Among their subjects are geckos and cockroaches. “Cockroaches continue to surprise us,” says Full, a professor of integrative biology who 15 years ago discovered that when cockroaches run rapidly, they rear up on their two hind legs like bipedal humans. “They have fast relay systems that allow them to dart away quickly in response to light or motion at speeds up to 50 body lengths per second, which is equivalent to a couple hundred miles per hour, if you scale up to the size of humans. This makes them incredibly good at escaping predators.”

Besides their speed to evade predators, cockroaches are also able to flip under ledges and disappear in the blink of an eye, the UC Berkeley researchers report recently in PLoS ONE. The cockroach does this by grabbing the edge with grappling hook-like claws on its back legs and swinging like a pendulum 180 degrees to land firmly underneath, upside down.

This pendulum swing subjects the animal to 3-5 times the force of gravity (3-5 gs), similar to what humans feel at the bottom of a bungee jump, lead author Jean-Michel Mongeau says.

(Video of the feat is available here.)

Surprisingly, the researchers observed geckos using this same escape technique both in the lab and in the rain forest at the Wildlife Reserves near Singapore.

“This behavior is probably pretty widespread, because it is an effective way to quickly move out of sight for small animals,” Full says.

Full and his colleagues make good with these obsessions with animal movements. They use the mechanics found in nature for robotics. Nature has had millions of years to develop the engineering, so why not borrow it?

“This work is a great example of the amazing maneuverability of animals, and how understanding the physical principles used by nature can inspire design of agile robots,” UC Berkeley engineering professor Ron Fearing says.

With the help of Poly-PEDAL Lab’s observations, Fearing’s team created a robot that can turn onto ledges like the roaches and geckos.

This new robot could help in dangerous search and rescue missions, according to Full. “That’s really the challenge now in robotics: to produce robots that can transition on complex surfaces and get into dangerous areas that first responders can’t get into.”

Photo by Jean-Michel Mongeau and Pauline Jennings, courtesy of PolyPEDAL Lab, UC Berkeley

Biologists at UC Berkeley initially broke down gecko movement up walls to figure out how they travel up walls. You can watch our Science in Action piece called “Bio-Inspiraton: Gecko Adhesive” about that research.

Since then, scientists’ imaginations have taken over. What can we accomplish using the same properties geckoes use to climb vertically? Last winter, the New York Times reported on a new tape based on gecko’s feet from biologist Kellar Autumn of Lewis & Clark College.

The tape, which is reusable, was so strong, Mr. Autumn said, that when they tested it, he was able to stick his 50-pound, 8-year-old daughter to a window with it.

That was a little more than two years ago; there are now at least 50 patent applications pending in gecko-adhesion technology, Mr. Autumn said, and he holds several patents himself.

The latest entry in gecko-adhesion technology is Stickybot, a robot developed at Stanford that can climb walls. The newest versions of the adhesive that holds Stickybot to the walls was published earlier this month in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

The molecules of gecko toe hair interact with the wall through a molecular attraction called the van der Waals force. A gecko can hang and support its whole weight on one toe by placing it on the glass and then pulling it back.

That’s because the toe of a gecko’s foot contains hundreds of flap-like ridges called lamellae. On each ridge are millions of hairs called setae, each one 10 times thinner than a human’s. Under a microscope, you can see that each hair divides into smaller strands called spatulae, making it look like a bad case of split ends. These split ends are so tiny (a few hundred nanometers) that they interact with the molecules of the climbing surface.

The new and improved versions support higher loads and also allow Stickybot to climb surfaces such as wood paneling, painted metal and glass. The material is strong and reusable, and leaves behind no residue or damage.  Robots that scale vertical walls could be useful for accessing dangerous or hard to reach places.

Next up for Stickybot, the technology of turning around, also gecko-inspired. According to Stanford’s Mark Cutkosky, “The new Stickybot that we’re working on right now has rotating ankles, which is also what geckos have.”

But wait there’s more… The Stanford team has started developing Z-Man—a gecko adhesive for human climbing.  Watch out, Peter Parker!  Spiders have nothing on geckos…

Awesome, right?

Creative Commons image by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

The 318 million-year-old reptile footprints were found in sea cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. They show that reptiles were the first vertebrates to conquer dry continental interiors. These pioneers paved the way for the diverse ecosystems that exist on land today.

The footprints were discovered by Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang of Royal Holloway, University of London. According to New Scientist,

Around five centimeters long, the five-toed prints were made by small gecko-like creatures. “I discovered them by accident when I tripped over [them],” Falcon-Lang says.

Hundreds of stunning footprints belonging to at least three different kinds of reptile have been preserved at the site, all in sediments that, at the time the prints were made, were more than 500 kilometers [over 300 miles] inland within the supercontinent Pangaea.

The results of this study are published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

New Scientist also reports that “amphibians were the first creatures to make it onto land, hopping up the beach somewhere between 400 and 360 million years ago.” But, it has long been suspected that reptiles were the first to colonize continental interiors since they don’t need aquatic habitats to breed, unlike their amphibian cousins. The new footprint discovery bolsters this theory.

It may have been one small step for reptile-kind, but it was one giant leap for vertebrate diversity.

Image: University of Bristol

The rainforest belt in West Africa stretches nearly 3,000 miles from the coast of Sierra Leone through the Guinean rainforest in Ghana, through Nigeria and Cameroon, to the Congolian rainforest. Over millions of years, the forest has expanded and shrunk with climate change and an aridification trend over the past several hundred thousand years.

The discovery by Adam D. Leaché, PhD, a herpetologist with UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and Matthew K. Fujita demonstrates the wealth of biodiversity still surviving in the patches of tropical rainforest in West Africa, and the ability of new DNA analysis techniques to distinguish different species, even when they look alike.

Having collected numerous specimens of the six-inch gecko, the scientists decided to see whether studying the genetic diversity among the geckos could tell them something about the history of the rainforest belt.

“We tended to find this gecko, Hemidactylus fasciatus, throughout our travels in West Africa,” said Leaché. “Despite the fact that it is recognized as one species, using new methods we have established a high probability that it is composed of at least four species.”

Leaché and Fujita found sufficient genetic differences among the 50 geckos collected from 10 different forest patches to identify four distinct species. The different species were found in different forest patches, suggesting that the species divergence was driven by the isolation of gecko populations from one another after gaps developed in the rainforest.

“These rainforests are classified as one of the biodiversity hotspots on the planet, yet they are one of the most endangered areas on the earth,” Leaché said. “Human deforestation is accentuating the process of habitat destruction.” If our knowledge of the diversity of geckos expanded four-fold in these few patches, imagine what remains to be discovered in the rest of the rainforest belt in West Africa.