Phylogenetic analysis of the scaling of wet and dry biological fibrillar adhesives.

ABSTRACT: Fibrillar, or "hairy," adhesives have evolved multiple times independently within arthropods and reptiles. These adhesives exhibit highly desirable properties for dynamic attachment, including orientation dependence, wear resistance, and self-cleaning. Our understanding of how these properties are related to their fibrillar structure is limited, although theoretical models from the literature have generated useful hypotheses. We survey the morphology of 81 species with fibrillar adhesives to test the hypothesis that packing density of contact elements should increase with body size, whereas the size of the contact elements should decrease. We test this hypothesis in a phylogenetic context to avoid treating historically related species as statistically independent data points. We find that

SUBMITTER: Peattie AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2141822 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature