Letters from the Tangled Bank by Tamsin Woolley-Barker

PREFACE

Life’s diversity is staggering. After 3.8 billion years of scrambling, sifting, and selecting, there are at least 30 million uniques species out there- maybe three times that many. New species turn up forgotten in museum drawers- it’s hard to keep pace. The merest spoonful of soil teems with 10,000 unique bacteria, each with a special toolkit of adaptations honed by millennia of trial and error. The ancestors of each of us made a living in the ancient and tangled bank of Life. In their quest to find prey and avoid becoming it, acquire mates and raise their young to mating age, they pushed into open niches and discovered new ground to set seed and spread. Their descendants’ dazzling strategies and structures are our collective Earthling inheritance- the ultimate Creative Commons. This tangled bank is a vast repository of hard won knowledge, and literally the raw feedstock of all future innovation. Every problem has been faced before, and hundreds of solutions exist if we know where to look. For every challenge we face, we can ask ourselves, how does the rest of nature do it? Chances are, we will be surprised.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST & BIOMIMICRY PROFESSIONAL

Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker is an Evolutionary Biologist, Author, and Biological Innovation Consultant with over 25 years experience in business, design, sustainability, and biology. Tamsin studied Plant Sciences and Fine Art at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and obtained her MPhil, MA, and PhD in Biological Anthropology from New York University through the New York Consortium for Evolutionary Primatology (a joint undertaking between Columbia University, the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, City University of New York, and NYU). She is also one of the first to receive the new MSc in Biomimicry from ASU, and has professional certifications from University of California San Diego in Sustainable Business Practices, Leadership Development, and Teaching Adults. She spent 12 years as CEO and co-founder of a small Media Arts company, and has worked as a senior Biotech bench Scientist, Corporate Sustainability consultant, Leadership Development professional for Biotech scientists, and as Content Developer for the California Association of Museums’ Green Museum Initiative. Today, she is as an independent ‘Biologist at the Design Table’ with organizations like Biomimicry 3.8, providing biologically-inspired innovation for a Fortune 100 clientele. She served as Biological Strategy Editor for AskNature (the Biomimicry Institute’s nature-based strategy database), and is an active curator and inaugural contributor for AskingNature, the Biomimicry Institute’s blog. Tamsin maintains Adjunct Professor status at Arizona State University’s new Biomimicry Center, is an advisory board member for Biomimicry Switzerland, co-founder of Biomimicry San Diego, and Senior Scientific Advisor for Mycologie, SPC (a Social Purpose Corporation dedicated to building biologically-inspired networks for a better future). She is a regular contributor to magazines like 'Digital Magazine of the Year' finalist Zygote Quarterly, Triple Pundit, Green Futures, and Trim Tab, and her regular column ‘The Biomimicry Manual’ appears at Inhabitat.com, a digital magazine with over 2.5 million followers. Her book on collaboration, innovation, and organizational structure inspired by ultrasocial creatures- BIOINSPIRED, INC.: How Networked Animals Innovate, Collaborate, and Create Lasting Value in an Unpredictable World (And Your Company Can Too)- will be available from White Cloud Press in Spring 2016. Tamsin lives near the beach in San Diego with her three delightful wild boys, a dog, two cats, a chinchilla named Houdini, a bearded water dragon, three chickens, one fish, and a tarantula named Fluffy. She is not accepting new pets. iii

INTRODUCTION

This book is intended as a thank-you all who supported me while writing my book BioInspired Inc: How Networked Animals Innovate, Collaborate, and Lead in an Unpredictable World (And Your Company Can Too). Thanks to you, White Cloud Press has selected the book for publication in their Spring/Summer 2016 catalog. This is very exciting to me. The quality of their publications is top-notch, and their commitment to the biomimicry movement second to none. White Cloud also published Jay Harman’s excellent book about his personal “innovation inspired by nature” journey, The Shark’s Paintbrush, and I am deeply honored to join him. White Cloud’s editorial guidance is proving invaluable, and will make the book much richer. In the meantime, however, you will have to wait a little longer to get it! To thank you for your support I am giving you this right away. This e-book is an anthology of other bio-inspired writings from the past couple of years, along with some new pieces that are written exclusively for you. I hope they will give you a taste of what is to come in BioInspired Inc, and I hope you enjoy them. The beautiful layout is by Mexico City designer Daniela Esponda, and features some of my own nature photography.

Tapping Our Ultimate Creative Commons: How Diversity Catalyzes Innovation and Unlocks Regenerative Value

Life’s genome is a vast repository of ancient knowledge. After 3.8 billion years of scrambling, shifting, and selecting ideas that work, the diversity is staggering. Today, we’ve named 1.6 million species, and every year, scientists report 15,000 more. New species turn up in forgotten museum drawers – it’s hard to keep pace. Just a spoonful of soil contains 10,000 different bacteria – many new to science – and each one contains a unique toolkit of adaptations honed by billions of years of trial and error. The ancestors of every creature alive today spent billions of years inventing new ways to make a living. In the quest to find prey and avoid becoming it, mate, and raise young to mating age, those pioneers found open niches – new ground on which to set seed and spread. Their descendants’ dazzling array of strategies and structures are our collective intellectual property as Earthlings – the ultimate Creative Commons. That Commons is literally the raw feedstock for all future innovation. Back in 1930, theoretical biologist Ronald Fisher showed that a population’s ability to adapt is limited by the amount of variation natural selection has to sculpt from. Evolution requires it. Populations that lack diversity stagnate and fail, destined to blink out and disappear. Take Daphnia water fleas (tiny aquatic crustaceans thriving in ephemeral water pans), for instance. They clone themselves merrily when conditions are good, but as soon as that pool starts to dry out, or the food in it dwindles, they switch to sex. By scrambling their genes, they increase the chance of hitting on something new, something that may save them in the future.

This reminds me of Steven Johnson’s observation that good ideas come to us in dreams from random combinations of neurons firing synchronously in our sleep. “A good idea,” he says, “is a network of thousands of neurons firing together that never fired together before.” The more diverse your experience and knowledge, and the more stimulus in your day, the more diverse your night neurons will be, and the more likely a novel idea is to spark. Diversity matters- to populations, species, and entire ecosystems. It catalyzes innovation, which unlocks exponential returns. These are not linear systems – they are regenerative, offering “compound returns on incremental reinvestment,” if you like. Let’s face it, striving for a “more sustainable and less bad” way of life will never be sexy. But regeneration? Abundance spiraling upward in ever-widening cascades of opportunity? That’s good stuff. Peer inside a thriving, species-rich habitat, and you’ll see a teeming pyramid of productivity, as all kinds of creatures contribute their bodies, carcasses, and feces to Life’s messy stew. The rich get richer, and abundance is surprising. When a small number of wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the 70s, for instance, the effects were dramatic and unexpected. Deer had stripped the valleys, but now the wolves kept them on the move. Plants proliferated under their roving influence, and scattered carcasses brought microbes and nutrients to the soil. The deer declined somewhat, but mostly there were just simple changes in their behavior. The grasslands recovered, saplings sprouted and became trees. Valley forests returned, and birds filled the air with song. Yellowstone’s green things took it upon

TAPPING OUR ULTIMATE CREATIVE COMMONS: HOW DIVERSITY CATALYZES INNOVATION AND UNLOCKS REGENERATIVE VALUE

IMAGE: JETHRO TAYLOR

themselves to spin carbon dioxide and sunlight into golden sugar, feeding a teeming pyramid in endlessly bewildering and delightful ways. Beavers came, damming rivers, creating ponds. Currents slowed, taking the time to give healthy spawning grounds, and stopped nibbling at eroding banks. Many creatures found new homes – tiny herbivores and their predators flourished. Eagles came for carrion, bears came for berries, and the rivers themselves changed course. Abundance in diverse ecosystems is exponential and surprising. What if we could mimic these pyramids in our human ecosystems? Philanthropist Peter Diamandis and journalist Steven Kotler believe we can. “Imagine a world of nine billion people,” they write, “with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care,

and non-polluting, ubiquitous energy.” It sounds too good to be true. But Diamandis (founder of the XPRIZE, a nonprofit competition for radical humanitarian technologies) and Kotler are convinced that exponentially advancing technologies are bringing this vision to fruition. They speak of innovation explosions in high-tech – artificial intelligence, computing, renewable energy generation and storage, broadband, digital manufacture, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology, among others – but also in lower-tech solutions, including water purification, vertical farming, and social enterprise. Because these technologies accelerate exponentially and these systems are synergistically interconnected, Diamandis and Kotler believe that, like the wolves in Yellowstone, the future will delightfully surprise us.

TAPPING OUR ULTIMATE CREATIVE COMMONS: HOW DIVERSITY CATALYZES INNOVATION AND UNLOCKS REGENERATIVE VALUE

IMAGE: TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

Maybe you’re thinking what a load of technoutopian wild scat. Well yes, this vision is a bold one, requiring a great deal of imagination, will, and optimism. I don’t know that I can drink the gee-whiz techno-Kool-Aid just yet. But one thing I do know: without hope we have nothing. And I also know, as a biologist, that ecosystems achieve this kind of regenerative abundance all the time. There’s really no good reason why we can’t do it too. In Glacier Bay, Alaska, for instance, a massive glacier has steadily retreated for the last 200 years, proffering open ground to any who would take it. Humble pioneering lichens and liverworts cling to bare rock there, crumbling it into soil where seeds find a purchase. Forbs and weedy opportunists sprout, stabilizing new ground for mycorrhizal fungi to settle into. Their pulsing networks bring water, nitrogen, and nutrients for big-

ger plants. Creeping shrubs shade developing saplings, grassy tussocks capture water and shelter seeds. Alder grows, and finally gives way to magnificent and massively productive spruce forests. As futurist designer Ezio Manzini reminds us, “it is diversity that unleashes creativity, [and] it is diversity that creates conditions conducive to change.” Change we must. And so, I believe, we will. With nine billion people on our planet’s horizon, diversity is plentiful. But the four billion poorest people on Earth have been cut out of our collective imagination. Now, with cheap cell phones and microfinance, they access jobs, training, information, and each other – while we access them. Corporations see dollar signs, and perhaps that is telling. When the poorest people in the world develop the technologies, services, and opportunities to rise out of poverty, they

TAPPING OUR ULTIMATE CREATIVE COMMONS: HOW DIVERSITY CATALYZES INNOVATION AND UNLOCKS REGENERATIVE VALUE

IMAGE: H. KRISP

become the next generation of customers and salespeople. It’s not a linear system. This is regeneration. The rich do get richer, after all. Like lichens crumbling bare rock into rich soil, the vision of the Rising Billion has powerful allure. The cornerstone of this bottom-of-the-pyramid growth strategy hinges on basic-needs technologies for food, water, and energy. Dean Kamen’s Slingshot water purifier, for instance, can transform enough polluted water, salt water, or raw sewage to meet 300 people’s water needs. Coca-Cola is eagerly distributing these simple machines. Meanwhile, vertical farms move agriculture into hydroponic ‘skyscraper greenhouses’ that use 80% less land and 90% less water for the same amount of food production. SkyGreen’s vertical Singapore towers now feed 5 million urbanites, with crops grown and sold right where they live. On the energy front, solar

is “just six doublings away from meeting 100% of our needs” (as Singularity University co-founder Ray Kurzweil likes to say). And now, with innovations like Tesla’s Powerwall battery, we can bank it or go gridless. These technologies are oddly populist, relying on many distributed, decentralized, small and diverse actions and opportunities- like thousands of honeybees bringing bite-size bits of abundance to the hive. Other innovations are barely techie at all. Social enterprises by groups like Ashoka Changemakers and Women4Empowerment provide the poorest and most vulnerable global citizens with cell phones, microfinance, and business training, handing them the tools for DIY innovation and personal enterprise. When 4 billion people no longer spend all day battling dysentery and fetching water, when they have light at night, food to eat, and gainful employment, their ideas and deter-

TAPPING OUR ULTIMATE CREATIVE COMMONS: HOW DIVERSITY CATALYZES INNOVATION AND UNLOCKS REGENERATIVE VALUE

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

mination will bring surprising delights. Add 3D printing, internet access, and online education, and the Rising Billion may become that spruce forest in the wake of the crushing glacier. Nine billion is a lot of diversity. But our planet has so much more! Some 10-30 million species face the same problems we do – thirst, hunger, the need for energy and shelter, competitors, and parasites. Every species has its solutions, often more efficient to make, run, and maintain than our own. Everywhere we look, Nature inspires us with her clever processes, materials, and structures. What if we combine our exponential technologies with hers? As Janine Benyus says, “why not take open innovation all the way outside?” Biomimicry is deeply synergistic with all of Diamandis and Kurzweil’s fields of innovation. For every exponential technology – be it water purification, renewable energy generation and storage, artificial intelligence, vertical farming, digital manufacture,

new materials, or social enterprise – we can ask ourselves, how would nature do it? Evolution is mostly a lot of imitation, mixed with a little innovation. A lot of copying, a heaping helping of diversity, and a dash of sex. That’s true for humans especially- if we are specialized for anything, it’s mimicry and mixing. It’s in our nature. And if a good idea is a diverse network of neurons firing together for the first time, then lets dig deep within our collective Earthling Commons and connect more neurons. Then, just maybe, like the wolves of Yellowstone, exponential abundance may delightfully surprise us. And I believe it will. Because our evolution requires it.

TAPPING OUR ULTIMATE CREATIVE COMMONS: HOW DIVERSITY CATALYZES INNOVATION AND UNLOCKS REGENERATIVE VALUE

Evolving Our Superorganism IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

Today’s businesses exist within an unpredictable world of changing supply chains and customer needs, upstart competitors, new technologies, resource scarcity, and volatile prices. It’s difficult to respond fast enough to the speed of change we face, especially when companies are global. Teams span diverse cultures, languages, time zones, and expectations. The flip side of this unpredictability and risk is a new world of opportunity. Today’s shifting landscape offers literally billions of potential new customers in emerging markets, with many wholly unexplored platforms, technologies, and ways of thinking about service and products. How do we navigate this dynamic landscape? I take the long, wide, evolutionary view. The ancestors of every creature alive today spent the last 3.8 billion years evolving their own unique set of innovations and relationships for dealing with change. How do they collaborate to unlock value? How do they coordinate the actions of millions of individuals to sense change and respond to it quickly, with collective intelligence? Can we copy some of those ideas to unlock the value in our own collaborative innovation? Lot’s of ultra-social animals live in groups, relying on individual intelligence and political negotiation to accomplish collaborative goals, just like we do. Bottlenose dolphins, vampire bats, orcas, elephants, monkeys and apes- and even crows, jays, and parrots. Some of them use and make tools. Crows even make tools to make other tools! Many species have amazing memories, remembering where they buried tens of thousands of last year’s seeds, found water in the last big drought, or who did what to whom. All of them have complicated political lives, with unique personalities; they negotiate dominance EVOLVING OUR SUPERORGANISM

hierarchies, and form alliances to gain access to mates or high quality food. Some hunt together, and even share prey, and some pass distinct cultural habits from one generation to the next. The results are impressive. But none of them exceed people in this approach. Our brains are freakishly large for our size, as big as they can physically get without toppling us over or getting us stuck in the birth canal. But if big brains were the only way to make teamwork succeed, then we could stop trying right now, because humans are as good as it gets. The smartest among us should think up the answers, and the rest of us should just do what they say. The End. But teamwork through combined individual intelligence has limits. Robin Dunbar is a primate behaviorist at Oxford who has spent a lifetime studying Ethiopian gelada baboons- the only grass-grazing primate. All day long, huge groups of these geladas shuffle around on their bottoms, out in the open, picking at the ground. They are sitting ducks for leopards, which is why they bunch together in huge social groups for protection. The only primate with bigger groups than geladas is ourselves. Geladas are strange in another way- their constant bizarre and chatty human-like singsong (YouTube it!). Dunbar, out there on the lonely rain-swept Ethiopian plateau, kept trying to figure out who was talking to him. Instead of checking in to the asylum, Dunbar began looking across different primate species, and discovered something very interesting. As the size of groups within a species grows, so does the average size of that species’ brain, especially its neocortex. Species with bigger neocortices also spend more time grooming each other, maneuvering for social dominance, and chatting.

