Temperature and fatigue effect on the maximum swimming speed of jack mackerel Trachurus japonicus

Swimming performance of jack mackerel Trachurus japonicus (18.2 ± 0.8 cm fork length (FL), n = 185) was examined in a flume tank by measuring the stride length at low and high tail beat frequencies with electromyogram monitoring and a muscle twitch experiment. Stride length was analyzed by monitoring the tail beat frequency according to the swimming speed at different temperatures of 10, 15 and 22 °C. In the electromyographic observations, the initiation of ordinary muscle activity occurred between 71.4 and 99.6 cm/s, that is 3.7 to 5.3 FL/s, when the tail beat frequency was over 6 Hz. The swimming speeds increased rectilinearly with the tail beat frequency at each water temperature both for the low and high tail beat frequency. Lower stride length was observed at the lowest temperature (10 °C) tested. The forced swimming exercise significantly affected the muscle contraction time to become longer than the control fish, which indicated a reduction of the maximum swimming speed performance.