XYZ plotter type thing to move an ADCP around to measure flow. An ADCP is an Acoustic Doppler Current […]

Popular Press

The Guardian used one of my videos of the movement of particles in the tides in Swansea Bay to background a section on the proposed tidal lagoon in Swansea. This is the featured video linked above. New Scientist published a piece on my work with Tuna navigation… it […]

Universal law of schooling

This idea was originally derived from models of gas aggregation and is an easy way to produce power laws from simple computer models. The idea is that particles randomly move around and aggregate with each other. Then the aggregated particles move just like the singletons and continue to […]