IMAGE: BEN GRE

The human brain and neocortex are, of course, freakishly increased. If you were a Martian primatologist and you had Professor Dunbar’s paper on brain and group size, and then you stumbled across your first human, you could measure its brain and predict that we hang out in groups of about 150. And you would be right- our Magic Friendship Number turns up everywhere in human society. Hunter-gatherers average 150 members. Neolithic farming villages contained about 150 people. British families send 150 Christmas cards each year. Military units historically hover around 150. That same Martian primatologist would know that, in order for us to maintain our relationships with those 150 people, we would have to devote 40% of our time to grooming our friends, which means we wouldn’t have time to eat and sleep. The same goes for geladas. If they spent as EVOLVING OUR SUPERORGANISM

much time grooming as their group-size predicts, they would starve. Instead, Dunbar suggests (and our Martian primatologist would guess) we never shut-up. Both our species hit on a solution - 'vocal grooming.’ We double up by chatting and singing to everyone around us. This way, we continue to assure our friends of our commitment to them. People speak 40,000 words a day on average, the equivalent of 4-6 hours of continuous talking. And that’s just the men. That’s cool, but of course, most of us live in huge towns and cities, and work in global organizations. Networks of 150 people won’t do the job. We turn to hierarchies instead, with top-down leadership, and we push the limits of vocal grooming by massively broadcasting our wordsfirst the printing press, then radio, TV, and now, Facebook- which is vocal grooming on steroids

(or pheromones might be an more appropriate metaphor). Unfortunately, hierarchies don’t adapt that well to change, because those with the most to lose control the information and resources. The top has the money and power to keep the money and power flowing to the top, as it always has. Failing to adapt to change, societies destabilize, empires fall, and huge multinationals miss the writing on the wall until it’s too late. Among other species, the best team players have no individual intelligence or dominance hierarchies to speak of. Instead, millions of ants, honeybees, and termites perform tiny tasks, coordinating themselves with their nearest neighbors through simple rules. Each individual contributes her local, first-hand knowledge and action, and unexpectedly complex behaviors and collective decision-making emerges. Together, they are like the cells of a single body- only a few will mate and reproduce- the rest are support staff. These are the workers- finding food, building a home, and caring for the colony’s children. Sterile Honeypot ant workers, for instance, fill their abdomens so full of liquid food they can’t move. They hang from the ceilings of their underground nests, selflessly storing food (that other workers feed them) for the rest of the colony. Among termites, only the queen and king reproduce, and the rest are sterile workers, including soldiers with giant trapjaws so enlarged they cannot feed themselves. Other workers do this for them. These are superorganisms, groups of individuals that cannot survive alone for long, where everyone has a job to do, and the whole is more than the sum of the parts. For a superorganism, the group EVOLVING OUR SUPERORGANISM

IS an organism in quite literal ways. Societies are large and amoeba-like (though not physically connected), with all the abilities and metabolic functions you’d expect in an individual. And just as the some individuals reproduce more than others, so do some ant and honeybee colonies. Ants have been living as superorganisms for around 150 million years. That’s a lot of time to perfect a sustainable approach to teamwork. Their brains may be small, but these superorganisms effectively tap the power of collective wisdom, collaborative leadership, and distributed intelligence. They can accomplish the same kinds of things that small groups of intelligent mammals do, but with far less “computing power” and no managerial oversight or dominance hierarchies. If you had 500 million years to adapt your organization, you might arrive at something like the myccorhizal fungi. These “networked creatures” fuse their bodies together into a network. Individual nuclei stream through this interconnected cytoplasm, shuttling nutrients to whomever they are connected to. They BECOME an Internet. The result is startling ‘intelligence’ where we would not expect it to be. And they do this not just for themselves, but for the plants. Nearly all land plants trade photosynthetic sugars with the fungi in exchange for nutrients and water that their coarse, clumsy roots could not reach otherwise. Meanwhile, the fungi transmit chemical signals between them, warning them against insect attacks, and help parent trees feed their shaded saplings until they get big enough to reach the light on their own. These mycorrhizal networks are actively supporting, if not farming, our planet’s food base, and we are barely beginning to understand it.

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

Today, of course, cell phones and the Internet give us two-way, always-on, fully-networked communication, just like the mycelia have. Our networks are dense, diverse, and distributed like other biological networks. To paraphrase futurist Ezio Manzini, our society is a living ecology, a complex adaptive system, more garden than machine. And as in any ecosystem, evolutionary innovation is achieved when all the components are fully integrated, with diversity, redundancy, nutrients, and energy flowing throughout.

helped themselves. And I like to think we will discover that too.

I like to imagine that the ancient fungi who first hit on networks wreaked havoc on every ecosystem they touched as they spread, just our way of life does today. And now, those disruptive innovators provide critical life-support to the rest of us Earthlings. Because somewhere along the line, they discovered that by helping others, they EVOLVING OUR SUPERORGANISM

Once We Were Natural IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

Many people feel that we are apart from nature, quite different from it. There are animals, and then there are us. Plants are just scenery. And the fungus and bacteria? Well, that’s what antiseptic soap is for. Some of us believe we were created by a higher power to steward the rest of creation, or to use it as we see fit, until one ill-considered bite of the devil’s apple got us cast from the Garden. Others believe that humanity is a plague, an overpopulated cancer or a parasite that overstepped its bounds and is sapping the host planet dry. Either way, once upon a time we were natural, and now we are not. I am an evolutionary biologist, and a biological anthropologist to boot, which is a fancy way of saying I study monkeys and apes and the processes of deep time that shaped us. I take the Darwinian view. We are just as natural as we ONCE WE WERE NATURAL

ever were, and like any good naturalist, I enjoy watching my fellow humans do their thing! When I look down at our apartment buildings and roads from the airplane window, I see beautiful paper wasp nests and termite tunnels, built by people, together. My children are like little chimps, huffing and puffing at each other, slapping the ground, shaking sticks, and pretending to be tough. Like any naturalist finding a cool life form, I get excited. We are one seriously weird and fantastical ape. We are natural. I say this because I want to change your feelings about Us. We are not a child apart from nature, lost in a bad divorce. I think it’s important. I know, you nod. It’s just that we forgot that we depend on her. Or we pretend we aren’t, because nature is outside and we live in an air-conditioned house. But we haven’t

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

forgotten, any more than the ants have. And they live in air-conditioned houses too. Our ambivalence is embedded in our language, which means it is embedded in our hearts. We don’t feel we deserve success. We bit the apple, after all. “We used to live in harmony with nature,” “Go outside and reconnect with nature,” and even the oft-quoted Biomimicry adage (that I sometimes use myself), “How would nature do it?” - We speak this way all the time, and ironically, the most eco-conscious of us do it the most. Each of these contains the inherent implication that we are cast from the Garden, and we are ashamed. It saddens me, because I don’t think we can create regenerative abundance until we face it. We live the way people do, which is not all that different from ants. We are not bad, not wayward, not perverse, nor are we the pinnacle of some ONCE WE WERE NATURAL

pre-ordained chain of being. We are what we are, and we do what we do. No more or less than the ants and termites and honeybees and vampire bats and naked mole rats. We are one among many. I try hard to remember this, by making a conscious effort to use the word ‘nature’ only when I truly mean all of it, including people. Otherwise, I say “the rest of nature.” Try it- it’s hard at first. You’ll catch yourself doing it all the time, but slowly it seeps into you. I am natural. Just as I am. It will make you happier and more hopeful about humanity, less concerned about who is recycling and who isn’t, and less judgmental about why people insist on having so many children. I think it matters. Boundless optimism, acceptance, and love of life is the source of the energy we need to keep doing the hard work of adapting. We can’t get there by being less bad,

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

by saying no to desert while the next person takes two. Resentment, judgment, and abstinence are all weirdly human traits- the rest of nature isn’t doing that. If it makes you feel better, just imagine if killer whales had hands. They would make us look like the Mother Teresa Club. You are perfectly natural, just as you are. But. Are you well-adapted? That’s a better question. We really are one very clever ape. We can do things other species cannot, just as they can do things we can barely comprehend. The star-nose mole’s 22 pink snout-tentacles see seismic vibrations. The mimic octopus changes color and shape to impersonate some 15 different animals on cue. Our special powers include diverse individual intelligence and personalities; wildly different cultures and ways of being; the ability to empathize with others and put ourselves in their ONCE WE WERE NATURAL

shoes; and to imagine complex solutions and work backwards to make them so. We are oh so clever. But cleverness can only get us so far. There are 7 billion of us- and more on the way. If we keep doing business as usual, we’ll need a couple more planets just like this one. I’m sure they are out there, but most of us have to adapt to the reality of just one Earth, and fast. Unlike most informed people, I don’t believe that has to mean more despair, poverty, and famine. I don’t think it has to mean scraping by, or a slow death spiral. I don’t even think it necessarily means doing more with less. But I am certain it does mean finding a different way to live, and much, much faster than any other species has before. Humans are always lightning-quick to adapt. That’s human nature, and has been for some time. That’s because we don’t adapt one plod20

ding generation at a time through genes alone. We do it culturally, at blinding speed. We figure things out; imagine the future, work backwards, try, fail, and repeat until we make it so. And we do it together. But because we are natural, there are 30 million other species we can ask for help. Each of them has survived alongside of us with a survival strategy of their own. Some collaborate in groups much larger than ours, achieving the same kinds of complex tasks. Leaf-cutter ants and Namibian termites carefully tend fungal gardens, wood ants herd aphids, specially bred to be tame and wingless and produce milky nectar on demand. Honeybee hives are designed with hexagonal honeycomb perfection that any architect would admire. All of them have been doing it far longer than we have, some 150 million years compared to maybe a couple for people. What do they know about living sustainably in huge complex societies? What can we learn from them? I’ve been writing a book (for too long) about this very thing, and I’ve come up with ten evolutionary principles that drive superorganism and ‘networked creature’ function. All have been tested by deep time, and all are fairly easy to implement in our own organizations. 150 million years is a lot of time to perfect a sustainable approach to teamwork. The ants have it dialed, with no top-down plan or leadership whatsoever. Each ant performs their individual microwork, coordinating it indirectly with those around them, using dynamic structures and simple rules. Their brains are small, but these superorganisms effectively tap the power of collective wisdom, collaborative leadership, and distributed intelligence instinctively. They can accomplish the same kinds of things that ONCE WE WERE NATURAL

small groups of intelligent mammals do, but with far less “computing power” and no managerial oversight or dominance hierarchies. But what if you had 500 million years to hone your organization? Perhaps you would arrive at something like the slime mold (also called social amoebae), or the mycelial fungi. These are the “networked creatures.” Individuals fuse their bodies together, forming a network of interconnected cytoplasm. They maintain their individual nuclei, streaming along while shuttling nutrients among themselves and whomever they are connected to. These creatures BECOME an Internet. The result is startling ‘intelligence’ where we would not expect it to be. The social amoebae can find the fastest way through a maze, while the fungi sense and respond to local events as they occur, feeding that information throughout their network. In the case of the mycorrhizal fungi, they do this not just for themselves, but for the plants that grow above them and tap into their network. As much as 90% of those plants trade photosynthetic sugars with the fungi in exchange for nutrients and water that their own coarse, clumsy roots cannot reach. Meanwhile, the fungi transmit chemical signals between those plants, helping them warn each other against herbivore attacks and insect infestations, so they can produce defensive compounds. They also shuttle nutrients from parent trees to shaded saplings, helping them grow large enough to reach the light on their own. These mycorrhizal networks are actively supporting, if not farming, most of our planet’s food base. Humans are superorganisms too, according to evolutionary biologist supreme E.O. Wilson,

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

though our coordination and communication are laughably puny compared with the fungi. We’ve been seeking networked communications from the time we invented smoke signals, and now, we’ve got it. With cell phones and the Internet, we have two-way, always-on, fully-networked communication, just like the mycelia and social amoebae. Our networks are dense, diverse, and distributed like other biological networks: the human brain, an octopus body, the fungal mycelium underground, an amoeboid slime mold, an ant colony laying pheromone trails, or the mammalian immune system. Someday, perhaps we’ll build and run our networks on human waste, while feeding other life - just like the fungi do today. But for now, we can start by getting connected. This is a key part of the transformation we need, and I believe every organization, especially the global ones, must take a leading role in accelerating it. Everyone must join our human network. This takes care of the first ONCE WE WERE NATURAL

three, and maybe four, of the ten time-tested evolutionary principles that drive superorganism and ‘networked creature’ function: By 1) cultivating networks that connect 2) diverse and independent individuals through 3) ‘two-way always-on’ communication into 4) an “information assimilation structure,” we can sense and respond to changing conditions quickly and effectively. There are six more principles as well, and all are very simple, but I believe we can change the world with them. When all 7 billion of us, even children in remote African villages, have the opportunity to access the global conversation and contribute our diverse and independent opinions and bit of information to it, when we are all welcome in the Garden once more, we can start the hard work of regenerating it.

Collaborative Leadership IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

We humans are intrinsically social creatures. Every day, thousands of people risk their lives to text and drive: it's that important to us. A human without others is naked and defenseless, like an ant without a colony, or a coral without a reef. Each of us is part of a larger ‘super-organism.’ We can’t even drink a cup of coffee without hundreds of people growing, harvesting, roasting, delivering, and even brewing it. Over a million years ago, our ancestors were going head to head with professional carnivores. Big ones. But we didn’t have slice-and-dice claws or pointy teeth, cheetah speed, or furry protection. How did we possibly compete against them for those big juicy mammoth steaks? We did it by working together: intelligently, with communication, in teams. Everyone had a job to do. The spotter on the hunting COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP

team, the scout over in the gathering department. And of course, the waterbearer and the nutty shaman. But ultimately, it was our early human social network that made it fly. Wolves hunt in packs, but super-organisms like us (and a handful of other fascinating species) give teamwork a whole new meaning. Take this cellular slime mold, Dictyostelium, for instance. It forages alone, underground, as a free-living, single-celled amoeba. Each individual cell independently leverages the power of it’s own knowledge and the speed of lone decision-making. But when the going gets rough, and food is scarce, that strategy changes. Suddenly, one hundred-thousand to one million of these guys heed the chemical alarm bells, coming together to merge into a slime-wrapped slug with newfound superpowers. The slug slimes to the surface, through soil and over leaves, foraging 24

as one body. Together, these amoebae can even find their way through a maze- with no brain at all. Finally, they climb onto each other like circus freaks, linking pseudopods to form a towering stalk, and toss the lucky ones to the wind as spores to grow the next generation. My point? A super-organism can do things an individual could never do on her own. Which brings us to the workplace. Collaboration creates opportunities that weren’t there before, especially when resources are patchy, scarce, and unpredictable. That’s because “the wisdom of the crowd” gives use more eyes and ears, diverse abilities, viewpoints, knowledge, and experience. For instance, beneath the soil you walk on lies a pulsing nutrient highway. It’s the ‘mycelial’ fungus, constantly on the search for rotting plant matter to digest. Like the slime mold, every individual is on the lookout. If a meal is out there, someone will find it. And when they do, those nutrients will flow through the system to where they are needed most, because the fungal bodies are physically fused together. The whole is more than the sum of the parts: everyone gets more than they would have on their own. A single leaf cutter ant colony can harvest half a ton of leaves a year this way, creating the perfect compost for their favorite fungal food. Other ant species herd aphids like cattle, milking their sugary honeydew. As in human enterprises, insect colonies members have specific jobs: they may be foragers or farmers, builders or breeders, scouts or soldiers. But do they have leaders?

COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP

Not so much. Super-organisms don’t go in for ‘top-down’ structures, because they don’t adapt well to change. Perversely, hierarchies get more rigid under stress, exactly when we need them to bend. It's difficult for these organizations to adapt, because those with the most to lose hold the information and resources. Change threatens their very structure, so leadership gets nervous when things aren’t under control. Much energy goes into keeping everyone in place, and making operating procedures “standard.” Without adapting to change, the hierarchical society crumbles, empires fall, and businesses fail. This is the “deer in the headlights” approach to leadership. The brain isn’t telling the body the right thing to do. Today, our communications form a dense pulsing web, not unlike a slime mold or the underground fungal mycelial threads. We are ‘networked creatures’ too, and we don’t need those top-down command-and-control centers to get things done. Which is great, because we’ve created some ‘patchy, scarce, and unpredictable’ conditions that require quick action. But as we move into the Networked Age, our clunky, top-down relics are still with us. We need to engineer the transition. Social insects (like ants, termites, wasps, and honeybees) provide us with great insight on how teams can leverage decentralized senseand-respond networks. When a honeybee hive needs to find a new site, for instance, the scouts go buzzing out into the world. When one finds something she likes, she comes back and ‘waggle dances’ for the hive, telling everyone just which direction to go, how far, and how good it is. If she really boogies down, her sisterbees fly there and check it out for themselves. 25

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

Lackluster sites fade from the dance floor, and hype builds for the favorites. Suddenly, one site hits critical mass, and the whole hive departs for the new spot. Nobody is in charge. It’s just simple interactions, based on local knowledge and diverse experience, amplifying and building into tipping points that massively trigger action. Ants are similar. They lay down chemical pheromone trails when they scout for food. When one finds something, she doubles back along the trail, doubling the pheromone scent. Other ants follow, sticking to the stronger smelling fork in the road. Cooperation is cumulative: the colony get ‘smarter’ the more information is gathered and shared. No leadership required here either. But is there really no place for leadership in a super-organism? We all know instinctively that good leadership is critical to organizational

COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP

success. What are we missing? Surely there is some example for us to follow in these networked societies? Indeed there is! The queen plays a vital role, though she does not tell the colony what to do. She is its heart and soul, and it cannot survive without her. Her pheromone signals attract the male drones (fresh DNA) and maintain connection among the workers. In fact, she literally creates the entire network. But mostly, she provides a purpose that unifies action. Of course, I’m simplifying the exquisite complexity of the system here, and there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. As a biology geek, I could go on about all the mechanisms of superorganism leadership and organization (I have identified six), and how we can use them ourselves. But for now, I leave you with just one: emergence.

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

This is when order mysteriously appears from many seemingly chaotic actions. When everyone does their own thing around a shared goal, with a few simple rules and densely networked communication, there is a moment when disorder gives way to something unexpected: a pattern, a decision, a change in direction. The simple rules and structures you put in place as a leader are the backbone of the company DNA. But by unifying action around a vision, cultivating diverse talent, and facilitating trust and transparency, you just might find, like the colony queen, that something far more valuable than the sum of the parts emerges.

COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP

Biodiversity and Biomimicry: Regenerative Value IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

The ancestors of every organism alive today spent billions of years and countless generations scrambling to make a living. In their quest to find prey and avoid becoming it, to find mates and raise their young to mating age, they found ways to do things differently than those that came before. They discovered open niches- new ground on which to set seed and spread. The dazzling array of strategies and structures in the descendants of these ancient innovators are our collective Earthling inheritance: our planet’s Library of Alexandria. The sum total of life’s genome is a vast repository of ancient knowledge, and the basis for all future innovation. After 3.8 billion years of evolution and natural selection, the diversity is staggering. Today, we have named 1.5 million species, and every year, scientists report 15,000 more. New species even turn up in forgotten museum drawBIODIVERSITY AND BIOMIMICRY: REGENERATIVE VALUE

ers- it’s hard to keep pace. Just a spoonful of soil may contain 10,000 different bacteria, many new to science, and every one of these species has a unique toolkit of adaptations, exquisitely honed by 3.8 billion years of trial and error. The value of this treasury is incalculable. But like Julius Caesar’s armies at the gates of Alexandria, we are burning our library down. Some say 90% percent of ancient knowledge was destroyed by human hubris, but in reality, we will never know what we had, nor the value that lost intelligence might have brought us. In 1930, R.A. Fisher showed that a population’s ability to adapt is limited by the amount of variation natural selection has to act upon. Biodiversity is quite literally the raw feedstock of innovation. Evolution requires variety, and without it, populations fail to adapt- they blink out and disappear.

“It is diversity that unleashes creativity, [and] it is diversity that creates conditions conducive to change," says futurist designer Enzo Manzini. Unfortunately, "our desire to organize, manage, scale-up, coordinate, and control [produces] monocultures, which reduce resilience and increase the fragility of our systems.” The more diverse and interconnected our webs, the more resilient we become- but the converse is also true. Disengagement and uniformity increase our vulnerability. Pull a thread here, says writer Nadeem Aslam, and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. We are so much more tightly interconnected than we realize. The microbes that inhabit our bodies outnumber our own cells by a factor of ten, and contain at least 100 times as many genes. Our bodies are vast ecosystems of interacting bacteria, fungi, and animals, all releasing substances that activate our genes or make them turn off. You are much more than the sum of you. Now- imagine that diversity disappears. There isn’t much of you left. Similarly, the biodiversity within species, ecosystems, and populations acts as an interconnected system. Lose too much of it, and they begin to fail. Damaged ecosystems have sadly depauperate associations of plants and animals compared to intact ones. It’s like the dish-washer and the bus-boy calling in sick at a busy restaurant. The staff might be able to get by that night, but if one waitress stubs her toe, the whole thing could quickly unravel. In California, amphibians that live in wetlands with a wider variety of other amphibian species are 78% less likely to be infected with a deadly snail-transmitted parasite. And it doesn’t take much: artificial wetland tanks with just four host species have half as many BIODIVERSITY AND BIOMIMICRY: REGENERATIVE VALUE

infected animals as those containing just one. Diverse ecosystems are healthy ones, and the more diversity they contain, the greater their resilience to floods, hurricanes, disease, drought, and fire. And these are not linear systemshealthy ecosystems experience exponential spirals of regeneration. The rich get richer indeed. Diverse environments are far more productive than monocultural ones, because the bodies, carcasses, and feces of all these different species create a cascade of opportunities for others. Abundance is exponential, bewildering, and often unexpected. When a small number of wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States, for instance, the effects were dramatic. The deer they preyed upon had stripped the valleys, but now the wolves kept them on the move. The deer, which had proliferated far beyond the capacity of the overgrazed valleys to support them, did not radically decline in number; they just changed their behavior. The grasslands began to recover, saplings sprouted and became trees. Valley forests regenerated, and a host of birds filled the air with song. Beavers came for the trees as well, damming rivers, creating ponds, slowing the currents to make healthy spawning grounds for fish, and stemming erosion along the banks. Many creatures found new homes, and a diverse assemblage of tiny herbivores and their predators began to flourish. Raptors came for carrion, and bears came for berries. And most dramatically, the rivers themselves changed course. Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. Clearly, top predators like wolves and big cats do much more than manage prey populations. But who would have guessed they regulate carbon dioxide as well? Trisha Atwood, from the University 30

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

of British Columbia in Canada, discovered that if she removed the top predators from a freshwater ecosystem, the CO2 emissions rose a staggering 93 percent. Why? Predators leave carcasses, encouraging microbes and enriching soil, as well as affecting the distribution and number of grazing herbivores. This nurtures plants, which breathe in CO2 and sunlight, spinning it into golden sugar that feeds a pyramid of diverse life. Pull a thread… Biodiversity doesn’t just stabilize our climate, either. It feeds all of Earth's life support systemseverything from watershed protection to pollination to the food on our tables. It combats pollution, preserves and creates soil. “Biodiversity is the heartbeat of the planet,” says environmentalist David Suzuki, and we cannot live without it. Once lost, all the human ingenuity in the world cannot replace or replicate these services. As BIODIVERSITY AND BIOMIMICRY: REGENERATIVE VALUE

activist Marcus Garvey once said, a people without knowledge of their history is like a tree without roots. Everything depends on it. The Library must stand. In the United States alone, pollinators like bats and bees contribute some $30 billion a year to agriculture and landscaping. Coastal wetlands provide billions of dollars each year in stormsurge protection. Wild plants provide over 60% of the world with the medicines they depend on for primary health care. Over 70% of promising anti-cancer drugs come from the tropical rainforest. Biodiversity feeds us, and will do so even more in the future. Only 103 species contribute 90% of the world's plant food supply today, and just four (rice, maize, wheat, and potato) provide 60% of our global calories. A single pest or disease could easily wipe us out, just like the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1847. The diversity of wild genes 31

may save us in our darkest hour, increasing yields, resisting pests and disease, tolerating drought, stabilizing soil, and conserving fertilizer. Biodiversity is our best insurance policy against an unknowable future. That is true today, just as it was 200,000 years ago, when our ancestors’ environment varied more dramatically than it does today. Early humans were quick to observe and imitate one another, along with the mating calls, behavior, and danger signals of the animals around them. To be human is to imitate, borrow, and modify ideas, say anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. And when lots of imitation is mixed with a little bit of individual learning, populations can adapt at blinding speed. By consciously imitating the special powers of other species, we radically broaden our problem-solving toolkit. Humans have always done this, but today there is a twist. Biomimicry is the formalized art and science of imitating Nature’s genius for sustainable innovation, and it radically alters our economic valuation of biodiversity. The plants and animals of every habitat face challenges much as we do- from wind, rain, drought, UV exposure, snow, heat and cold, fire, competitors, parasites, and predators. We have our own (often toxic and energy-intensive) solutions, but many other possibilities exist. Often, the innovations of other creatures are more efficient to run and cheaper to make and maintain than our own. Bumps on the leading edge of humpback whale flippers unexpectedly minimize turbulence, and wind turbine blades that mimic them are remarkably efficient. Water beads up and rolls off the lotus leaf’s unique nanoscale surface, cleaning it in the process. Lotusan offers a paint that mimics it, saving mainBIODIVERSITY AND BIOMIMICRY: REGENERATIVE VALUE

tenance costs, labor, and energy, while eliminating toxic cleansers. Everywhere we look, Nature’s research and development laboratory inspires us with innovative processes, materials, structures, and compounds that withstood the test of time. These ideas can increase our own resilience and productivity, creating a cascade of opportunities for others. Once again, abundance is exponential, bewildering, and unexpected. Introduced in 2010 by Point Loma Nazarene University's Fermanian Business & Economic Institute in San Diego, the Da Vinci Index attempts to quantify the impact of Biomimicry in the United States. It measures the use of biomimetic terms in scientific publications, patents, and grants. From 2000 to 2011, there was an elevenfold increase in nature-inspired innovation in the research pipeline. By 2025, the Institute predicts that Biomimicry may represent $300 billion annually of U.S. GDP and 1.6 million jobs. Globally, the report projects that Biomimicry could account for $1 trillion in GDP by 2025. Obviously, these innovations require biodiversity to mimic. If Nature’s ancient knowledge is destroyed, we will never know what we had, nor the value it might have brought us. Daphnia water fleas are tiny aquatic crustaceans, often found in short-lived seasonal pools. When conditions are good, they clone themselves asexually. But as soon as the pool starts drying up, or food runs low, they switch to sexual reproduction. By scrambling their genes, they increase the chance of hitting on something new, something that may save them. Diversity catalyzes innovation, which unlocks value. Similarly, Steven Johnson writes about how good ideas come to us in dreams, from random combinations of neurons firing synchronously in our 32

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

sleep. “A good idea,” he says, “is a network of thousands of neurons firing together that never fired together before.” The more experience and knowledge you have, the more inputs from your day, the more diverse your neurons will be, and the more likely a novel idea will result.

adapt, ultimately destined to join the ranks of the forgotten- blinking out, to disappear.

Humanity may indeed be like the armies of Julius Caesar, setting fire to our priceless Earthling inheritance. But it’s not too late to save this tangled bank. Certainly, preserving it is in our financial interests, increasing our resilience and productivity, creating opportunity, innovation, and exponential and unexpected abundance. Biodiversity offers us a wealth of new ground upon which to set seed and spread. But if we do not begin to value our treasury wisely, we may be surprised to find ourselves failing to

BIODIVERSITY AND BIOMIMICRY: REGENERATIVE VALUE

What If . . . Business Was Bio-inspired? IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

Have you ever seen a lone ant dreaming around, aimlessly hoping to stumble on a crumb? It seems an iffy way to catch a snack. But not five minutes later, your kitchen is so crowded you wonder if the new antPhone just went on sale by the recycling bin. How did that little ant get the word out so fast? Yes, pheromone trails alert the rest of the colony to the catch. But this tiny ant search engine is far more efficient than Google. A recent computer model shows why. Ants switch from a “maximize likelihood of finding” to WHAT IF . . . BUSINESS WAS BIO-INSPIRED?

a “maximize speed of getting” strategy as soon as someone finds food. All the random ant walks suddenly coalesce, laser-like, into a single-file line. How do they do it? And how do they decide who hunts and who gathers? Do they have a business plan? If they don’t, why should we? Can their six-legged math help us improve our transportation and delivery systems, crisis management, and internet search patterns? Can they help us make business as usual a sustainable brand?

