Quantification of flow during suction feeding in bluegill sunfish

Nearly all aquatic-feeding vertebrates use some amount of suction to capture prey items. Suction prey capture occurs by accelerating a volume of water into the mouth and taking a prey item along with it. Yet, until recently, we lacked the necessary techniques and analytical tools to quantify the flow regime generated by feeding fish. We used a new approach; Digital Particle Image Velocimetery (DPIV) to measure several attributes of the flow generated by feeding bluegill sunfish. We found that the temporal pattern of flow was notably compressed during prey capture. Flow velocity increased rapidly to its peak within 20 ms of the onset of the strike, and this peak corresponded to the time that the prey entered the mouth during capture. The rapid acceleration and deceleration of water suggests that timing is critical for the predator in positioning itself relative to the prey so that it can be drawn into the mouth along with the water. We also found that the volume of water affected by suction was spatially limited. Only rarely did we measure significant flow beyond 1.75 cm of the mouth aperture (in 20 cm fish), further emphasizing the importance of mechanisms, like locomotion, that place the fish mouth in close proximity to the prey. We found that the highest flows towards the mouth along the fish midline were generated not immediately in front of the open mouth, but approximately 0.5 cm anterior to the mouth opening. Away from the midline the peak in flow was closer to the mouth. We propose that this pattern indicates the presence of a bow wave created by the locomotor efforts of the fish. In this scheme, the bow wave acts antagonistically to the flow of water generated by suction, the net effect being to push the region of peak flow away from the open mouth. The peak was located farther from the mouth opening in strikes accompanied by faster locomotion, suggesting faster fish created larger bow waves.     

The Bow and Arrow in Northern North America

There were at least four waves of bow and arrow use in northern North America. These occurred at 12000, 4500, 2400, and after about 1300 years ago. But to understand the role of the bow and arrow in the north, one must begin in the eighteenth century, when the Russians first arrived in the Aleutian Islands. At that time, the Aleut were using both the atlatl and dart and the bow and arrow 1 (Fig. 1 ). This is significant for two particular and important reasons. First, there are few historic cases in which both technologies were used concurrently; second, the bow and arrow in the Aleutian Islands were used almost exclusively in warfare. The atlatl was a critical technology because the bow and arrow are useless for hunting sea mammals. One cannot launch an arrow from a kayak because it is too unstable and requires that both hands remain on a paddle. To use an atlatl, it is necessary only to stabilize the kayak with a paddle on one side and launch the atlatl dart with the opposite hand. The Aleut on the Alaska Peninsula did indeed use the bow and arrow to hunt caribou there. However, in the 1,400 km of the Aleutian Islands, there are no terrestrial mammals except humans and the bow was reserved almost exclusively for conflicts among them. The most significant event in the history of the bow and arrow is not its early introduction, but rather the Asian War Complex 1300 years ago, when the recurve and backed bows first entered the region, altering regional and hemispheric political dynamics forever.

Figure 1 Open in figure viewer PowerPoint Aleut male as shown in Liapunova 50 Figure 2, remastered and edited by Maschner. A) Atlatl and darts, B) the recurved bow, C) armor, and D) shield. Drawing by M. C. Levashov, 1764–1769, original in the Central State Archives of the Navy, Russia.

Citing Literature

Number of times cited: 9

• Todd J. Kristensen, Thomas D. Andrews, Glen MacKay, Ruth Gotthardt, Sean C. Lynch, M. John M. Duke, Andrew J. Locock and John W. Ives , Identifying and sourcing pyrometamorphic artifacts: Clinker in subarctic North America and the hunter-gatherer response to a Late Holocene volcanic eruption , Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports , 10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.11.039 , 23 , (773-790) , (2019) . Crossref
• Brigid Sky Grund and Snehalata V. Huzurbazar , RADIOCARBON DATING OF TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS: THE LATE HOLOCENE SHIFT FROM ATLATL TO BOW IN NORTHWESTERN SUBARCTIC CANADA , American Antiquity , 83 , 01 , (148) , (2018) . Crossref
• Brigid Sky Grund , Behavioral Ecology, Technology, and the Organization of Labor: How a Shift from Spear Thrower to Self Bow Exacerbates Social Disparities , American Anthropologist , 119 , 1 , (104-119) , (2017) . Wiley Online Library
• Anna Berge , Chapter 3. Subsistence terms in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut) , Language Dispersal Beyond Farming , 10.1075/z.215.03ber , (47-73) , (2017) . Crossref
• Matthew Walls and Lambros Malafouris , Creativity as a Developmental Ecology , The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research , 10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_30 , (623-638) , (2017) . Crossref
• Adam N. Rorabaugh and Tiffany J. Fulkerson , TIMING OF THE INTRODUCTION OF ARROW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE SALISH SEA, NORTHWEST NORTH AMERICA , Lithic Technology , 40 , 1 , (21) , (2015) . Crossref
• Bill Angelbeck and Ian Cameron , The Faustian bargain of technological change: Evaluating the socioeconomic effects of the bow and arrow transition in the Coast Salish past , Journal of Anthropological Archaeology , 36 , (93) , (2014) . Crossref
• Paul M. Bingham, Joanne Souza and John H. Blitz , Introduction: Social Complexity and the Bow in the Prehistoric North American Record , "Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews" , 22 , 3 , (81-88) , (2013) . Wiley Online Library
• Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza , Theory Testing in Prehistoric North America: Fruits of One of the World's Great Archeological Natural Laboratories , "Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews" , 22 , 3 , (145-153) , (2013) . Wiley Online Library

Volume 22 , Issue 3 May/June 2013

Pages 133-138     

Introduction: Social Complexity and the Bow in the Prehistoric North American Record

This Special Issue of Evolutionary Anthropology grew out of a symposium at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting in Memphis, Tennessee (April 18–22). The goal of the symposium was to explore what we will argue is one of the most important and promising opportunities in the global archeological enterprise. In late prehistoric North America, the initial rise of cultures of strikingly enhanced complexity and the local introduction of a novel weapon technology, the bow, apparently correlate intimately in a diverse set of independent cases across the continent, as originally pointed out by Blitz. 1 If this empirical relationship ultimately proves robust, it gives us an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate hypotheses for the causal processes producing social complexity and, by extension, to assess the possibility of a universal theory of history. The rise of comparably complex cultures was much more recent in North America than it was elsewhere and the resulting fresher archeological record is relatively well explored. These and other features make prehistoric North America a unique empirical environment. Together, the symposium and this issue have brought together outstanding investigators with both empirical and theoretical expertise. The strong cross‐feeding and extended interactions between these investigators have given us all the opportunity to advance the promising exploration of what we call the North American Neolithic transitions. Our goal in this paper is to contextualize this issue.     

Sociopolitical Complexity and the Bow and Arrow in the American Southwest

The evolution of sociopolitical complexity, including heightened relations of cooperation and competition among large nonkin groups, has long been a central focus of anthropological research. 1 , 2 Anthropologists suggest any number of variables that affect the waxing and waning of complexity and define the precise trajectories that groups take, including population density, subsistence strategies, warfare, the distribution of resources, and trade relationships. 3 , 4 Changes in weaponry, here the introduction of the bow and arrow, can have profound implications for population aggregation and density, subsistence and settlement strategies, and access to resources, trade, and warfare. 5 Bingham and Souza provide a general conceptual model for the relationship between complexity and the bow and arrow, arguing that this compound weapon system, whereby smaller projectiles travel at higher speed and are capable of hitting targets more accurately and at greater distances than hand‐thrown darts, fundamentally favors the formation of larger groups because it allows for cost‐effective means of dealing with conflicts of interest through social coercion, thereby dramatically transforming kin‐based social relations. 6 Here we consider the impacts the introduction of the bow and arrow had on sociopolitical complexity in the North American Southwest.     

Sedentism,Social Change,Warfare, and the Bow in the Ancient Pueblo Southwest

In the ancient American Southwest, use of the bow developed relatively rapidly among Pueblo people by the fifth century AD. This new technology replaced the millennia‐old atlatl and dart weaponry system. Roughly 150 years later in the AD 600s, Pueblo socioeconomic organization began to evolve rapidly, as many groups adopted a much more sedentary life. Multiple factors converged to allow this sedentary pattern to emerge, but the role of the bow in this process has not been fully explored. In this paper, we trace the development of the bow and discuss its role as sedentism emerged and social changes occurred in ancient Puebloan society from the fifth through seventh centuries AD.     

Theory Testing in Prehistoric North America: Fruits of One of the World's Great Archeological Natural Laboratories

This paper has several interconnected goals. First and most generally, we will review the project represented by the papers in this dedicated issue and the SAA Symposium (2012) on Social Complexity and the Bow. This project centers on the ever‐stronger and broader theory testing now becoming feasible in archeology and anthropology, in this case exploiting the unique natural laboratory represented by what we refer to as the North American Neolithic transitions. Second, we will strive to synopsize the papers in this issue as opportunities to falsify two general theories of the cause of increases in social complexity associated with the North American Neolithic: warfare and social coercion theories.¹ We argue that, though much work remains to be done, the current evidence supports one of the central predictions of both these theories, that the local arrival of elite bow technology was a central driver of local transitions to increased social complexity. This conclusion, if ultimately verified, has profound implications for the possibility of general theories of history. Third, we will argue that several important details of this evidence falsify warfare theory and support (fail to falsify) social coercion theory (the authors' favored perspective). Moreover, several potential falsifications of social coercion theory are amenable to alternative interpretations, leading to new falsifiable predictions. Finally, we discuss how interactions with our colleagues in this project produced new insights into several details of the predictions of social coercion theory, improving our interpretative capacity.