Natures wonders: How geckos shed water (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, March 12, 2015, 14:02 (3542 days ago) @ David Turell

Lots of tiny hairs:-http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/42410/title/Self-Drying-Skin/-"Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast, James Cook University, the University of Queensland in Australia, and the University of Oxford examined the skin of ground-dwelling box-patterned geckos (Lucasium steindachneri) under a scanning electron microscope. The scientists found that the skin was covered in densely packed spiny hairs, each a few micrometers in length, which had also been previously identified in other gecko species. By trapping pockets of air, the spines force water on the skin's surface to remain as spherical droplets rather than spreading in an even layer over the reptile's scales. Water droplets the size of a crayon's tip make contact with roughly 100,000 spines.-"Next, the scientists analyzed slow-motion videos to examine how the spiny scales repelled water. The skin's structure encourages the water drops to merge, creating a larger drop that eventually falls off the skin due to gravity, wind, or being hit with a smaller falling droplet that drives it from the surface at high speed, the researchers found. The narrow spines, of which thousands would fit in the width of a human hair, contribute to the phenomenon the authors dubbed “geckovescence,” in which merging drops convert the energy associated with their shrinking surface area into kinetic energy that sends them flying off the animal's skin."