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

A single scout ant might appear adrift, but not all who wander are lost. Put a whole colony of them out there, and they are unbelievably good at bringing home the bacon. Each scout lays a trail of pheromone as she drifts, helping her sisters refine their own searches. The best routes are repeated, amplifying the successful trails into highways. The shortest foraging path becomes an orderly line. No plan, it just happens. We call it ‘emergence’ when order mysteriously appears from a lot of seemingly random actions: a plague of locusts, a school of fish, a flock of seagulls. When everyone does their own thing, with a few simple rules and a single shared goal, there is a moment, a turning point. Chaos becomes order, and something new and unexpected emerges. Revolution can happen in an instant. But if the rest of nature doesn’t have a plan, and they are so great at adapting to change, maybe WHAT IF . . . BUSINESS WAS BIO-INSPIRED?

we should scrap our business plans too? Maybe we should we grow our solutions from the bottom-up, like ants, instead of imposing them from the top down? The answer, as usual, is it depends. Ants do have an overall strategy. It’s built it into their DNA. Everyone in the colony gets the memo: Find food and bring it home! And they follow some simple rules. Each day, every ant makes a personal decision to be a scout or a gatherer. She evaluates her future worth to her nestmates, and makes a choice. A young ant has more work left in her, so she should stay close to home and keep herself safe. She also considers her ability to contribute now: Older ants make better scouts. But her foraging skills will improve if she explores, increasing her value in the future. All these variables go into her daily hunting or gathering equation. Imagine if we ran our own 36

organizations this way. Should we reassign me? Fire me? How much should we pay me? Let’s ask me! Nobody knows me better than me, and I want what’s best for us! The difference, of course, is that we are not ants in a colony: We are not all sisters, and our goals only overlap so much. At some point, we are all looking out for Number One. On average though, with shared goals and good information, a well-networked and diverse group of ants- or people- can make change happen on a dime. Every organization wants to leave the competition in the dust. The C-suite tries to leverage opportunities and shut down threats, to reach the goals they agreed on last year. That’s strategy. It’s pre-planned, consistent, and comes from the top. How good it is depends on the quality of the forecasts and how wide a swath management is scanning. They better see it coming or you won’t know what hit you. These yearly business plans work great, when the past predicts the future. But nowadays, things aren’t so easy. Surprises are guaranteed, plans fail. Supply chains are vulnerable; prices are volatile. Good strategy is as dynamic as life itself. Think fast, grab the ring, jump over the banana peels. Companies that expect the unexpected and leverage it have what we call ‘emergent strategy.’ It’s not about brilliant leadership, so much as sharing a vision and some simple rules, cultivating diverse and interconnected long-term stakeholders, providing a measure of transparency (a reliable pheromone trail), and trusting the wisdom of the crowd. It’s a collaborative learning process, where everyone senses and responds to current conditions, and strategy shifts on the fly. WHAT IF . . . BUSINESS WAS BIO-INSPIRED?

Purely emergent strategies are as rare as purely intended ones, in nature or in the boardroom. The balance must be finely tuned. Intentional strategy brings focus and control, getting things done, bringing food back to the nest when you know it’s there. Emerging strategy maximizes the likelihood of finding it before someone else does. The trick is devising ways to trigger the right amount of each when you need it. Biology is littered with the accidents of history. Adaptations are not always the simplest, or the most obvious, or even the best; they are simply good enough at the right time. Which is to say, they are better than the competition. The human foot and spine are hacked from our tree-swinging ancestors. I’m certain an engineer starting from scratch would make us better, but we work with what we’ve got. Back problems, ankle sprains, and arthritis have plagued us for at least 3 million years. Evolution isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t have to be. Natural selection takes out the worst performers, and sex scrambles up new combinations in search of the best. Every living thing on Earth is a jerry-rigged contraption of duct-tape and paper-clips, but only the best designs make it to the next round. After 3.8 billion years, the survivors are pretty fantastic, and that includes us. Our disruptive innovations – walking upright, taming other species, settling in huge groups, awesome BBQs — allowed us to spread into nearly every niche and nook imaginable. I mean, what kind of ape can swim like Michael Phelps, fly in a squirrel-suit, ride a unicycle, ski down a mountain slope, surf like Laird, sing like Mary J., and do ballet? We must be doing something right, even if the ants have us beat at Google. Human frailty

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

aside, we do okay, because nobody else does it like we do. Our game-changer is what I like to call ‘what-iferousness.’ Humans ask “what if…?” and imagine how things could be. We plan and predict, play out alternate scenarios. We step back and ask, could things be different? We tell stories, we make art, we envision other worlds, other spiritual dimensions. And once we imagine, we want to make. We reverse-engineer. We work backwards from where we want to be and we try to make it so. Next thing you know, you’re in Vegas watching Cirque du Soleil. Or driving a solar powered car that looks like a sea lettuce. Humans invented the ‘what if’ niche, and we can claim first-mover advantage. But only if we use it well. This week, I find myself at the Sustainable Brands conference in San Diego. I’m joined by influencers at the top of some of the world’s WHAT IF . . . BUSINESS WAS BIO-INSPIRED?

largest companies. All of us are hoping to make the change we wish to see in the world, in the biggest way possible. The theme is “what if…?” What if business ran on sunlight? What if manufacture was carbon negative? What if our waste was no worse than a fallen tree, feeding the next generation of insects and fungus? What if human consumption was good for the planet? When all kinds of people do their own thing together, with a shared goal and a few simple rules, there is a moment, a turning point. Order appears from the seemingly insignificant actions of many, and something new and unexpected emerges. Revolution just happens. You never know when.

With Biomimicry: A Regenerative Economy Free From Environmental Debt IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

Last month, the first ever Biomimicry 3.8 Global Conference at the University of Massachusetts in Boston brought together over 350 futureminded professionals, all asking, “How can humans create conditions conducive to Life?” They meant something more than just sustainable economies, cities, and manufacturing, but a new kind of regenerative human system that creates abundance for all species on Earth. After discussing generative cities and sustainable materials, the conference’s final day turned to the question of how nature might redesign our entire economy to encourage the regeneration we envision. Amy Larkin, the straight-talking, clear-eyed author of Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy, took the podium. Ms. Larkin is the former Director of Greenpeace Solutions, and is equally comfortable

on both sides of the “environment-or-economy” fence. She brought the conference full cycle, connecting our current financial and environmental crises, and pointing to practical solutions that can (and must) be implemented by a wide range of influential stakeholders. Larkin showed how neither manufacturers, retailers, nor consumers pay the true cost of the goods they make, sell, or buy. As anyone who has walked into a Walmart knows, prices do not reflect the true cost of the workers, longterm exposure of children to environmental toxins, the disposal of waste material, the clean-up of rivers, or so many other “externalities.” The products we buy are artificially cheap. This unpaid “environmental debt” is passed on to taxpayers and investors in the form of ad hoc crisis management, said Larkin. This is far more expensive and risk-intensive, essentially wastes

WITH BIOMIMICRY: A REGENERATIVE ECONOMY FREE FROM ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

our human and environmental capital and is running our “business” of humanity into the ground. No CEO would run a company this way if they had to answer to shareholders for it. Off-the-books environmental debt is standard operating procedure, and plenty of old guard industrialists work to hold on to this government giveaway. KPMG estimated that $2.15 trillion of environmental damage was passed on to taxpayers and investors by the 3,000 largest public companies in 2008. And that doesn’t even take into account more abstract damages, like those from extreme weather events caused by climate change, or emotional damage from the loss of loved ones in factory disasters. But, what is perhaps most surprising, said Larkin, is the growing schism within the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Many companies want

more accountability. They prefer a level playing field, one that rewards the sustainability efforts that their customers and employees wish to see. In the end, companies are made up of people, and people derive a sense of meaning from the long-term value they create through their work. Corporate Sustainability Reporting (through The Global Reporting Initiative and Carbon Disclosure Project, among others) is becoming the norm. With a Bloomberg terminal on every desk, Wall Street sees the unknown metrics as risk and uncertainty. Investor beware. Puma is one brave company that voluntarily chose to take stock of their products’ true costs. With the help of Big Four accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers and boutique accounting firm Trucost, Puma put together an Environmental Profit and Loss Statement. What they found was shocking: $193 million in downstream environ-

WITH BIOMIMICRY: A REGENERATIVE ECONOMY FREE FROM ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

mental costs were paid by neither the company nor the consumer, but were instead passed on to taxpayers and investors in disaster-management expenses. If Puma had paid these costs, 72 percent of their profit would have been erased. And yet, they stepped forward of their own accord to put a number on the externalities, in part because it represents real risk and uncertainty in their system. Larkin went on to summarize today’s business as usual: 1) pollution is free for the polluter; 2) earning statements don’t include long-term impact; and 3) governments subsidize business without concern for either, on the backs of taxpayers and investors. The solution, she said, is to build long-term costs into the price of goods (through regulation), with less regard for short-term quarterly earnings. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, for

instance, simply decided not to give quarterly earnings guidance, and the result has been runaway success in producing real value and reducing uncertainty. As this kind of thinking spreads, Larkin warns, it will be like a wildfire, burning wide swaths of business as usual. Goods will become expensive, and companies will avoid environmental damage in order to bring consumer costs down. Consumer spending will decrease (or shift to services), and many businesses will fail. But after the fire, said Larkin, regeneration will allow the seedlings of a new, sustainable, and abundant economy to emerge. One in which our children are not saddled with environmental debt, but enjoy the abundance that comes from carefully tending living things.

WITH BIOMIMICRY: A REGENERATIVE ECONOMY FREE FROM ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT

How Would Nature Do “Green Chemistry”? IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

IMAGE: DR. TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

Last month, over 350 visionary teachers, designers, architects, biologists, industrialists, and policymakers came together to focus on one burning question: “How can humans create conditions conducive to Life?” Not just sustainable, but regenerative; a way of life that leaves our planet better than we found it, with each generation. The group was gathered at the first ever Biomimicry 3.8 Global Conference, hosted by the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The first day of the conference showcased heady visions of “generous cities,” collaborative ecosystems of people, organizations, industry, and buildings that leave the air and water cleaner than it was before. On the second day, the audience thrilled to the revolutionary possibilities of 3D printing, and the new manufacturing and distribution systems it could unleash.

EXAMINING HOW NATURE WOULD DO “GREEN CHEMISTRY”

Janine Benyus, co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8 and author of the book, Biomimicry, was clearly excited about the possibilities. She spoke passionately of ordinary people going to their neighborhood “Maker Shop” to download blueprints and print exactly what they need, when, where, and how they need it, without waste or energyintensive shipping. However, she cautioned, “Let’s make sure these printers aren’t tiny volcanoes on our desks.” Currently, 3D printers rely primarily on plastic resin, but there is really no reason why this should be so, said Benyus. “Let’s make sure we develop and use locally abundant and benign feedstocks.” Benyus was especially excited about the possibility of creating printer feedstocks that recapture carbon from the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and carbonic acid in our oceans. Carbon itself is a valuable nutrient, the building block of life, not 44

a waste product to be carelessly discarded, and yet, that is exactly what we do by burning fossilized carbon from past biospheres. We simply need to recapture that carbon and bring it back to Earth in a form that life can use. And, she said, “Let’s make sure that these materials can be enzymatically digested at the end of the product’s life and fed back into the printer,” just like nature would do it. From dust to dust… Which brought the conference to the topic of green chemistry. John C. Warner, from the Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry, told the audience, “At the end of the day, we can only make products that are as sustainable as the building blocks we make them with.” But these sustainable building blocks are surprisingly difficult to come by right now, simply because chemists haven’t been taught to want to make them. Only one chemistry program in the country currently requires students to complete a course in Toxicology, said Warner. And yet, the substances chemists make surround us and our children, from before birth, to the grave. Warner advocates rethinking the way we do chemistry entirely, by asking, “How does Nature do it?”

chancy, said Warner. Many of our industrial processes rely on energy-intensive heat and toxic solvents, “simply to increase the speed and likelihood of our reactions.” But, he said, that’s not how nature does chemistry. In the developing embryo, for instance, all cells start out the same, with identical DNA blueprints. As development progresses, various “independent, simultaneous, and non-competitive reactions” occur, triggering a cascade of cellular differentiation. It’s a self-assembling process, where one product triggers the next, without anyone telling the cells what to do. In the future, Warner imagines doing industrial chemistry the same way. Maybe we will put all of the “ingredients” for a compound together into a condensed gel, using flashes of different colors of light (timed photochemistry) to trigger a cascade of reactions that build to form a final compound. This will get us one step closer to chemistry the way nature does it: water-based, self-assembling, non-toxic, without “heat, beat, and treat” technologies. Once we learn how to make and reuse all our building blocks as nutrients, creating “a way of life conducive to life” will be mere child’s play.

“At the molecular level,” he said, “there is no robot arm” putting molecules together. We, like the rest of nature, have to rely on the statistical likelihood of the right molecules coming together when we “shake them in a box.” Which is frustratingly

EXAMINING HOW NATURE WOULD DO “GREEN CHEMISTRY”

What Can the Pompeii Worm Teach Us About Heat and Chemical Resistance?

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

‘Biomimicry‘ is a way of designing that asks “How would nature do it?”. Other creatures on Earth have spent millions of years perfecting their craft in ways that are inherently sustainable. The ones that got it wrong are extinct! Our fellow earthlings have things to show us to make our way of life a long-term success as well. Wild creatures have the same problems we have. Their answers, tested by millions of years of R&D, are energy-efficient, biodegradable, nontoxic, and there’s no such thing as waste. Every

solution eventually becomes food for someone else. In our new series, The Biomimicry Manual, we’ll be exploring how the world’s flora and fauna have gotten it right. First up? The Pompeii worm (Alvinella pompejana), an enterprising creature that thrives in a real-life hell, where a living thing should have no business being.

WHAT CAN THE POMPEII WORM TEACH US ABOUT HEAT AND CHEMICAL RESISTANCE?

Here at Inhabitat, we are always looking for smart, sustainable, and stylish designs. And where better to look than to Mother Nature? Our big blue design lab in space has been experimenting for 3.8 billion years. The result? Some 100 million stylish species, each with their own perfectly efficient, eco-friendly, and multi-purpose design innovations. Truly good design. The Pompeii worm makes its home in a boiling hot, deadly sulfurous soup of heavy metals, at a pressure depth that would crush a man (think of the Hulk squeezing a tube of toothpaste). Only discovered thirty years ago, these four-inch wrigglers build large colonies along hydrothermal vent ‘smokers’ in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. How do they survive?

pressure: these are all human design challenges as well. The worm has found elegant, efficient, and sustainable solutions to all of them. So how does an aspiring biomimic go about turning this bioinspiration into useful design? Start by asking questions. How does the worm create the tube? From what? Arranged how? What makes it heat and chemical resistant? Can humans collaborate with other creatures to detoxify our spaces? Could bacteria like these clean the environments we inhabit? How does the tube and bacteria function together? What is the nature of this thermal insulation? And so on. Give it a try. Post your ideas. Let’s brainstorm together. We promise nature’s genius will not disappoint!.

Looking something like a living pipe cleaner, the Pompeii worm builds a heat- and chemicalresistant paper-like tube around itself. Inside the tube, it has a ‘Chia Pet’ protection strategy. Its hairy back secretes a sugary mucus, nurturing a fleecy blanket of sulfur-eating bacteria. The bacteria live off the sugar, as well as the sulfur, lead, zinc, calcium, and copper belching from the vents. The worm’s home becomes just a little less toxic in the process. The bacterial blanket acts much like the one around your water heater, but keeping the heat out instead of in. The worm also has a behavioral answer to its extreme environment. It feeds and breathes as far away from the hot-seat as it can get, sticking its feathery red head out of its tube into the cooler water just a worms-length away. What can human designers learn from this extreme creature? Can the Pompeii worm teach us something useful? Cooling down, resisting heat, detoxifying chemicals, and resisting high WHAT CAN THE POMPEII WORM TEACH US ABOUT HEAT AND CHEMICAL RESISTANCE?

