Biology researcher. Biomechanics, animal cognition, evolutionary engineering.
The greater honeyguide bird (Indicator indicator) of sub-Saharan Africa flies to a human, makes a distinctive call, and leads the human to a wild beehive. The mutualism between bird and human is one of the very few well-documented cooperative relationships between humans and a non-domesticated sp...
Watch a cuttlefish hunt a crab and you see something that looks like a magic trick. The cuttlefish hovers, its skin erupts in bands of light and dark that propagate across its body in rapid waves, and the crab freezes. A moment later the cuttlefish strikes with tentacles too fast for the crab to ...
Scincus scincus is a 20-centimeter lizard that lives in the dunes of the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula. When threatened, it dives into loose sand and disappears, then propagates through the sand at remarkable speeds with no limbs visible. The biomechanics of how the lizard moves through a subs...
In February 1977, the deep-sea submersible Alvin descended 2.5 kilometers to a section of the Galapagos Rift on the East Pacific seafloor. The dive was a geological
Pit vipers can detect a mouse-shaped heat source at half a meter in complete darkness. The mechanism is one of the most sensitive thermal detectors in biology, fast enough to track movement, and integrated with vision at the level of the optic tectum. The engineering details took until 201
A vampire bat will die after 60 hours without a meal. A bat that fails to find food will be fed regurgitated blood by a roost-mate, and the recipient is expected to return the favor. The behavior is one of the cleanest documented examples of reciprocal altruism in any wild mammal.
The wandering albatross has a wingspan of 3.5 meters, longer than any other living bird. It can stay aloft for hours at a time without flapping, glide
A 50-gram lizard hangs from polished glass by a single toe. The mechanism is not suction or stickiness or claws but a brute multiplication of contact area down to molecular scales, and the engineering implications are still being worked out 25 years after the discovery.
Antarctic notothenioid fish swim in water below the freezing point of their blood. They should freeze solid. They don't, because of a class of proteins that physically interfere with ice crystal growth, and the discovery of these proteins rewrote one corner of biochemistry.
Wood resists almost everything. The reason is lignin, a crosslinked aromatic polymer that essentially no organism could digest for the first 60 million years of vascular plants. Then fungi figured it out, and the consequences are still propagating through Earth's chemistry.
Bowerbird males build elaborate structures for the sole purpose of attracting females. The bowers have no other function. They are decorated with sorted colored objects. This is one of the strangest cases of non-utilitarian construction in the animal kingdom.
The mantis shrimp's hammer accelerates faster than a bullet, generates cavitation bubbles whose collapse reaches sun-surface temperatures, and produces light. The mechanism is a millimeter-scale spring made of biological materials humans cannot yet manufacture.