Surprising Spider Hair Discovery May Inspire Stronger Adhesives

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Just how do spiders walk straight up-and even upside-down across-so many different types of surfaces? Answering this question could open up new opportunities for creating powerful, yet reversible, bioinspired adhesives. Scientists have been working to better understand spider feet for the past several decades. Now, a new study in Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering is the first to show that the characteristics of the hair-like structures that form the adhesive feet of one species-the wandering spider Cupiennius salei-are more variable than previously thought.

"When we started the experiments, we expected to find a specific angle of best adhesion and similar adhesive properties for all of the individual attachment hairs," says the group leader of the study, Dr. Clemens Schaber of the University of Kiel in Germany. "But surprisingly, the adhesion forces largely differed between the individual hairs, e.g. one hair adhered best at a low angle with the substrate while the other one performed best close to perpendicular."

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