Scanning electron microscope image of hairs on a honeybee’s eye. Image © Georgia Tech, CC BY
Last week a pair of scientists writing for The Conversation (a news source with what they call “academic rigor, journalistic flair”) and also Discover Magazine’s science blog discussed the merits of hair in keeping animals clean. We found it pretty interesting, and hope you will too:
Watch a fly land on the kitchen table, and the first thing it does is clean itself, very, very carefully. Although we can’t see it, the animal’s surface is covered with dust, pollen and even insidious mites that could burrow into its body if not removed.
Staying clean can be a matter of life and death. All animals, including us human beings, take cleaning just as seriously. Each year, we spend an entire day bathing, and another two weeks cleaning our houses. Cleaning may be as fundamental to life as eating, breathing and mating.
Yet somehow, cleaning has gotten little attention.
In our new review article in the Journal of Experimental Biology, we discuss how cleaning happens in nature and whether animals indeed have principles for getting clean. We looked at microscope images to count the number and sizes of hairs across hundreds of animals. We read nearly a hundred articles on cleaning in nature, trying to put numbers onto the cleaning process.
How animals get clean is an interplay between the surface of animal, its behaviors, and the energy of its environment. An animal gets clean for free if it has the right kind of surface. If we have this mindset, perhaps we can design new devices that get clean for free too.
Consider solar panels. Like the eye, they must let light in. But solar panels lose 7% of their power annually due to dust accumulation. The most high-tech solution is the squeegee. When you think about it, the computer age has put us light years ahead of our ancestors in terms of communication, but our cleaning methods remain stuck in the past.
Imagine solar panels designed like insect eyes. Thin filaments could be placed periodically to suspend dust above the panel, but still allow light to penetrate. Cleaning the panel would amount simply to swiping it with another brush. Just like the insects, the panel could get clean without the use of water or chemicals. Similarly, video cameras, the eyes of robots could be rimmed with eyelashes to reduce deposition. Building synthetic hairy systems is the subject of our National Science Foundation grant, Engineering Insect Eyes.
Read the rest of the original article here.
Organikos 