What can bionics researchers learn from butterflies and moths?
What can bionics researchers learn from butterflies and moths?
Bionics researchers studying silkworm moths and butterflies.
Contunico © ZDF Studios GmbH, Mainz
Transcript
NARRATOR: The wing scales of a blue Morpho butterfly, one of the most iridescent butterflies of all. What useful things can scientists and engineers learn from the phenomenon that produces this color? Or, what are the scientific conclusions we can arrive at through the analysis of silkworms and the silk they produce? And what can the flight behavior of moths and butterflies teach us? The science that addresses questions such as these is called bionics, which is the application of biological principles to the study and design of engineering systems. This approach has also allowed new developments to emerge in the areas of technology, medicine and design. Great Britain is one of the leading countries with regard to the bionic analysis of butterflies and moths. One of the most important research centers is Oxford. The college's long history and its reputation as one of the best universities in the world attract many international researchers to Oxford. One of them is Professor Fritz Vollrath, founder of the Oxford Silk Group. Vollrath heads a multi-disciplinary team of scientists.
FRITZ VOLLRATH: "The goal of the Silk Group, the ultimate goal, is to find out how silk works, how it functions and how the animal can make this material so efficiently and so effectively."
NARRATOR: In nature, silk is produced by several different animals. The best-known are spiders and moths. Spiders produce silk to spin their webs, draglines and also cocoons. Moth and butterfly caterpillars also spin cocoons. The threads of silk moth cocoons can be turned into silk fabric, and humans have bred them for this purpose for around 5,000 years.
This silkworm is about to spin its protective cocoon for pupation. This particular caterpillar, however, will never reach that stage. Laboratory engineer Bjoern Greving pulls approximately two kilometers of thread from the caterpillar in order to analyse the silk. The silk is produced by the caterpillar's salivary glands, and secreted through the so-called spinnerets at its head. As soon as the protein-containing liquid comes into contact with air, it hardens into a thread. Electron microscopes reveals more about these gossamer silk threads. It allows the Oxford-based scientists to study the nanocomposite structure of silk, wherein lies the secret to the extreme toughness of silk thread.
VOLLRATH: "It's an interesting material, silk, because it's a highly structured nanocomposite with different building blocks on the nanoscale and interact on the nanoscale. So you have hard blocks, crystalline blocks and you have soft blocks. And the hard blocks give the strengths and the soft blocks give the sensibility. Together they give the toughness of the material."
NARRATOR: The molecular composition of silk makes it even stronger than steel ropes and it is still more flexible than many modern plastic fibers. The University of Cambridge is Oxford's biggest rival. This other great English university is over 800 years old. It also counts the most Nobel Prize laureates among its alumni. The university's Department of Physics has undertaken several years of bionics research involving butterflies. The team of researchers is particularly interested in one tropical butterfly. The scientists are primarily interested in how it produces its color, in this case the bright, iridescent blue of the Morpho butterfly.
The interesting thing about the structural coloration of some butterflies is that the material itself does not actually have any color at all; it is completely transparent. The researchers use a model to see how the colors we perceive are created. These depend on the way in which the scales are arranged in multiple layers in which the light is refracted in different ways.
Putting a small piece of butterfly wing under the high-resolution electron microscope reveals the exact structure of these colorless multiple layers. This is how physician Maik Scherer discovers the structures which, in combination with light, give the Morpho its iridescence. Imagine this chitin structure to look like a building constructed from a wide range of different tiny, transparent tubes. Each of these catches and refracts the light, resulting in different colors depending on the amount of light and the viewing angle, although these are not visible under an electron microscope.
The scientists at Cambridge mimic the iridescence of structural colors with a transparent polymer liquid. Inside a centrifuge, a metal plate is coated with the polymer. The plastic coating changes color depending on its thickness and the viewing angle. This effect is again not achieved with color pigments but through the interaction of structure and light, mimicking the Morpho butterfly.
