A scorpion’s sting tip and the mandibles and fangs that ants and spiders use to puncture prey are made of special materials that form tips and sharp edges. These tools enable them to cut and penetrate things that the limited forces of their small muscles won’t otherwise allow.
That knowledge won’t lessen the pain of puncture in human skin, but it may be useful in the design of precision cutting tools, said University of Oregon physicist Robert Schofield, lead author of a paper published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
In the paper, Schofield’s 19-member team detailed experiments done with miniaturized testing machines to explore the strong tools of small organisms including ants, bristle worms, scorpions and spiders. In all, the team performed about 1,500 hand-positioned measurements on 150 organisms from 10 different species from several phyla.
The heavy element biomaterials, as the research team labeled them, are zinc- and manganese-enriched. They make up a third class of structural biomaterials, after plain organic materials found in claws and fingernails and mineralized substances in teeth and bones, the researchers said.
“We found that, if these small organisms made their tools of the same organic material as other stiff parts of their exoskeletons, the sharp edges would deform more, they would not be as hard, and they would often wear away much faster,” Schofield said. “On the other hand, if they used the calcified material that human teeth are made from,...
Read Full Story: https://scienceblog.com/525161/sharpness-enabling-materials-help-insects-with-small-muscles-puncture-tough-skin/
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