  When a microorganism begins swimming from rest in a Newtonian fluid such as
water, it rapidly attains its steady-state swimming speed since changes in the
velocity field spread quickly when the Reynolds number is small. However,
swimming microorganisms are commonly found or studied in complex fluids.
Because these fluids have long relaxation times, the time to attain the steady-
state swimming speed can also be long. In this article we study the swimming
startup problem in the simplest liquid crystalline fluid: a two-dimensional
hexatic liquid crystal film. We study the dependence of startup time on
anchoring strength and Ericksen number, which is the ratio of viscous to
elastic stresses. For strong anchoring, the fluid flow starts up immediately
but the liquid crystal field and swimming velocity attain their sinusoidal
steady-state values after a time proportional to the relaxation time of the
liquid crystal. When the Ericksen number is high, the behavior is the same as
in the strong anchoring case for any anchoring strength. We also find that the
startup time increases with the ratio of the rotational viscosity to the shear
viscosity, and then ultimately saturates once the rotational viscosity is much
greater than the shear viscosity.