Back at Oxford, at the Institute for Zoology, a group of scientists is researching the flight behavior of various insects. Today, Dr. Richard Bomphrey is studying the flight behavior of a tobacco hawkmoth. Every move this animal makes is recorded with a high-speed camera in order to subsequently analyze this particular moth's flight performance.
RICHARD BOMPHREY: "Okay, so here is a nice sequence. You can see the descending flight to begin with and it wants to slow down its descent so it works quite hard and increases the stroke amplitude where the wings almost clap together and sometimes do clap together at the top of the upstroke. And then it manages to arrest the descent and start climbing again. And up here towards the end you can see it taking a turn to the left."
NARRATOR: The researchers feed the moths' flight paths into a computer which then creates diagrams such as these. It also analyzes the insects' wing beat frequency. What exactly is Richard Bomphrey hoping to learn from the tobacco hawkmoth and the other little flyers?
BOMPHREY: "My research focuses mostly on the flight performance envelope of different insects. So, how fast they can go, how tight they can turn, how quickly they can accelerate. And also on the aerodynamic mechanisms which make that possible.
NARRATOR: A wind tunnel allows Richard Bomphrey and his team to precisely observe the aerodynamic mechanisms a moth employs in flight. Dr. Per Henningsson prepares a tobacco hawkmoth for its wind tunnel performance. To video the moth's flight performance inside a wind tunnel, its thorax is attached to a stand, as the researchers can only study the interaction of wing anatomy and air flow behavior in detail if the animal is literally flying on the spot. In order to carry out and record the experiment with absolute precision, the moth is exposed to laser beams. The Oxford-based team is currently also conducting a comparative study, in which they analyze the widely differing flight behavior of insects from houseflies to moths, locusts and dragonflies.
BOMPHREY: "And what we can learn from that is trends which run through those groups, which lend themselves to particular tasks. So when you relate it to the ecology you find that a bumble bee is particularly good at lifting heavy loads. Whereas a locust is particularly good at travelling very long distance across desert with infrequent refueling stops, and these are the kind of trends which we will be able to apply to micro air vehicle design in the future where the wing shape that we put on is specific to the task that machine needs to do."
NARRATOR: The researchers at these British universities are still at the very beginning in terms of turning their observations into usable products and applications. The hugely diverse world of lepidopterans gives some idea of the sheer extent of technical solutions available. They are just waiting to be discovered by scientists through the close observation of the brilliant technology nature has perfected over billions of years.
FRITZ VOLLRATH: "The goal of the Silk Group, the ultimate goal, is to find out how silk works, how it functions and how the animal can make this material so efficiently and so effectively."
NARRATOR: In nature, silk is produced by several different animals. The best-known are spiders and moths. Spiders produce silk to spin their webs, draglines and also cocoons. Moth and butterfly caterpillars also spin cocoons. The threads of silk moth cocoons can be turned into silk fabric, and humans have bred them for this purpose for around 5,000 years.
This silkworm is about to spin its protective cocoon for pupation. This particular caterpillar, however, will never reach that stage. Laboratory engineer Bjoern Greving pulls approximately two kilometers of thread from the caterpillar in order to analyse the silk. The silk is produced by the caterpillar's salivary glands, and secreted through the so-called spinnerets at its head. As soon as the protein-containing liquid comes into contact with air, it hardens into a thread. Electron microscopes reveals more about these gossamer silk threads. It allows the Oxford-based scientists to study the nanocomposite structure of silk, wherein lies the secret to the extreme toughness of silk thread.
VOLLRATH: "It's an interesting material, silk, because it's a highly structured nanocomposite with different building blocks on the nanoscale and interact on the nanoscale. So you have hard blocks, crystalline blocks and you have soft blocks. And the hard blocks give the strengths and the soft blocks give the sensibility. Together they give the toughness of the material."