What Can the Tree Shrew Teach Us About Addiction? IMAGE: PROCEEDINGS OF THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON

IMAGE: JOHN EDWARD GRAY, THE ZOOLOGY OF THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. SAMARANG

In our newest series, The Biomimicry Manual,

tail ending in a fabulous feathery fringe. It

we are thinking about design in a different way

spends its days sleeping, but by night, this little

and asking ourselves “How would nature do

creature indulges its taste for naturally fermented

it?“. Nature’s designs are tried and true, and

palm wine. A lot of it. In fact, booze is pretty

there are a number of creatures on this planet

much what they live on. So what can we learn

that have a few tricks we can study and borrow

from them?

from to make life on earth better. Take, for instance, this tiny party animal seen above. The pen-tailed tree-shrew (Ptilocercus lowii) is a beautiful, bright-eyed social climber, with a lovely naked WHAT CAN THE TREE SHREW TEACH US ABOUT ADDICTION?

Though many fruit-eaters (like bats, birds, and

through the nighttime trees would be a poor

humans) enjoy a good tipple, the pen-tailed

choice for such a delectable morsel.

tree-shrew is hands-down nature’s biggest lush. They spend several hours each night sipping the equivalent of up to 12 glasses of wine. They are the only known wild mammal with such a regular drinking habit. Their drink of choice is served in the tops of the Southeast Asian bertram palm. A rich yeast community flourishes in the flowers of this palm, producing a heady brew of fermented nectar. With up to 3.8 percent alcohol content, the palm wine is one of the most alcohol-rich foods found in the wild. It seems that the wine is made especially for the tree-shrew, which finds itself unable to resist the

What can human designers learn from this extreme creature? Can the pen-tailed tree-shrew teach us something useful? Perhaps we can we study the metabolic pathway and use it to find a way to cure alcohol addiction or stop alcohol poisoning and other harmful side-effects. And using alcohol to lure people to gather somewhere is nothing new, but there may be other lessons about advertising to be learned here. What do you think? Give it a try. Post your ideas. Let’s brainstorm together and uncover nature’s genius for smart design.

opportunity to pollinate the palm. The flowers ferment all year round, and the treetop bar never closes. Madame Tree-Shrew’s rich source of calories allows her to nurse her young somewhat infrequently, and once the babies are full and drowsy, mom leaves them alone in the nest for up to two days while she goes on her next bender. If a person drank the way this party-girl does, she would suffer severe liver, heart, kidney, and brain damage—that is, IF she survived the alcohol poisoning (and we won’t even mention the wisdom of breastfeeding with this diet). But despite a blood-alcohol concentration several times the legal limit, the tree-shrew never gets drunk. It seems they metabolize the alcohol differently than we do, neutralizing its effect. Which is probably a good thing. Wandering alone drunkenly

WHAT CAN THE TREE SHREW TEACH US ABOUT ADDICTION?

Can Super-Organisms Teach Us About Collaboration? IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

When I think of monkeys, I don’t think of them living in the desert, namely because primates love trees, water, big juicy leaves, and fruit. In fact, only two primates have even bothered to go there, and the Hamadryas baboon is the first. With a magnificent white mane, scarlet face, and bizarrely complex social system, he was a sacred muse of the ancient Egyptians; in the afterlife, it fell upon his regal mantle to devour the souls of the dead that were deemed “unrighteous”—serious stuff! The other priCAN SUPER-ORGANISMS TEACH US ABOUT COLLABORATION?

mate is us. Both are supreme collaborators, and wherever resources are scarce and unpredictable, the most successful creatures are those who work as a team. That type of collaboration is the skill that we’re going to explore in today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual!

The ants and termites that make their homes in the desert are all ultra-social, spending their days coordinating carefully to build elaborate mounds and nests, farm fungus, herd aphids, and work together in busy cities—much like we do. Biologists refer to all of us as “super-organisms”; groups where individuals don’t survive alone for long, everyone has a job to do, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Humans and ants must collaborate in order to survive: it’s in our nature. But people have only been noodling around this super-organismic experiment for a couple million years. Our societies are downright facile next to those of ants, who have been doing so for over 100 million years. Mycelial fungi, living underground in a pulsing web of interconnected hyphae, have us all beat: they’ve been doing it for more than a billion years. As resources get scarcer, and prices, supply chains, geopolitics, and climates less predictable, we’d be well-advised to study our elder ultra-socialites. Can we figure out their evolutionary math, and make it work for our own way of life? Humans do surprisingly well just about anywhere. Conditions of scarcity and unpredictability have never bothered us too much, as long as we have shelter, tools, knowledge, and each other. We’ve made it through some savagely icy geological patches this way—pretty impressive considering our fur-less, fang-less state. (And on just two legs? How inherently non-resilient! Lose one and you’re a monopod!) But somehow, together, we made it through. Ever since Homo erectus was competing successfully against professional carnivores like lions and hyenas (without sharp claws, pointy canines, speed, or protective fur), we’ve been a super-organism society. We did it by collaborating; with tools CAN SUPER-ORGANISMS TEACH US ABOUT COLLABORATION?

and signals, persistence, and experience. Together, we searched for beehives, dug for water, and remembered where last year’s best roots and berries were found. And it worked. Today, Homo sapiens occupies every landmass on Earth, altering every habitat we touch. I’m sure the other species would add us to the Most Invasive List if they could, but why aren’t ants choking on smog or stuck in traffic? Why aren’t the fungi counting carbon credits and worrying about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Do termites have slums? What do they know that we don’t? It’s my job to try and find out: I’m an Inter-species Innovation Translator. I discover how other species do things, and help non-biologists use those ideas to do things differently. After all, 30 million species have spent billions of years coming up with ways to make a living on this planet, solving exactly the same problems we have. If their solutions aren’t sustainable, they evolve or fall by the wayside. So, when I need advice on thorny social issues, I ask the professionals: Ants, termites, wasps, honeybees, mycelial fungi, and naked mole rats are successful because they divide up their tasks to form an amoeba-like entity that acts like a single, super-powered creature. All have fantastically complex levels of communication, flexibility, efficiency, and organization. In the words of mycologist Paul Stamets, they are “networked creatures.” They have a startling advantage over other species. Super-organisms can be wildly successful, sometimes too much—14 of the Top 100 Invasive Species (including fire ants, yellowjackets, and Argentine ants) are super-organisms. But look what happens when the program runs 54

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

long: after a billion years, we have mycelial fungi, so networked that their very bodies form an underground internet. They don’t just use it for themselves, either; they use it to bring nutrients, water, and signals to 70 percent of the vascular plants. They are actively supporting, if not farming, a vast proportion of our planet’s food base, while acting as a global internet for them—the Wood Wide Web, as Janine Benyus calls it. Of course, the fungi took a billion years to evolve their societies, and that kind of time is something we don’t have. Summers get hotter, polar vortices fiercer, and hurricanes and floods and droughts more severe. Can we figure this out quick enough? The global petro-industrial machine and its endless array of perverse wealth incentives keep us circling intractably around a drain of our own making. As my friend CAN SUPER-ORGANISMS TEACH US ABOUT COLLABORATION?

Dr. Jamie Brown-Hansen says, as long as trees grow more slowly than interest compounds, we’ll keep turning living things into money until there’s nothing left. Sounds like an easy fix. But even though we’re rookies in the Networked Creature Club, we humans learn fast: that’s what super-organisms do. That’s why people and ants run rampant over this planet so handily. Every living ant, if you tied them up together in a colossal Santa sack, would weigh about the same as every living person tied up in another sack. Together, those two sacks weigh 16 times more than a sack of all the other land-dwelling wild vertebrates combined. So I guess we’re doing something right. And humans have a couple of innovation-acceleration tricks that ants don’t have (I’m not so sure about fungi, and how much do you think their sack weighs?). First, we aren’t limited to plain, vanilla genetic 55

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

adaption, one plodding generation at a time. We can pass our innovations sideways, behind the back, over the head, and take it to the hoop; from friends to neighbors to people we don’t even know. Human ideas transcend generations, borders, religions, and even species. We have a powerful ability to innovate new things and imitate what works. It’s fast, it’s viral, and we’re getting there. If we can understand the simple rules that other super-organisms use to create their adaptive networks, I believe we can use them too, and get the quick change we need. Already, we’ve worked out our own mycelial fungal webs and ant-pheromone trails. With internet and cellular networks in place, we are already doing business like they do.

what could be, and make it so. If we imagine it, we can reverse-engineer it. That’s what people do. Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves, but often, we get exactly where we need to be. I like to imagine that the ancient fungi, after discovering the super-organismic way of life, might have gone down the same kinds of rabbit-holes we’re in today. And just like us, they wreaked untold havoc on every ecosystem they touched as they spread. Today, however, these disruptive innovators provide life support for all us Earthlings- because somewhere along the line, they discovered that by helping others, they helped themselves. I like to think we are discovering that too. And if we can imagine it, we can make it so.

Our second advantage is what corporate cultural anthropologist Robin Sol calls “what-iferousness”—an ability to imagine CAN SUPER-ORGANISMS TEACH US ABOUT COLLABORATION?

What Can We Learn About Resilience, Weight Loss, and Kidney Disease from the Grizzly Bear? Regenerative Value IMAGE: JEAN-PIERRE LAVOIE

IMAGE: SHELLIE FROM FLORIDA, USA

I’m off to the wilds of Montana this week, doing some in-person, up-close biomimicry research, and I’ve got my fingers crossed I’ll see a grizzly bear. But you know, over there, not over here. With five inch long claws, massive muscular shoulders and forearms, and a habit of rearing up ten feet tall with a throaty growl, I don’t want this guy breathing hot bear breath down my neck. A subspecies of brown bear, he makes his home in the woodlands and mountains in Asia, Europe, Western Canada, Alaska,

and down into the ‘Lower 48.’ He’s pretty much got the widest range of any bear. How’s he do it? Easy. He’s an opportunist par excellence. Can we learn something about adapting to change from the grizzly?

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT RESILIENCE, WEIGHT LOSS, AND KIDNEY DISEASE FROM THE GRIZZLY BEAR?

IMAGE: AZOV

The grizzly bear adapts readily to alpine mountains, deserts, beaches, and forests, and her wide-ranging appetite spans a remarkable variety of food preferences and foraging techniques. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a cunning hunter, and passes her tricks on to her cubs, just like we do. In fact, her smarter-than-the-average-bear abilities allowed some of her ancestors to venture into the extreme life of the Arctic, becoming polar bears in less than a million years. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, and she might even consider mating and producing offspring with a polar bear if they should meet. In fact, her long, polar bear-like muzzle and beautiful frosted highlights may be testament to the indiscretions of her fore-mothers. Our grizzly can take down big prey, like moose, elk, bison, caribou, and even muskox and black bears, as well as small animals like ground

squirrels and rabbits, marmots, lemmings, and voles. Because our girl is at the top of the food chain, her habits indirectly influence the entire ecological community. She keeps prey populations in check, preventing overgrazing, which in turn affects plant and insect distribution, as well as bird migration patterns. Despite her love of a good steak, our bear is actually an omnivore. This is the secret to her success. She can almost always find something to eat. In Yellowstone National Park, for instance, she gets half of her yearly caloric needs feeding on miller moths and whitebark pine nuts (I know you thought I was going to say peanut-butter-andjelly sandwiches stolen from picnic baskets). In British Columbia, she skewers salmon with a deft claw, while in Alaska, she digs for razor clams, adding a side of sedge grass and berries. Grizzly bears on the coast scavenge washed up whales,

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT RESILIENCE, WEIGHT LOSS, AND KIDNEY DISEASE FROM THE GRIZZLY BEAR?

IMAGE: PUBLIC DOMAIN

and every bear loves blueberries, blackberries, salmon berries, cranberries, buffalo berries, huckleberries, and pretty much any other kind of berry. She will even eat ladybugs, ants, and bees if she finds them. She just rolls with the punches, enjoying the bear necessities of life: flowers, grasses, roots, fungus, nuts, mammals, insects, and fish (oh, and honey, of course). The moral of the story? Diversify!

sprout after she poops them out. A tremendous digger, her long claws and powerful shoulders stir up the soil, creating open patches for many plants to grow. This increases species richness, while bringing nitrogen up from the lower soil layers. Her habit of carrying salmon carcasses into the surrounding forest brings even more nitrogen into the ecosystem, while providing leftovers for gulls, ravens, and foxes.

It may surprise you to learn that she is 85-90% vegetarian. But unlike the large hoofed mammals she shares her ecosystem with, the grizzly doesn’t have a big multi-chambered stomach filled with collaborative bacteria to do her digesting for her. Instead, she has a very long intestine, longer than any of the other Carnivora. This gives her more time to wring value out of a potentially low-quality diet. She has an intimate relationship with many fruiting plants, some of which can only

Her other survival trick is to simply go to sleep for the winter, holing up in a cozy cave, hollow log, or crevice. She’s not a true hibernator like a squirrel or a marmot, though. Her temperature goes down just a few degrees, and she will certainly wake up and let you know if her beauty rest is disturbed. But for five months she doesn’t eat, drink, or urinate. Does a bear poop in the woods? Not in the winter. When she’s good and ready, she emerges, after losing half her body

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT RESILIENCE, WEIGHT LOSS, AND KIDNEY DISEASE FROM THE GRIZZLY BEAR?

IMAGE: TONY HISGETT FROM BIRMINGHAM, UK

weight. Personally, I think this is pure genius. If I could bottle and sell ‘The 5-Month Grizzly Diet,’ I’d have a yacht in the Caribbean by now. Doctors think so too. They are looking at grizzlies for novel ways to prevent and treat chronic kidney disease. A hibernating bear takes in no food or water for months, doesn’t move or pee, but somehow wakes up with low blood urea nitrogen levels, healthy lean body mass, strong bones, and no complications? A human with reduced kidney function would suffer muscle loss, osteoporosis, and heart disease. How do bears avoid that, and how can we learn from them?

As Baloo the Bear once said, and it bears repeating: “Look for the bare necessities, The simple bare necessities. Forget about your worries and your strife. I mean the bare necessities, Old Mother Nature’s recipes.” That’s why a bear can rest at ease. The bare necessities of life will come to you!

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT RESILIENCE, WEIGHT LOSS, AND KIDNEY DISEASE FROM THE GRIZZLY BEAR?

