Skip to Content

Stanford GSB News

 

Beetles, Snails, and Squirrels Can Help Humans Solve Design Problems

February, 2003

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Janine Benyus wants a biologist at every design table along with the architects and engineers, but not for the usual reason. Instead of asking them how to kill things or how to stop killing things, she wants to talk about what critters can tell us about building things and making them work.

A science writer and author of the book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Benyus urged an overflow Stanford Business School audience to look to the world of nature for ways to cool buildings, collect water in the desert, keep pipes from clogging with scale, and manage air traffic. Her Jan. 28th speech was sponsored by the School's Center for Social Innovation.

In the desert with no groundwater, the Namibian beetle stands on its head and traps water from fog on microscopic bumps on its wings. The bumps have smooth sides that encourage water to flow down to the tip of the bump, where it is channeled into the beetle's mouth. She said British engineers are now making sheets that mimic the beetle bumps to trap water for agriculture and for use on tents for refugees in desert settings.

She also cited the greatly unappreciated banana slug, which can glide over nearly any sharp object unharmed thanks to the mucus it produces—one of nature's best lubricants. "It holds 1,500 times its weight in water which makes it like an artificial muscle," Benyus boasted on the gastropods' behalf. Turbine lubricants, for example, might be greatly improved if designers could produce a product mimicking the slug's mucus.

"Biomimicry is not about harvesting these substances and getting the critters to produce them," she said. "It's asking them for the recipe and then walking back to our labs."

It's also about asking the locals how they do things. Early Hispanic settlers of Colorado built with adobe but didn't know how thick to make the walls to cope with the cold nights and hot afternoons. "They went to the engineering experts, Columbia ground squirrels. They measured the depth of the bedroom burrows and that's how thick they made the adobe walls."

Shells of marine mollusks may hold an answer to controlling the buildup of calcium carbonate that clogs water pipes, Benyus said. A snail shell is made of calcium carbonate, but the snail can control the shell's size by releasing proteins that adhere to the growing face and tell the shell not to grow larger. A commercial product is being developed to mimic the protein mollusks use and create a biodegradable substance that could be flushed through pipes to remove scale.

Plants, too, can teach us, she said. Some not only survive fire but produce seeds that need fire to sprout. Fire retardant compounds required by law could be patterned after the substances in those seed coats. "There are biologists and ecologists in Montana studying these seeds but they haven't talked to the people in industry doing fire retardant work. My dream is to get these fellows together in an elevator, turn off the power, and leave the building."

The world is moving from an oil-based economy to one based on carbohydrates, Benyus said, but even this has its risks. "What scares me is that we are no longer going to the wellhead in the oil field but rather to a new fossil raw source. Our new oil is soil fertility" and our present farming methods are costing us dearly. "We've lost 30 percent of our topsoil in the past 100 years."

Benyus challenged her audience to initiate and maintain dialogues with those investigating the world through ecology, agriculture, medicine, technology, renewable energy research, and other sciences. "There is more to discover than to invent," she said.