NARRATOR: The molecular composition of silk makes it even stronger than steel ropes and it is still more flexible than many modern plastic fibers. The University of Cambridge is Oxford's biggest rival. This other great English university is over 800 years old. It also counts the most Nobel Prize laureates among its alumni. The university's Department of Physics has undertaken several years of bionics research involving butterflies. The team of researchers is particularly interested in one tropical butterfly. The scientists are primarily interested in how it produces its color, in this case the bright, iridescent blue of the Morpho butterfly.
The interesting thing about the structural coloration of some butterflies is that the material itself does not actually have any color at all; it is completely transparent. The researchers use a model to see how the colors we perceive are created. These depend on the way in which the scales are arranged in multiple layers in which the light is refracted in different ways.
Putting a small piece of butterfly wing under the high-resolution electron microscope reveals the exact structure of these colorless multiple layers. This is how physician Maik Scherer discovers the structures which, in combination with light, give the Morpho its iridescence. Imagine this chitin structure to look like a building constructed from a wide range of different tiny, transparent tubes. Each of these catches and refracts the light, resulting in different colors depending on the amount of light and the viewing angle, although these are not visible under an electron microscope.
The scientists at Cambridge mimic the iridescence of structural colors with a transparent polymer liquid. Inside a centrifuge, a metal plate is coated with the polymer. The plastic coating changes color depending on its thickness and the viewing angle. This effect is again not achieved with color pigments but through the interaction of structure and light, mimicking the Morpho butterfly.
Back at Oxford, at the Institute for Zoology, a group of scientists is researching the flight behavior of various insects. Today, Dr. Richard Bomphrey is studying the flight behavior of a tobacco hawkmoth. Every move this animal makes is recorded with a high-speed camera in order to subsequently analyze this particular moth's flight performance.
RICHARD BOMPHREY: "Okay, so here is a nice sequence. You can see the descending flight to begin with and it wants to slow down its descent so it works quite hard and increases the stroke amplitude where the wings almost clap together and sometimes do clap together at the top of the upstroke. And then it manages to arrest the descent and start climbing again. And up here towards the end you can see it taking a turn to the left."
NARRATOR: The researchers feed the moths' flight paths into a computer which then creates diagrams such as these. It also analyzes the insects' wing beat frequency. What exactly is Richard Bomphrey hoping to learn from the tobacco hawkmoth and the other little flyers?
BOMPHREY: "My research focuses mostly on the flight performance envelope of different insects. So, how fast they can go, how tight they can turn, how quickly they can accelerate. And also on the aerodynamic mechanisms which make that possible.
NARRATOR: A wind tunnel allows Richard Bomphrey and his team to precisely observe the aerodynamic mechanisms a moth employs in flight. Dr. Per Henningsson prepares a tobacco hawkmoth for its wind tunnel performance. To video the moth's flight performance inside a wind tunnel, its thorax is attached to a stand, as the researchers can only study the interaction of wing anatomy and air flow behavior in detail if the animal is literally flying on the spot. In order to carry out and record the experiment with absolute precision, the moth is exposed to laser beams. The Oxford-based team is currently also conducting a comparative study, in which they analyze the widely differing flight behavior of insects from houseflies to moths, locusts and dragonflies.
BOMPHREY: "And what we can learn from that is trends which run through those groups, which lend themselves to particular tasks. So when you relate it to the ecology you find that a bumble bee is particularly good at lifting heavy loads. Whereas a locust is particularly good at travelling very long distance across desert with infrequent refueling stops, and these are the kind of trends which we will be able to apply to micro air vehicle design in the future where the wing shape that we put on is specific to the task that machine needs to do."
NARRATOR: The researchers at these British universities are still at the very beginning in terms of turning their observations into usable products and applications. The hugely diverse world of lepidopterans gives some idea of the sheer extent of technical solutions available. They are just waiting to be discovered by scientists through the close observation of the brilliant technology nature has perfected over billions of years.