What Can the Nutcracker Teach Us About Farming and Regeneration? IMAGE: MICHAEL SULIS

Early explorers like Lewis and Clark saw this nutcracker hammering away at the pine cones, and mistook him for a woodpecker, just like I did. But he’s actually a member of the crow family. And like a crow, he is a clever genius in the bird world. This one I’m watching will plant an entire forest in his lifetime, and the vast pine stands of the Rocky Mountain Front would not even exist without him. One pine in particular depends on the nutcracker. The seeds of the Whitebark Pine do not disperse by wind, nor do their cones open by themselves the way other cones do. These cones are completely dependent on animals to break them open and spread their seeds. Squirrels do their part, but Clark’s Nutcracker is the real puppet-master here. The little gray bird grasps a pine cone tightly in his foot, hammers at the cone with his bill, and deftly tweezes out one pine nut after another. He doesn’t eat them right away, though. Did you ever have a hamster as a kid? I did. His name was “Nutty,” and sometimes he’d break out of his cage and go AWOL on us. Eventually we’d find him, and as soon as we put him back in, he’d go berserk stuffing his cheeks full of seeds. Plotting his next great escape, no doubt. The nutcracker has a seed pouch too. It’s right under his tongue, and his throat bulges out as he fills it. He can get more than one hundred pine nuts in there, each one carefully chosen for the best possible energy return-on-investment. When he can’t pack in a single one more, he flies off to hide his bounty for the winter. He’s a hoarder. He may fly for miles, looking for the perfect hiding spot. Then, he expertly swipes his beak over his chosen plot of land, plowing a little

trough. He coughs up a handful of seeds into the row, then carefully covers it over with soil. He’s planting his fields, tilling, hoeing, and seeding—like any good farmer does. This one nutcracker will hide almost 100,000 seeds in a single season. It’s way more than he needs, but it’s a good insurance against thieving squirrels, and even grizzly bears. The crazy thing is that he will remember exactly he hid them. Diana Tomback, the director of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, counted one bird hiding 35,000 seeds in 9,500 different caches in one season. Within nine months, he returned to almost half those spots to collect his treasure. Some were buried under several feet of snow, miles away from the tree they grew on. Considering that I can’t even remember where I put my car-keys half the time, that’s jaw-dropping to me. This bird is a savant by any standards. But what about the seeds he doesn’t come back for? All over these woods, you can see the whitebark pines growing in clumps of three to five trees. Exactly the number planted by the nutcracker. His forgotten caches have sprouted, creating more forest, more trees, and more nuts. For his children and theirs, in an endless cycle of regeneration that benefits everyone in the community, from bears to beetles. Because that’s how Mother Nature does business. Not just optimizing ROI, and not just creating sustainable business models, but evolving regenerative systems that create more more raw resources and more value for themselves and every member of the community than they started out with. Life creates conditions conducive to life. And by paying close attention to our fellow earthlings, we can learn to do it too!

WHAT CAN THE NUTCRACKER TEACH US ABOUT FARMING AND REGENERATION?

How Do Beavers Create Business Opportunity?

IMAGE: FREDLYFISH4

I’m fascinated by creatures that create new ways of life for others. Ecologists talk about ‘keystone species,’ ones which support entire ecosystems, like the central stone in a renaissance archway. Pull it away, and the whole arch falls. But I like to go beyond the edge-of-your-seat ‘Jenga’ approach, and think about ‘ecosystem engineers': category-busters that create new opportunities for everyone. The beaver is one of those. Beavers build lodges (domed shelters made of woven branches and grass, plastered together like adobe) and they also build log dams to raise the water level around the lodge, hiding the entries to their home safely underwater. When beavers are around, a wetland is nine times more likely to have pooling water, and in times of drought, these waterways have 60% more water in them. Where there are beavers, there is a greater abundance and diversity of songbirds, frogs, salamanders, dragonflies, and fish. Put simply, HOW DO BEAVERS CREATE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY?

beavers make ponds, and ponds support life. There are other ecosystem engineers out there; fig trees, coral reefs, elephants, and fungus, for example. In each of these species, a radical innovation brought them success and changed the world forever, not just for themselves, but for everyone else as well. People do it too. But are we creating more life with our innovation? More opportunities? More value? Read today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual, and find out!

With climate change predicting more drought, it looks like we’re going to need a lot more beavers. The more dams we have, the more and better freshwater we have, and the richer the local wildlife. Beavers are a cheap and effective way to restore habitat. Near San Francisco, for instance, Alhambra Creek’s $10 million flood-improvement project was ‘destroyed’ by a pair of beavers who weren’t impressed! It wasn’t long before steelhead trout, mink, and otter made their way back home. Beavers are busy as… well, beavers! They’re repairing river habitats, replenishing local water tables, reducing downstream flooding, and stopping silt runoff. And beavers aren’t the only ones who create conditions for more life. Back in the Pleistocene, a baffling array of elephant-like creatures helped open up a savanna-grassland patchwork across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Large and small, woolly and bald, even one with a spork at the end of his nose (yes, that brilliant cafeteria combo of fork and spoon), these creatures uprooted trees, opened forest edges, excavated dry riverbeds with their tusks, and created wallows essential to other species. Many large grazers like bison and zebra benefitted, as did our own ancestors. Meanwhile, in the tropical rainforests of the world, towering fig trees offer a juicy gathering spot for countless tree-dwelling insects, spiders, birds, monkeys, and other mammals. Along the lazy shores, coral reefs (an unlikely partnership of tiny coral animals and photosynthesizing algae) have invented an entirely novel platform for all kinds of innovative life. Today, they teem with a jaw-dropping richness of flashing, darting jewels. Last year, I visited a strange, salty, volcanic lake in the mountains of Mexico. The shore was ringed with round, bleaching humps that looked HOW DO BEAVERS CREATE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY?

for all the world like giant decaying brains. These ‘stromatolites’ are left behind by primordial photosynthesizing bacteria, whose ancestors brewed up the air we breathe and our nice ozone sunblock some 3.8 billion years ago. Thanks, stromatolites! The humble lichen might seem kind of Plain Jane, but this fantastical chimera of fungus and algae has worked together tirelessly over millennia to wrest minerals from bare rock while cooking up a rich layer of soil. Plants later came along and found this was a nice place to sink their roots. And, as any gardener who’s looked under a microscope at their fingernails knows, that soil positively seethes with ecosystem engineers. Darwin himself devoted a whole book to the magical earthworm (no, that one isn’t on my nightstand). Around them, a dense network of mycorrhizal fungus pushes and pulls at nutrients, water, and communication signals, forming a veritable superhighway and internet for the trees that depend on them. Who really knows what the mushrooms are up to? I suspect their pulsing planetary neo-cortex is involved in an inscrutable evolutionary plot of their own design. I wonder where Congress fits in? For each of these species, a radical innovation brought them success and changed the world forever. We humans, of course, are one of the best ecosystem engineers this planet has ever seen. We’ve altered the atmosphere, the weather, and ocean pH. We’ve inventing polymers that never existed and may never go away, hauled vast amounts of metal and fossilized carbon to the planet surface, incinerated forests, melted polar ice, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. We modify every environment to suit our immediate selves. This naked tropical ape can

IMAGE: U.S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE - PACIFIC REGION'S

live anywhere. That’s a radical innovation, and it’s changed the world forever. But are we creating a new platform, new opportunities never before seen on this planet? It’s possible. No doubt a rich and vibrant plastic-eating ecosystem will emerge in the distant future. And of course, the rats and cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes love us just the way we are. But at some point in the history of any successful species, someone discovers a competitive advantage by partnering with other species, sharing risk and opportunity, surfing for free. As we push up against the boundaries of our world, I think we’ll find that it is safer, more efficient, and more productive to partner up into closed loop systems, to upcycle our waste into opportunities that weren’t there before. Not just for each other, but for all life on Earth. It’s time for this ecosystem engineer to create conditions conducive to life. HOW DO BEAVERS CREATE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY?

What Can the Aye-Aye Teach Us About Echolocation? IMAGE: FRANK VASSEN

IMAGE: GUNNAR CREUTZ

You know bats and dolphins ‘echolocate’ to find their prey, sending out blips of squeaky SONAR-like sound waves that bounce off fish or moths in the dark. And people do it, too, using expensive equipment. But how about a monkey? The aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is certainly no ordinary monkey. In fact, its not a monkey at all, but a highly specialized lemur from the island of Madagascar. This bizarre creature resembles some mythical chimera from the realm of the dead. Think of Yoda’s scruffy cousin, mated with Harry Potter‘s Dobby the House-Elf, and more than a pinch of Gollum thrown in for good measure. He’s the world’s largest nocturnal primate, and the only placental mammal to find food by echolocating with his fingers.

WHAT CAN THE AYE-AYE TEACH US ABOUT ECHOLOCATION?

Under cover of complete darkness, the aye-aye drums his way through the forest, tapping trunks and branches up to eight times a second with his grotesquely elongated toes. When his outsized foxy ears detect a juicy larvae-packed hollow, he deftly gnaws a hole with his rat-like incisors, then drills and pokes his spindly middle finger in to fish out the grubs. It’s like poking a tiny appetizer fork into a bulb of roasted garlic head. Essentially, the aye-aye fills the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. The slim third toe is the tapper, and the long fourth toe is the skewer. The local people have thought up other uses for this veritable Swiss Army Knife, claiming the aye-ayes sneaks into homes through the roof-thatch, murdering sleeping inhabitants by puncturing their aorta. Others believe that if the aye-aye points his narrowest finger at them, they are marked for death. 70

Our fellow non-human earthlings have spent millions of years perfecting their crafts, and each has their own suite of perfectly efficient, eco-friendly, and multi-purpose innovations. This is biomimicry a way of designing that explicitly looks to nature for long-term sustainable ideas. After all, the ones that got it wrong are extinct! But sadly, many of these champion survivors are now in trouble, and the aye-aye is one of these. In 1933 they were thought to be extinct, then rediscovered 15 years later. Loss of habitat to farming is a big problem for them, but local superstition is another. Seeing one of these evil soul-sucking spirits foreshadows death, and the only way to prevent it is to kill the animal on sight, and hang the corpse as a warning. The aye-ayeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inadequate revenge is urinating on their oppressors from the treetops.

WHAT CAN THE AYE-AYE TEACH US ABOUT ECHOLOCATION?

What can we learn from these amazing but threatened creatures? Maybe we can invent echolocating walking sticks for the blind? Or improve methods of detecting objects, like ultrasounds or SONAR. And how about their all-in-one five-finger tool? Can we learn something from that? I, for one, would like an aye-aye inspired garlic fork.

What Can the Honeybee Teach Designers About Insulation, Elasticity and Flight? IMAGE: USGS BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB FROM BELTSVILLE, MARYLAND, USA

IMAGE: WAUGSBERG

What exactly is biomimicry? I think of it as a way of unlocking a whole world of super-powers for humanity. It is literally the next stage of human evolution. Leonardo DaVinci himself said, “Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, a mistress above all masters, are laboring in vain.” Maybe we’ve been studying the wrong master, trying to make a living on this planet in ways that will ultimately deplete us all. That’s certainly the case with humans and honeybees. Yes, humans love honey, and the busy hum of

bees in the garden is a sound that gives us peace on a warm day. But we have much more to learn from them. Find out the lessons they have to teach in today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual!

WHAT CAN THE HONEYBEE TEACH DESIGNERS ABOUT INSULATION, ELASTICITY AND FLIGHT?

Great designers know that people feel good when they are surrounded by plants and other living things. Gardens are good for the soul. That’s ‘biophilia.’ Nature makes us happy. We love using ‘organic’ raw materials, like honey and beeswax, because they are useful and renewable, pleasing and non-toxic. They won’t sit in a landfill for the next thousand years like yesterday’s plastic. The Earth will recycle them. That’s ‘bio-utilization,’ using nature because it’s just good stuff.

store her honey and larvae in. It’s an expensive proposition, and it has to be done efficiently. The ancient Greeks understood that modular hexagonal honeycomb makes the most storage possible with the least amount of material. Architects and designers are tapping this for all sorts of applications. Panelite, in New York, offers hexagonal ClearShade insulating glass. It passively regulates heat, while still letting in lots of light. The Sinosteel skyscraper in Tianjin, China uses honeycomb windows the same way.

Our herds of goats and sheep, the crop varieties we’ve grown and selected for millennia because they taste the way we want, and even the family dog are ‘bio-assistants.’ They help us make and do the things we need. Honeybees, for instance, are not ‘wild animals,’ but domestic helpers. We have shaped their evolution to suit ourselves.

Our honeybee has other brilliant design ideas as well. For instance, her 300 degree field of vision literally gives her eyes in the back of her head. Nissan Motors is working on a laser range finder inspired by these curved, compound eyes, which will detect and avert potential collisions. German researchers are designing a honeybeeinspired wide-angle lens for aerial drones, while other researchers are using their navigation tricks to optimize GPS and tracking systems.

Biomimicry is a little different. It only “uses” life’s ideas. It’s when you have a problem, and you ask, “how other living creatures solving it?” Instead of harvesting that creature or its by-products, you copy the idea itself and make it anew, make it human. Every plant and animal, fungus, and bacteria has a whole genome worth of time-tested, sustainable ideas to inspire us. That’s a lot of superpowers. Myself, I like bioinspiration of all kinds. John Todd‘s ‘Living Machines‘, for instance, do a little of everything: biophilia, bio-utilization, bioassistance, and biomimicry. He uses a pleasing array of living plants and bacteria (both domestic and wild) to imitate the way a natural wetland ecosystems works, filtering and treating sewage in the process. Believe it or not, a bee has to eat eight pounds of honey to make a single pound of wax to safely

We know that it’s physically impossible for bumblebees to fly. And yet they do, with incredible efficiency and maneuverability. So what are we missing? We aren’t completely sure, but one thing they have is the ability to zip and unzip their two-part wings for flight and landing. What if our airplanes could do that? Wouldn’t that save space on aircraft carriers and in busy airports? And when we say something is “the bees’ knees,” it’s even better than we thought. Insect joints contain ‘resilin,’ a springy protein. Turns out to be the most efficient elastic known, dramatically better than natural or synthetic rubber. With it, bees can flap their wings a thousand times a minute, and fleas can jump one hundred times their body length. An Australian government

WHAT CAN THE HONEYBEE TEACH DESIGNERS ABOUT INSULATION, ELASTICITY AND FLIGHT?

IMAGE: BUDOVA FEDERÁLNÍHO SHROMÁŽDĚNÍ, PRAHA

research group has mimicked this “near-perfect” rubber, creating 98% bounce back. That’s practically a perpetual-motion machine! These examples are taken from Jay Harman’s new book, The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and how Nature is Inspiring Innovation. There are so many good ideas in nature, it boggles the mind, And that’s just the bees! There is literally an infinite world of time-tested, sustainable ideas to learn from. And if we get “buzz-y” studying them, we can unlock a whole new set of superpowers to take us into the future.

WHAT CAN THE HONEYBEE TEACH DESIGNERS ABOUT INSULATION, ELASTICITY AND FLIGHT?

What Can the Bombardier Beetle Teach Us About Fuel Injection? IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

Charles Darwin was a man inordinately fond of beetles. He once caught a rare specimen in one hand, when another, even more remarkable, beetle showed up. He snatched that one up with his other hand. Suddenly, an extraordinary third species crawled past. Darwin, in despair over losing any of them, popped the first one in his mouth. With “unspeakable disgust and pain” he discovered it was a Bombardier Beetle—the only known creature to mix a boiling hot chemical explosion inside its own body. As it squirted livid acid down his throat, he spit the “little inconsiderate beast” out, and all three beetles made their getaway. The Bombardier is a six-legged tank, fitted with two little weapons of destruction: a pair of deadly, swiveling rocket launchers, firing high-pressure clouds of hot, acrid gas to injure shrews, birds, and frogs, and kill would-be invertebrate predators. So, what can we learn from this acerbic little bug? Read on to learn more in our latest installation of The Biomimicry Manual. Producing a boiling poison inside your body on demand is a major feat of engineering, but the Bombardier’s spray mechanism is nothing short of genius. In fact, creationists argue the beetles’ internal design is so irreducibly complex that it must be the product of ‘intelligent design’ by a higher being. It was Darwin himself who brilliantly realized that each exquisitely perfected species has honed its craft and form over millions and even billions of years of trial and error. Today, biomimicry is the art and science of studying nature’s perfectly efficient, eco-friendly, and multi-purpose innovations, hoping to borrow their long-term sustainable ideas for ourselves. After all, the ones that got it wrong are extinct!

