  The effect of damping the longest streaks in wall-bounded turbulence is
explored using numerical experiments. It is found that long streaks are not
required for the self-sustenance of the bursting process, which is relatively
little affected by their absence. In particular, there are turbulence states in
which the fluctuations of the streamwise velocity have approximately the same
length as the bursts, and are thus presumably associated with the bursts
themselves, while the burst structure is essentially indistinguishable from
flows in which longer velocity fluctuations are present. This suggests that the
long streaks found in unmodified flows may be byproducts, rather than active
parts of the energy generation cycle.
