Biomimetics
Based on Wikipedia: Biomimetics
Nature's Three-Billion-Year Head Start
Here's a question that keeps engineers up at night: how do you design a material that repairs itself when damaged? Or a surface that never gets dirty? Or a structure that stays cool in scorching heat without air conditioning?
Nature solved all of these problems billions of years ago. And we're finally getting smart enough to copy the answers.
The field is called biomimetics—from the Greek words for "life" and "imitation." It's the science of stealing ideas from nature. Not in a metaphorical sense. Engineers literally study how a beetle shell works, then build materials that function the same way. They analyze how termites regulate temperature in their mounds, then design buildings that do the same thing.
The economic impact? Several hundred billion dollars per year worldwide. This isn't academic curiosity. It's becoming one of the most important approaches to solving problems that traditional engineering can't crack.
The Original Flying Machine
The most famous example of biomimicry is also one of the oldest: human flight.
Leonardo da Vinci spent years obsessed with birds. He filled notebooks with detailed sketches of wing anatomy, observations about how birds bank and turn, theories about how air flows over feathers. He designed flying machines based on these studies—ornithopters with flapping wings that a person would power by moving their arms and legs.
None of them worked. Da Vinci understood observation but not aerodynamics. His machines were too heavy, his materials too weak, his understanding of lift too primitive.
Four centuries later, the Wright Brothers took a different approach. They didn't try to copy bird anatomy directly. Instead, they observed something subtler: how pigeons twisted their wing tips to control their flight path. This led them to develop "wing warping," a technique for steering their aircraft by changing the shape of the wings.
The Wright Flyer didn't look much like a bird. But it solved the control problem the same way birds do.
From Squid Nerves to Digital Circuits
The man who gave biomimetics its name was Otto Schmitt, an American biophysicist working in the 1950s. His story illustrates how the field actually works in practice.
Schmitt was studying squid. Specifically, he was studying how signals travel through squid nerves. Squid have unusually large nerve cells—large enough to stick electrodes into—which makes them ideal for this kind of research.
What Schmitt discovered was that nerve signals don't just gradually rise and fall. They snap on and off like a switch. Once the signal reaches a certain threshold, it fires completely. Below that threshold, nothing happens. This creates clean, reliable communication even when the underlying signals are noisy and messy.
Schmitt thought: what if we could build electronic circuits that work the same way?
The result was the Schmitt trigger, a circuit that's now used in billions of electronic devices. It converts noisy analog signals into clean digital ones. Every time you press a button on a calculator or type on a keyboard, circuits descended from Schmitt's squid research are cleaning up the electrical noise.
But Schmitt saw something bigger than just one useful circuit. He saw a whole approach to engineering. Most biophysicists at the time used physics to understand biology. Schmitt proposed the opposite: use biology to solve physics and engineering problems.
Biophysics is not so much a subject matter as it is a point of view. It is an approach to problems of biological science utilizing the theory and technology of the physical sciences. Conversely, biophysics is also a biologist's approach to problems of physical science and engineering, although this aspect has largely been neglected.
That "largely neglected" aspect is what we now call biomimetics.
Bionics, Biomimetics, and The Six Million Dollar Man
Around the same time Schmitt was developing his ideas, another researcher named Jack Steele coined a competing term: bionics. Steele worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the military was deeply interested in anything that might give them technological advantages.
For a while, both terms competed. Scientists debated which word better captured what they were doing. Schmitt preferred biomimetics; Steele preferred bionics.
Then television ruined everything.
In 1972, a novelist named Martin Caidin wrote a book called Cyborg, about a test pilot who receives artificial limbs and implants after a crash. Caidin had researched Jack Steele's work and used the term "bionics" throughout the book. Two years later, ABC adapted it into The Six Million Dollar Man, and suddenly "bionic" meant something completely different to the public.
Steve Austin, the show's hero, could run sixty miles per hour and see with zoom vision. The word "bionic" became associated with superhuman abilities, cybernetic implants, science fiction. Scientists in English-speaking countries quietly abandoned the term and settled on "biomimetics" instead.
It's a strange bit of history: a television show permanently altered scientific vocabulary.
The Kingfisher's Beak and the Bullet Train
Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains had a problem. When they emerged from tunnels at high speed, they created a sonic boom—a thunder-like crack that disturbed residents living near the tracks. The sudden transition from the confined tunnel to open air caused air pressure to build up and then release violently.
Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer working on the problem, was also a birdwatcher. And he'd noticed something interesting about kingfishers.
Kingfishers dive from air into water to catch fish. Air and water have very different densities—water is about eight hundred times denser than air. When most objects hit water at high speed, they create a dramatic splash. But kingfishers slip in with barely a ripple. How?