The Bombardier’s solution is so good that it apparently evolved twice, completely independently. And, there are at least 500 species of Bombardier Beetles, many using different mechanisms or chemistry. They can control the direction, strength, and speed of their spray with incredible accuracy. In South Africa, they are known as “eye-pissers.” Because if you look too close, you’re sure to get an eyeful. How do they do it? Special cells inside the beetle produce hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide. These collect in a reservoir, which opens into a tiny, but indestructible, combustion chamber rivaling a homemade pressure-cooker bomb. A muscle-controlled valve separates the reservoir from the chamber, opening to allow the chemicals in, and closing to allow gases to build pressure. The interior of the bombshell chamber is lined with special enzyme-secreting cells that break down the chemicals, releasing oxygen and generating heat. The boiling fluid creates high pressure vapors that force open the exit valve at the tip of the abdomen. Hot liquid explodes out in a powerful burst of venomous steam that would kill the beetle if it happened all at once. Instead, the reaction is spread over some 70 imperceptibly rapid bursts. You can probably imagine the applications inspired by this remarkable adaptation. The automotive, aviation, spacecraft, medical, fire control, and consumer industries could all apply these technically advanced, eco-friendly spray systems. Everything from efficient fuel injection to improved drug delivery systems, engines, fire extinguishers, and even asthma inhalers could create more using less with this bio-inspired technology. But… don’t put them in your mouth.

WHAT CAN THE BOMBARDIER BEETLE TEACH US ABOUT FUEL INJECTION?

What Can Sloths Teach Us About Energy Efficiency? IMAGE: SERGIODELGADO

IMAGE: DAVE PAPE

It’s a scientific fact that there’s nothing cuter than a baby sloth in a bucket. But even if Facebook ‘likes’ turn out not to correlate with biological fitness, sloths are a runaway success by any measure. Well, maybe not so much ‘runaway.’ But it’s certainly true they’re not going anywhere. Sloths have an outstanding survival strategy, as their unexpectedly high density in South and Central American tropical forests attests. In some areas, sloths consume half the energy and make up two-thirds of mammalian biomass. That’s a lot WHAT CAN SLOTHS TEACH US ABOUT ENERGY EFFICIENCY?

of sloths. But it’s hard to see them because they hardly move—their leafy diets just don’t provide enough energy for them to monkey around. How do they succeed on such meager rations? Simple. They are consummate energy misers. Can humans learn something about conserving energy from the sloth? Read today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual to find out!

The sloth spends his whole life browsing in the trees, and he’s built perfectly for it. In fact, he can’t even stand up on the ground because his hands and feet are essentially coat-hangers. He is designed to do one thing: hang upside-down from a horizontal tree branch. His body is designed to resist tension forces, not compression. He’s a great natural model for hanging roofs, gardens, and bridges. Pretty much anything that hangs. He lives on leaves, which are plentiful and easy to find but hard to digest and give little energy or nutrition. The solution? A cow-like, multichambered, slow-acting stomach full of leafeating bacteria. They also have an extremely low metabolic rate (less than half of what you’d expect for his size). While most mammals keep their body temperature around 100 degrees, the sloth stays well below 90. In fact, even though he makes his home in warm, wet tropical forests, he has to work to keep warm. He sunbathes high in the canopy, sleeps in a compact ball to conserve heat, and cuddles up in a dense fur coat. Which brings us to the sloth’s other brilliant energy-saving strategy: collaboration. There’s a whole ecosystem thriving in sloth fur. One sloth is a playground for moths, beetles, cockroaches, fungi, and algae. In one case, 950 beetles were found living on a single sloth. All these creatures work together, exchanging nutrients, energy, and “surfing for free” on each other’s special talents.

sloth a nice shade of green, perfectly hiding him from hungry harpy eagles. The sloth licks the algae for a nutrient boost—like a hippie with a shot of wheatgrass—and even absorbs it through the skin. The algae is passed directly from mom to baby sloth, and each species of algae is only found on a unique population of sloths. In fact, most organisms living on any given sloth species have been evolving separately just as long as the sloths themselves have, about 20 million years. These are a pretty specialized bunch of critters. For example, the sloth moth only lays its eggs in sloth dung. Since a sloth spends most of its life in one single tree, he feels compelled to descend once a week to dig a hole and carefully fertilize it. The moth takes this opportunity to jump off and lay her eggs, then jump back on for the ride up the tree. The eggs hatch, the caterpillars metamorphosize, and the new moths fly off to find new sloths. When organisms cooperate, it’s a win-win for everyone. This also reminds me of the Kalundborg Industrial Ecosystem in Denmark, where a power plant, oil refinery, pharmaceutical plant, plasterboard factory, an enzyme manufacturer, a waste company and the city all trade and share byproducts and heat emissions. Why shouldn’t our human industrial ecosystem be more sloth-like, with one species’ waste becoming food for another, reducing raw materials, pollution, and waste? It’s another great idea from Mother Nature. Just like baby sloths in a bucket.

For instance, each individual hair on a sloth has a special groove which absorbs water like a sponge. Certain blue-green algae love this. They multiply in the rainy season, turning the

WHAT CAN SLOTHS TEACH US ABOUT ENERGY EFFICIENCY?

What Can the Whale Teach Us About Fans and Filters? IMAGE: WHIT WELLES

IMAGE: CHRISTOPHER MICHEL

Whales are some of the most extreme creatures on Earth. The 115 foot, 150 foot ton Blue Whale, for instance, is the largest animal that ever lived. These magnificent creatures are social mammals, descended from an ancient land dweller that also gave rise to the hippopotamus family. Like hippos and humans, they are warmblooded and air-breathing, and stay with their young, nursing them for an extended period of time. And like us, they maintain complex social networks. As you might imagine, the whale WHAT CAN THE WHALE TEACH US ABOUT FANS AND FILTERS?

faces some special challenges doing all this in the ocean. As usual, where challenge is extreme, the solutions are efficient. So how can the Blue Whale inspire us today? Find out in The Biomimicry Manual.

IMAGE: ROBERT PITMAN, NOAA

Some whales, like the Sperm and the Orca (really a very large dolphin), flash a mouthful of sharp, fish-grabbing teeth. Others, like the Blue and Humpback, maintain their huge bodies by gathering protein-rich plankton from the water. These “filter feeders” gulp seawater, then press it through comblike “baleen” sieves in their cavernous mouths. Baleen is the same stuff your hair and fingernails are made from, and not so long ago we used it like plastic, putting it in corsets and hoop skirts. Whale populations were decimated, of course, but today, they are making a comeback. They still have something to share with us: beautiful and brilliant bio-inspiration. I am often asked whether actual biomimicry products are making it to market. Absolutely, they are, and the potential for innovation is limited only by our imagination and power of observation. WHAT CAN THE WHALE TEACH US ABOUT FANS AND FILTERS?

Every creature is exquisitely honed to exist in its environment, and their challenges are often ours as well. Take the Baleen Filter, for instance, a patented liquid-separation technology inspired by real baleen. The filter removes particles smaller than anything you could see with your naked eye, and it mimics the swiping motion of the whale’s tongue to stay clean. The Baleen Filter is finding wide agricultural interest, from fish processing to pig farming. Like most of nature’s “inventions,” this bio-inspired solution is highly efficient and nontoxic, and folks are also interested in using it for wastewater treatment, biogas generation, composting, and emergency cleanup response. Sounds like a great idea. Whale-inspired fans and wind turbines are also finding their way to market. The humpback whale is a graceful dancer, despite her size. An 83

IMAGE: NOAA PHOTO LIBRARY

irregular jagged edge on the front of her flippers is the key, creating tiny whirlpool ball bearings along her skin. These increase lift by 8%, reduce drag by 30%, and increase the angle of attack by 40%. WhalePower is commercializing this by adding similar bumps to the leading edge of its industrial fan blades, reducing noise and increasing efficiency. Since fans consume 20% of our electricity, this represents a significant way to do more using less!

Last, the humpback whale’s 2,000 pound heart sees him through rough seas and deep dives. Microscopic heart ‘wires’ stimulate his heartbeats, even through thick, non-conducting blubber. Can his heart show us the way to better performing, less expensive, battery-free pacemakers? Maybe it’s a $3.7 billion industry just waiting for a solution from the great Blue Whale.

And here are a couple of other highly marketable ideas from the whale. A thick layer of fatty blubber insulates his body from the cold, but not his tongue. Since he thrusts it out into the water with every plankton-rich mouthful, this is a problem. In response, his tongue has become an enormous radiator, with blood vessels artfully arranged for maximum heat retention. Could we apply this strategy to cool electronics or buildings? WHAT CAN THE WHALE TEACH US ABOUT FANS AND FILTERS?

What Can Crows Teach Us About The Sharing Economy? IMAGE: NEIL MCINTOSH FROM CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

Mother Nature doesn’t give her information for free. Her minions cloud their enemies’ judgement with devilish deception, and make plain the truth for their friends. Birds flock and fish school, predators are confused, and the little guy is a little safer. Delightful collaborations emerge where we least expect them, but it’s a simple matter of finding our mutual interest. Transparency and trust are much harder to come by. Welcome to the sharing economy, where online platforms help people share access to goods and services. Maybe it’s cars, or rooms, or power tools. Ride-sharing companies Lyft, and room-sharing app Airbnb, even Craigslist. The sharing economy offers tremendous opportunities, but you have to elicit trust to get it. And that means giving a measure of transparency into who you are. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable, be willing to reveal something of yourself to strangers. If we can WHAT CAN CROWS TEACH US ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY?

take that plunge, we can learn to “surf for free” on an unprecedented scale, just like the rest of nature. Keep reading to learn how common crows work together to keep their entire flock in check.

Any negotiator will tell you that information is a currency: being open builds trust for creating alliances, while keeping your cards close gives you power when you go it alone. It’s a tricky balancing act. But what we, as a species, are increasingly discovering, is that we simply can’t go it alone. It isn’t an efficient or effective strategy when you need collaboration. Democracies and market economies depend on transparency, giving citizens the hope they need that their actions and opinions can make a difference. Transparent practices earn businesses loyalty from consumers and make long-term shareholders feel secure. Visible supply chains and authentic sustainability initiatives mean fewer nasty surprises. It’s just good business. But if that’s true, you ask, then why is everything such a scam? Why can’t we trust our banks, our businesses, our governments, our institutions? Well, shady practices thrive in our systems for one simple reason: cheating is a quick way to make a buck, and publicly-held businesses are managed for quarterly profit. Everything is a slave to the leading edge of that profit. Follow the money. It flows to the top. That said, there is a movement away from these opaque monoliths, and it’s picking up steam. Airbnb hosts have put up some 9 million guests since 2008, with 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities. Lyft facilitates 30,000 rides per week. The sharing economy is worth around $26 billion right now, and it’s growing all the time. But sharing stuff with complete strangers over the internet is risky. Who are these people? How do I know I can trust you? I have the word of other strangers to go by, as past sharers and borrowers rate their exchanges, but mostly I just

WHAT CAN CROWS TEACH US ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY?

have to go by gut instinct. People trust other people that are one of Us, and the best way to find that out is probably by reading your potential collaborator’s online profile. Are you Them, or are you Us? Genetically speaking, the first loyalty of every gene inside you is to itself and to copies of itself living in your relatives. The group has to subjugate your wish to look out for el numero uno to the extent they need you to get things done for them. Humans are practically Borgs compared to our ape friends. A person without a group is like an ant in a jar. Pretty sad. Few species know more about the advantages of living cooperatively than we do, but there are also costs: a lot more competition! A lot of our decision-making around whether to help out or not revolves around simple “Us or Them?” math. To benefit from group living, we entice others to make and keep promises with us. We do it by eliciting trust, which we do by showing our cards. I’m on your side. We’re in it together. Here’s the ultimate promise: woman promises paternity, man promises family protection and provisioning. That’s a lot of trust around some really big issues, and there’s really no guarantee the promises are being honored. Chimpanzees and bonobos get around it by exchanging food and sex simultaneously: “Here’s an apple, baby. How ‘bout it?” Humans are more nuanced about the whole thing. If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it. And that’s after the pair spends God-knows-how-long convincing each other with elaborate vocal, gestural, cultural, and financial displays that the ring will be an investment well-spent. It could take years (if you separate

the sex from the offspring part of the bargain. Keep them together, and things get a lot chimpier). Not everyone follows through on a promise, of course. Take lions, for instance. Some hang back when its time to defend the pride’s resources. Maybe they are “friends in need,” helping only if it will make or break the outcome, or ”fair-weather friends,” who only lend a hand if they know their team will win. Nature, as always, has a diversity of strategies, one of which is cheating. The dangers of being cheated on are profound. We need each other to survive, which requires our trust and transparency, but we also have to guard against exploiters. Female and lesser-ranked male chimps “hide behind a rock” for forbidden trysts, even trying to suppress their cries of passion. Subordinate chimps put their hands over their erections when pretty ladies go by (if Big Hector is around). And of course humans WHAT CAN CROWS TEACH US ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY?

love to play the field if they can get away with it. My PhD advisor used to teach his undergrads about genetics by having them map out eye color in their family, but he had to stop. The 20% rate of “spontaneous mutation” was too hard to explain. Yes, there are always cheaters, because its a damn fine strategy. But if too many do it, it stops working. Take vaccines, for example. Many parents don’t vaccinate their children, because they perceive a risk of side-effects. It’s an acceptable “cheater strategy,” as long as most other kids get their shots. Your child takes no risk, and reaps all the benefits of group protection. It’s a win-win. But as the idea catches on, the benefit goes down: your child could actually die of whooping cough. And of course, society isn’t going to like it. Gradually the math begins to change. 88

IMAGE: PUBLIC DOMAIN

Nature is full of balancing mechanisms like this. Take the fig tree and fig wasp, for instance. The figs provide food and a place for baby wasps to grow, and the wasp pollinates the figs. If the wasp cheats and doesn’t pollinate the fruit, the fig tree drops all the unfertilized fruit, killing the wasp’s offspring. Ta-dah!

social interactions. In less than thirty minutes, we know who is not to be trusted. African Grey parrots are the same way. They work together to solve problems, just like we do. But they like some partners better than others. Who wants to collaborate with a guy who won’t share his nuts?

Crows and jays sock nuts away for a rainy day, and when they do, they watch out for their lying, cheating, stealing crow-brethren. For example, Crow One may pretend to hide the food, but instead he’ll stash it in his chest feathers and fly off to bury it somewhere else. Crow Two may see this and he knows all about crow deviousness (a flock of crows is called a murder for good reason in my opinion). He’ll suspiciously follows the first to be sure things are on the up and up. Check-mate.

