World’s largest treadmill…for fish

The new megaflume - a treadmill for large sharks

Measuring how much energy animal’s use for their daily activities can be REALLY useful. It can give us an idea of how much food they need to eat; how long they might be able to spend running or swimming at high speeds; and it can even help us understand why animals can live in one habitat, but not in others. We usually talk about an animal’s rate of energy expenditure in terms of “metabolic rate”, and scientists have come up with lots of cool ways of measuring metabolic rate at different levels of animal activity, e.g. resting, running, hopping or swimming.