IS BIOLUMINESCENT TURBULENCE AN EXAMPLE OF SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY

When mechanically stimulated by flow, some marine cells react by flashing blue light or bioluminescing. The flash response give a relatively non-invasive measure of turbulent behavior which lends itself readily and quantitatively to statistical models of fluid structure. We report substantial agreement between a series of experiments performed using stimulated light from the bioluminescence of seawater flowing through a glass pipe and theoretical predictions based on models proposed for describing a self-organized critical phenomenon. In this way, bioluminescent turbulent flow can be taken as a natural and potentially robust example connecting long-held scaling problems in turbulence to recent thinking on fractals and self-organized criticality.