When humans learn to swim, they are taught that the displacement of water is key to progress. From doggy paddle to the crawl to the frog kick, people swim in the belief that the best way to move forward in the water is by moving the water back to propel themselves.
Apparently, this is not the case. Generations of understanding may have been undone by researchers at Stanford University who have studied the swimming habits of eels. Some of the eels in their test swam like eels, and some were modified so that only their tail end flicked, causing them to swim more like humans. The researchers filled a shallow tank with millions of glass beads, which they rapidly and repeatedly photographed, in order to track the movement of particles as the eels passed through.
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