Our paper entitled: “The Nasal Geometry of the Reindeer Gives Energy-Efficient Respiration” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. In the article, we show that the complicated geometry and internal structure of the nose of arctic reindeer help them to survive in the harsh arctic climate by making breathing more energy-efficient. In particular, we found that in comparison to a simple “cylindrical-like” reference nose (similar to that of humans), the reindeer nose became increasingly more efficient the lower the temperature got.
The work was a combination of theory and experiments, in which we developed and solved a distributed, time-dependend mathematical model of the reindeer nose with input from experiments and measurements on a real reindeer nose. The work was done in collaboration with Elisa Magnanelli and Signe Kjelstrup at NTNU, and Mario Acquarone and Lars. P. Folkow at the department of Arctic and Marine Biology at the University of Tromsø.