Their beaks. Kingfisher beaks are shaped to minimize the pressure change at the interface between air and water. The long, narrow shape allows them to enter water smoothly without announcing their presence to potential prey.
Nakatsu redesigned the front of the Shinkansen 500 Series to mimic the kingfisher's beak. The result was a train that emerged from tunnels quietly—and as a bonus, used about fifteen percent less electricity while traveling ten percent faster than its predecessors.
A bird that catches fish inspired a train that catches passengers.
Robots That Hop, Scuttle, and Swim
Building robots that move well is surprisingly difficult. Engineers have been working on the problem for decades, and wheeled robots still outperform walking ones in most situations. Walking involves constantly falling and catching yourself—a complex balancing act that computers struggle with.
So roboticists started looking at how animals solve this problem.
The BionicKangaroo is a robot that moves by hopping. What makes it interesting isn't just that it can jump—it's that it recovers energy from each landing and uses it for the next jump, just like a real kangaroo. Kangaroos have tendons that act like springs, storing energy when they land and releasing it when they take off. They can travel long distances while using less energy per mile than a running animal of the same size.
At the other end of the size scale, there's Kamigami—a children's toy that mimics cockroach locomotion. Cockroaches are disgusting, but they're incredibly good at moving quickly over uneven terrain. They can squeeze through tiny gaps, climb over obstacles, and keep going even when they lose a leg or two. Kamigami robots copy these abilities, letting kids race bug-shaped robots through grass, over rocks, and around furniture legs.
In the water, researchers have built Pleobot, a robot that swims like a shrimp. Shrimp use a technique called metachronal swimming—their many legs beat in a coordinated wave pattern, like dominoes falling in sequence. It's an efficient way to move through water, and studying it with robots helps scientists understand both the locomotion and its ecological effects.
When Robots Fly Like Bats
Flying robots—drones—typically use spinning propellers. They're simple, reliable, and well-understood. But they're also noisy, dangerous to be around, and not very maneuverable in tight spaces.
Animals fly differently. Birds, bats, and insects all use flapping wings, which generate both lift and thrust in ways that propellers can't match. They can hover, dart sideways, fly backward, and navigate through cluttered environments with ease.
Building robots that flap their wings is extraordinarily difficult. The physics is more complex, the mechanical systems are more intricate, and the control algorithms are more demanding. But researchers are making progress, and the results are impressive.
Bat-inspired flying robots, or BFRs, have some advantages over bird-inspired designs. Bats have flexible membrane wings that can deform in complex ways, allowing for more precise control. Bat Bot, one of the most advanced examples, can adjust the shape of its wings in flight, mimicking how real bats maneuver.
The DALER project went further: it created a robot that can both fly and walk. When it lands, its wings fold and become legs. This makes it useful in environments where a robot might need to fly to a location and then explore on foot—disaster zones, for instance, where debris might block direct flight paths.
Bird-inspired robots have their own advantages. Some designs use artificial feathers, which increase the range of angles at which the robot can fly before stalling. Others mimic how gulls adjust their elbows and wrists during flight. Researchers found that lift is maximized when elbow and wrist deformations are opposite but equal—the kind of precise detail that only comes from carefully studying actual bird flight.
Insect-inspired robots are the smallest and in some ways the most remarkable. They flap much faster than larger flying robots—they have to, because insect-scale aerodynamics work differently. One design, inspired by the rhinoceros beetle, can keep flying even after colliding with obstacles. Its wings deform on impact and then spring back, like the original beetle's.
Buildings That Breathe Like Termite Mounds
Termites in Africa face an engineering challenge that would stump most architects. The insects maintain their colony at a nearly constant temperature—around thirty degrees Celsius—while outside temperatures swing from nearly freezing at night to over forty degrees during the day. They do this without electricity, without fans, without any moving parts at all.
How?
Their mounds are designed for passive ventilation. The structure is riddled with tunnels and chambers that channel air through the colony. Hot air rises and exits through upper passages; cooler air is drawn in from below. The porous walls allow moisture to pass through while maintaining structural integrity. The whole system self-regulates, responding automatically to changing conditions.
Researchers in Zimbabwe used these principles to design the Eastgate Centre, a mid-rise office building in Harare. The building has no conventional air conditioning. Instead, it uses passive cooling inspired by termite architecture—fans draw air through hollow cavities in the concrete structure, which stores heat during the day and releases it at night. The result: the building uses only ten percent of the energy that a conventional building its size would require.
