MULTISCALE INVESTIGATIONS OF STIRRING AND MIXING PROCESSES IN BROADCAST SPAWNING BY BENTHIC 
INVERTEBRATES

Many benthic invertebrates utilize broadcast spawning as a reproductive strategy: to spawn, 
adult males and females extrude sperm and eggs into the surrounding flow. The resulting 
fertilization success depends on the physics of stirring and mixing across a range of 
spatial scales; these scales may span five orders of magnitude.  In this talk, we describe 
the different physics that govern this biological process at each end of the spatial scale 
range, and we summarize a holistic experimental and numerical modeling approach designed to 
understand and quantify the effect of these physics on fertilization success.  We 
demonstrate that large-scale structured stirring by unsteady or turbulent flow fields 
selectively aggregates egg and sperm into localized regions to form local hotspots for 
fertilization efficacy.  We show the effect of small-scale mixing on the deformation of 
chemoattractant plumes released by eggs, and on the resulting chemotactic response of motile 
sperm navigating within these complex plumes. Our results suggest that sperm motility and 
taxis acts as an evolutionary adaptation that takes the place of molecular diffusion in 
traditional mixing and reaction problems.  During the course of this talk, I will highlight 
the various numerical and experimental approaches that we use to explore this problem.