Scientists at Sapienza University of Rome took a different lesson from termites. They focused on the porous nature of mound walls and designed a double-panel façade—essentially two walls with a gap between them. Heat enters the outer wall, is partially absorbed, and is then carried away by air convection in the cavity. This reduced the building's cooling load by fifteen percent.
Another team created a façade with a small ventilation gap that induces airflow through the Venturi effect—the same principle that makes a garden hose spray faster when you put your thumb over the end. Air is drawn through the narrow gap, continuously flowing over the building's surface and carrying heat away. When combined with green walls—plants growing on the building's exterior—the cooling effect is even more dramatic. Plants add evaporation, respiration, and transpiration, and the damp growing medium acts as additional thermal mass.
The Two Paths: Technology Pull and Biology Push
Biomimetic research generally follows one of two approaches.
The first is called "bottom-up" or "biology push." Scientists discover something interesting in nature—a material with unusual properties, an organism with a clever solution to a problem—and then ask: how can we use this? The kingfisher beak story is a biology push example. Eiji Nakatsu noticed an interesting biological phenomenon and then found an engineering application for it.
The second approach is "top-down" or "technology pull." Engineers have a specific problem they need to solve, and they search through nature for organisms that have already solved similar problems. If you need to design a better adhesive, you might study how geckos stick to walls. If you need to purify water, you might examine how desert beetles collect moisture from fog.
In practice, the boundary between these approaches is blurry. A discovery might start as basic research, catch an engineer's attention, and then be refined through focused development. The work typically happens in interdisciplinary teams—biologists, engineers, materials scientists, computer scientists, and mathematicians all working together.
This interdisciplinary requirement is both a strength and a limitation. It leads to creative solutions that no single field could generate. But it also means that biomimetic research is harder to organize and fund than traditional disciplinary research. You need people who can speak multiple technical languages, and those people are rare.
Why Nature Solves Problems Better
There's a reason biological solutions often outperform engineered ones: time.
Life on Earth has been evolving for roughly 3.8 billion years. That's 3.8 billion years of trial and error, mutation and selection, testing and refinement. Every organism alive today is the product of an unimaginably long optimization process. The failures were eliminated; only the successes remain.
Moreover, biological systems have to work with available materials. They can't order titanium from a supplier or synthesize exotic polymers in a factory. They build everything from common elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium. The constraints force creativity.
The results are remarkable. Biological materials are organized from the molecular scale up through nanometers, micrometers, and beyond, often in hierarchical structures where each level of organization contributes different properties. A bone isn't just calcium; it's a complex architecture of mineral crystals, protein fibers, and living cells arranged in ways that provide strength, flexibility, and self-repair capabilities simultaneously.
Surfaces in nature are particularly impressive. Many biological surfaces are multifunctional—they might repel water, resist bacterial colonization, collect sunlight, sense the environment, and provide structural support all at the same time. Engineers usually design surfaces for a single purpose. Nature packages multiple functions into every square millimeter.
Model, Measure, Mentor
Janine Benyus, the scientist who popularized the term "biomimicry" with her 1997 book, proposed a framework for thinking about what nature offers us.
Nature as model: we can mimic natural forms, processes, and systems to solve human problems. This is the most obvious aspect of biomimicry—copying what works.
Nature as measure: after 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned what works and what lasts. We can use ecological standards to evaluate our own designs. Is this material sustainable? Would it function in a closed-loop system? Could it exist for millions of years without degrading the systems around it?
Nature as mentor: this is perhaps the most philosophical aspect. Instead of asking "what can we extract from nature?" we can ask "what can we learn from nature?" It's a shift from exploitation to education, from conquest to collaboration.
Benyus emphasizes sustainability as a core goal of biomimicry. Natural systems don't just work well—they work sustainably. Organisms don't deplete their environments because organisms that deplete their environments go extinct. The successful ones find ways to integrate into existing systems, often improving those systems in the process.
A tree doesn't just take resources from its environment. It provides habitat for countless other species. Its leaves capture sunlight. Its roots prevent erosion. Its decay enriches the soil. It's part of systems that regulate climate, purify water, and cycle nutrients. Human designs rarely achieve this kind of integration, but biomimicry suggests they could.
The Difference from Biomorphism
There's an important distinction between biomimetics and biomorphism—between copying how nature works and copying how nature looks.
Biomorphism, also called bio-decoration, uses natural forms for aesthetic purposes. Ancient Egyptians designed columns that looked like papyrus plants. Greek temples featured acanthus leaves carved into capitals. Antoni Gaudí's buildings in Barcelona swirl with organic curves and bone-like structures.
These designs are inspired by nature's appearance, but they don't necessarily function like nature. A column shaped like a tree isn't stronger because of its tree shape. It might be beautiful, but the resemblance is superficial.
Biomimetics goes deeper. A biomimetic building doesn't just look like a termite mound—it ventilates like one. The form follows function, and the function is borrowed from biology.
Of course, the boundary isn't always clear. Sometimes something that starts as aesthetic imitation leads to functional discovery. And sometimes the most functional designs also happen to be beautiful—perhaps because our sense of beauty evolved to recognize healthy, functional forms in the natural world.
Murray's Law and the Geometry of Life
In 1926, a physiologist named Cecil Murray published a paper about blood vessels. He asked a simple question: given that the body needs to transport blood to every tissue, what's the optimal diameter for the blood vessels that do the transporting?
The answer depends on what you're optimizing. Thicker vessels carry more blood with less resistance, but they also require more material to build and maintain. Thinner vessels are cheaper but create more friction. Murray worked out the mathematics and found a formula for the ideal compromise.
What's remarkable is that actual blood vessels match Murray's predictions almost exactly. Evolution discovered the optimal solution long before mathematicians could calculate it.
Recently, engineers have re-derived Murray's law for industrial applications. It turns out the same mathematics applies to any branching network that transports fluid—not just blood vessels but also pipes, tubes, and channels. Engineers can now design plumbing systems, ventilation networks, and chemical processing equipment using equations derived from studying the circulatory system.
The pipe diameter that minimizes material usage while maintaining flow rates? It's the same relationship Murray found in veins and arteries. Nature figured it out first.
Management Strategies from Ant Colonies
One of the stranger applications of biomimicry is in business management.
Ant colonies accomplish remarkable things despite having no central control. No ant decides what the colony will do. No ant knows the colony's overall situation. Each ant follows simple rules: if you encounter food, bring it back; if you encounter another ant carrying food, follow her trail; if a tunnel collapses, help dig it out.
From these simple individual behaviors, complex collective intelligence emerges. Colonies find optimal routes to food sources. They allocate workers efficiently between tasks. They respond to threats and opportunities without any ant needing to understand the big picture.
Johannes-Paul Fladerer and Ernst Kurzmann developed what they call the "managemANT" approach—that's management plus ant—which applies ant colony strategies to business organizations. The idea is that sometimes decentralized systems outperform hierarchical ones. Sometimes the best way to solve a complex problem is to give simple rules to many agents and let solutions emerge.
It's a humbling thought. Ants have brains smaller than a pinhead. Yet their collective decision-making processes might teach us something about running corporations.
The Promise and the Reality
A 2013 report commissioned by the San Diego Zoo attempted to quantify the long-term economic impact of biomimicry. The findings suggested enormous potential—not just in direct applications but in reshaping how we approach design problems generally.
But it's important to be honest about where the field actually stands. Many biomimetic applications are still in prototype stage. The gap between "scientists demonstrated this works in a lab" and "you can buy this at a store" is often measured in decades.
Some applications have made the leap. Velcro—invented by George de Mestral after noticing how burdock seeds stuck to his dog's fur—has been in use since the 1950s. Self-cleaning surfaces inspired by lotus leaves are used on some commercial products. But many promising technologies remain in development.
The challenge is often manufacturing. Nature builds things one molecule at a time, with perfect precision at the nanoscale. Our factories work differently. Replicating the hierarchical structures that make biological materials special requires manufacturing techniques we're only beginning to develop.
There's also the challenge of understanding. We can observe what nature does, but understanding how and why is harder. A termite mound's ventilation system emerges from countless individual termite behaviors following simple rules—but figuring out those rules well enough to replicate them in a building is non-trivial.
Why This Matters Now
We're facing problems that conventional engineering struggles to solve. Climate change demands buildings that use less energy. Resource depletion requires materials that can be recycled or that degrade safely. Pollution calls for processes that don't generate toxic waste.
Nature has already solved these problems. Every organism on Earth operates in a closed-loop system. Nothing is wasted; everything cycles. The sun provides the only external energy input. Everything else is borrowed and returned.
Biomimicry doesn't just offer specific solutions—a better wing shape here, a more efficient cooling system there. It offers a different way of thinking about design. Instead of conquering nature, working with it. Instead of inventing from scratch, learning from 3.8 billion years of research and development.
The termites didn't know they were solving the same problem as the architects. The kingfisher didn't know it was designing a bullet train. But the solutions were there, encoded in wings and mounds and beaks, waiting for someone curious enough to look closely and humble enough to copy.
That might be the real lesson of biomimicry: the answers often already exist. We just have to learn how to ask the right questions.