Not chimpanzees, that’s for sure. If one guy steals food from another, the victim will sure as hell let him know, and it’s going to hurt. But the rest of the group doesn’t gang up on the thief the way humans do. There’s only one other species we know of that punishes social violators on a community scale, and it will surprise you. Cleaner fish! Manta rays, groupers, and sea turtles visit these fish schools specifically for a cleaning. It’s a carwash co-op, with high customer service standards. If a client gets nipped, the other workers will chase the miscreant down

This psychological arms race is integral to our biology. Humans are really good at assessing WHAT CAN CROWS TEACH US ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY?

IMAGE: ELIAS LEVY

and stone him to death (or something), just like at the human carwash when one guy forgets your air-freshener. Human societies have rules, called morality. We feel guilt, and cultivate values like trust, obligation, honesty, and integrity to keep each other in line. Violations are sometimes punishable by death.

believe 55.6 percent reported heads? That’s right, the numbers don’t lie. Schmoes before crows.

Clearly, many people are willing to enter into these social contracts. They believe their collaborators, complete strangers, are trustworthy. That’s a beautiful thing, and it gives me hope. The more we trust and give transparency to each other, the bigger our ‘We’ gets, and the more we surf for free: just like the rest of nature. And if you’re still on the fence about humanity, I give you this parting nugget: scientists at the University of Oxford called up hundreds of people and simply asked them to flip a coin. Tails you get paid; heads, stugatz! Would you WHAT CAN CROWS TEACH US ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY?

What Can Water Fleas Teach Us About Innovation? IMAGE: HAJIME WATANABE

IMAGE: TAMSIN WOOLLEY-BARKER

In business, innovation is non-negotiable. Stay fresh, rot, or go stale. That’s never been truer than today, with volatile prices, weather, regulations, supply chains, and public sentiment. You don’t know what’s going to happen, or when, but you know it will, and there’s a lot of opportunity in being first to recover. Resilience is a hot commodity, and nobody knows resilience like nature. Companies with a premium on out-of-the-box thinking find that really good innovation comes from mixing things up. Nature, however, does it all the time,

and it’s a tried and true recipe when the going gets tough. For instance, water fleas (known to scientists as Daphnia) clone themselves most of the year. But as soon as that pond starts to dry up, BAM, it’s sexy time! They will try anything and everything to survive, hoping that they find something works. So is there a method behind this madness, and can we learn something from them? Find out in our newest entry of The Biomimicry Manual!

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome, then the only rational answer is to try something fresh. Bring diverse people and ideas together, shuffle them up, cultivate diversity, network it, nourish it, and see what grows. ‘Open innovation’ is a hot buzzword right now, but it simply means ‘go outside your company for ideas.’ Biomimicry takes it one step further: Why not goall the way outside? [1] There are at least 30 million great ideas outside your door, all of which have stood the test of evolutionary time. Why not send your engineers, architects, and designers out there to swap saliva with them? The Industrial Revolution is ending, and The Age of Biology is beginning. There are many reasons why, but a big one is definitely our thirst for new ideas. According to Julian Vincent of TRIZ, 88% of the time, nature’s solutions are novel, something we just haven’t tried. Biomimicry is a tremendous source of innovation. Radically disruptive ideas seem to come out of nowhere, irreversibly transformative, surprising, and yet obvious, and often far-reaching. When you stumble onto how nature does something, you often find deep platform technologies, really big answers that solve lots of problems. Drag reduction, repellency, turbulence, stickiness, and swarm logic [2,3]. And we’ve only just begun. Jay Harman of PAX Scientific knows about this firsthand. As a kid, he spent all his free time at the beach, watching waves and searching for seashells. His “ah-ha!” moment came when he realized that energy and matter don’t travel in straight lines, they spiral in vortices. That realization translates into far more efficient and quieter fans and turbines. “When you find a solution in nature, you say ‘look at that!’ You get goosebumps.

It’s not hard to convey that excitement. You’re talking to the little kid in people. They get it.” [2] Biomimicry is a radical innovation catalyst, bringing odd groups of people together, breaking the narrow frames of our individual experience [3,4]. It can give a new vision and way of seeing, and it reconnects us to one other. When you look at the state of our existence, what we are doing to this planet, to each other, and to all the other creatures living here, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and hopeless. It’s just too much to fix. But biomimicry can offer us the big answers we need- just a few very big tipping points that could flip our way of life on a dime. We aren’t really that bad—we are just naked, clever apes, after all—we simply went down the fossil-fuel rabbit hole and suckled a whole passel of no-neck monsters at the teat of yesterday’s sunlight. Easily fixed, no? Biomimicry is everywhere, helping us do things smarter, and yes, making real money. Even the phone you’re holding in your hand contains an intelligent chip, reverse-engineered to mimic the way your ear (or brain) filters out background noise. When you think about it, various life forms have been solving problems like ours for the past 3.8 billion years. The ones still around could probably teach us a thing or two about everything we do and aspire to. Innovation is nature’s way, let’s tap into her genius!

How Does Nature Make Saltwater Drinkable? Regenerative Value IMAGE: LIAM QUINN

IMAGE: MICHAEL L. BAIRD

It’s frightening to think, but one of every six people in the world today doesn’t have enough safe water to drink. Within 30 years, thirst will spread to three-quarters of the world’s population. But surely this clever ape can figure out how to tap our watery planet’s vast oceans? We can’t drink saltwater, of course, but doesn’t desalination offer tantalizing potential? We already do it in some of the world’s driest spots, but in general, it’s still an expensive proposition, fraught with environmental disaster. But even as we humans struggle to meet the freshwater challenge in a sustainable way, nature is busy doing it. Every day, tide in and tide out, fueled by sunshine and emitting nothing more than sea salt. How do they do it? Find out in todays entry of The Biomimicry Manual.

HOW DOES NATURE MAKE SALTWATER DRINKABLE?

Humans use lots of technologies to make fresh water from salty. Generally though, it boils down to either evaporating water and condensing it somewhere else, leaving the salt behind, or actively pushing saltwater through a semi-permeable membrane, leaving salt on one side and fresh water on the other. Either way, you have to draw huge amounts of seawater through an intake screen, with the unfortunate side-effect of killing a lot of fish, invertebrates, birds, and even mammals. Smaller creatures that make it through (like plankton, eggs, larvae, and little fish) will die during processing. Various chemicals have to be added to the water along the way, to prevent clogging, scaling, and corrosion of filters and pipes, and then removed for drinking. The salty leftovers are laced with these chemicals, along with concentrated lead, iodine, and nitrate-heavy 95

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agricultural runoff. The whole process generally requires a lot of energy for heating or pumping or transporting, and many places with big water problems (like Mexico City or New Delhi) are far from the coast. Yes, human desalination is expensive, energyintensive, and a bit of an environmental nightmare. And yet nature pulls it off every day with none of these side-effects. Marine animals keep their blood only a third as salty as seawater (a serious feat, especially for critters like penguins, whales, sea snakes, and seals, whose ancestors were land-dwellers). How do they do it? Mammals simply make really salty pee, two and a half times saltier than seawater. Birds and reptiles can’t do that: their kidneys just aren’t built for it. Penguins and gulls take care of it by sneezing out salt, while sea turtles and crocodiles

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cry salty tears, and sea snakes ooze it out under their tongues. All of them use salt glands, with a sodium-potassium ion pump and a counter-current exchange mechanism to move salt out of their blood. The design has evolved more than once. It must be a great idea. Plants can’t tolerate salt either, but a select few have figured out how to beat it. In the last tiny pockets of Southern California coastal salt marsh, Pickleweed sequesters salt in its succulent stems. Once a segment is salt-saturated, it turns red and falls off. Bye salt. And in tidal saltmarshes all over the world, silver-leaved Saltbush fills tiny balloon-like bladder cells, each mushrooming off the tip of a special hairy ‘trichome’ cell. When the bladder is full, it pops open to dash salt out like a microscopic salt-shaker. Why re-invent the wheel? Can we harness these low-footprint strategies, with artificial wetlands 96

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acting like ‘Living Machines’ to make fresh drinking water? The undisputed champion of saltwater living is the mangrove. These trees perch on stilts, their roots directly in the salty coastal ebb and flow. Twice a day, the tides wet their feet. It’s not an easy lifestyle, but mangroves have figured it out more than once (‘mangrove-ness’ has evolved at least a couple of times in unrelated plants), with a few different strategies. Many are so good at getting rid of salt you can actually drink their root-water. Good to know, next time you’re competing on ‘Survivor.’ Red mangroves use this neat energy-free trick to make their drinking water: evaporation wicks moisture from their leaves, creating a vacuum that sucks saltwater through their root membranes up through the tree, leaving salt behind. Pretty

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cool. The Aquaporin company is doing exactly this, mimicking the fatty membrane channels commonly seen in nature. Their bio-inspired filters pass water through, excluding all other particles and ions. Black mangroves do it differently. Despite their name, their leaves are chalky white with excreted salt crystals. Other mangrove species sequester salt in their oldest leaves, shedding them, lifeless, into the water below. Still others collect salt in their most delicious root-parts, to be trimmed away by hungry crabs. I’m not sure how we can use that, but who doesn’t love feeding crabs? With a planet of nine billion thirsty people, why not look to nature for answers? It may be that sipping our way through our oceans is not sustainable either, but until we figure out how to lasso an icy comet, we have to find a way. Nature’s salty mentors are out there showing us how, with sunshine and sea salt.

What Can a Thorny Devil Teach Us About Water Harvesting? IMAGE: BĂ&#x201E;RAS

IMAGE: CHRISTOPHER WATSON

One of Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more bizarre creatures is the thorny devil or dragon, also known as the moloch. The devil is named for the ancient god Moloch, a hideous demon smeared with the blood of child sacrifice, but in reality, she is five inches long and lives entirely on ants. The thorny devil is, of course, covered in fearsome thorns, presumably to warn off would-be predators, but the spiky scales also serve another ingenious function. They form an incredibly efficient water

WHAT CAN A THORNY DEVIL TEACH US ABOUT WATER HARVESTING?

harvesting system. What can we learn about water management in our own increasingly parched world? Find out in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entry of The Biomimicry Manual!

The thorny devil is a master of camouflage and deception, changing color to blend in with her surroundings, and moving in agonizing slo-mo with a ritualistic freezing-and-jerk motion. She appears as a leaf in the wind, hiding expertly from birds, ants, and frustrated researchers. Once she is discovered, the thorny devil has another trick. Behind her head is a strange spiny knob. When threatened, she simply tucks her real head down between her forelegs, presenting a false one, and blows herself up with air like a puffer fish. The spiky scales are not just for looks and prickles. They also collect moisture and funnel it, against gravity, and with no expenditure of energy, directly to the corners of her mouth. The water is not propelled by gravity, a pump, or suction. It is simply capillary action, the passive molecular attraction between the incredibly convoluted walls of the channels and the water coursing along them. The system effectively and efficiently sucks water from all over her body. She uses this superpower to the hilt, collecting nighttime dew, rubbing her belly on wet rocks, and kicking damp sand on her back. Like a walking sponge, the thorny devil gathers all the water she needs. You may be thinking, doesn’t this lizard look a lot like our North American horned lizards from the desert Southwest? Definitely. Both are spiky and slow-moving, and both specialize in eating ants. Thorny devils eat virtually nothing else, as many as 3,000 in a single day. They flick a sticky tongue at them, one at a time, up to 45 times a minute. When unrelated organisms solve the same problem in a similar way, we call it ‘convergent evolution.’ Convergence is really

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interesting to us biomimics, because if a solution evolved twice, it must be a really good idea! Here’s another good “idea.” A female thorny devil will spend days digging her nesting burrow. She goes exactly 9 inches down, and then takes a sudden right turn. She lays her eggs, climbs out, seals the tunnel, and carefully smooths the sand to leave no trace of her entombed treasure. Once born, the hatchlings munch on their own eggshells, gaining instant calories and nutrients before climbing out into a hostile world. Since other lizards simply cover their eggs with sand, leaving tricky pickings, the tunnel arrangement keeps the shells edible. What can humans learn from this enterprising little beast? Could we borrow her spiky-scaled water-harvesting concept? Maybe collecting and distributing our precious water passively could help provide clean water to the 1 billion people who lack it. Or maybe it could reduce the energy needed to pump water to the tops of buildings, or suggest a variety of inexpensive technological solutions for managing water efficiently. This thorny devil may be remind us of a hideous demon, but she may just hold a key to a real thorny devil of a human challenge.

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What Can the Sea Snake Teach Us About Viagra, Boat Hulls and Desalination? IMAGE: RICHARD LING

IMAGE: JULIE BEDFORD

Let’s say you decided to live in the ocean. Can you imagine the challenges you would face? Lot’s of land animals have done exactly that, though the transition from land to sea happens gradually through vast generations of evolutionary time. Whales, seals, manatees, otters, penguins, and marine iguanas have done it, some more completely than others. Whales and manatees sleep and give birth there, losing their legs and any ability to return to the land. Sea snakes are another group of animals that has made a complete transition. Most of them never leave the ocean, and they can’t move on land. How do they do it, and what can their saltwater tricks teach us? Find out on today’s The Biomimicry Manual.

Sea snakes are descended from incredibly poisonous land-dwelling cobras, kraits, and mambas that ventured into the oceans about five million years ago. And like their relatives, sea snakes are among the deadliest of creatures. One bite can deliver ten times the venom needed to kill a human. Lucky for us, most species are peaceful, though maybe a little more curious than you might like. They are fascinated with snorkels and fins. That trait alone could kill the faint of heart. The sea snake has acquired exquisite adaptations to her watery existence. For one thing, she is a strong swimmer, undulating her paddleshaped tail and flat eel-like body to propel herself through the water. And, just as every boat owner knows, she needs to keep her body free from algae and barnacles and other parasites that would slow her down and make her less efficient.

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Her clever and distinctly snakey solution is to shed her skin. She changes wardrobe much more often than a land snake, and more than she needs to for growth. She rubs on coral to loosen her skin, then hooks it onto something hard, and crawls out. Could boat hulls or hospital walls borrow this trick? Can we design a constantly shedding surface? She has other brilliant design ideas as well. Like a land snake, she breathes air, and would drown if water filled her lung. A valve in her nose prevents this, sealing shut underwater, to keep the water out. It opens inward when she needs to take a breath, and holds it shut with penis-like, blood-engorged erectile tissue. My turgid spam folder suggests to me there may be a huge market for this idea. Did I say ‘lung,’ as in singular? That’s right. Like all snakes, the sea snakes has just one. But hers is the largest, extending all the way to the base of her tail. With it, one huge breath lets her dive 250 feet deep and stay down for up to two hours. Which brings us to another neat trick worth borrowing. Parts of her lung regulate her buoyancy. As she dives down, water pressure increases, and her lung volume decreases. With it, she becomes less buoyant as she goes down. This neutral buoyancy is an efficient way to dive, and she can swim slowly and steadily down without expending more energy to ‘fight the float.’

Steven Vogel of Duke University is exploring this gas exchange. It turns out that she can breathe through her skin. Oxygen diffuses from sea water into tiny blood vessels, while carbon dioxide and nitrogen diffuse out. She gets up to 22% of her oxygen this way. Neat trick for avoiding the bends! Could we use this idea to construct membranes that selectively allow gas molecules to pass through? Can we remove oxygen or other dissolved gases from water, or carbon dioxide or toxic gases from the air? And here’s one more idea. Like other land animals that have adapted to marine life, Madame Sea Snake has to deal with extra salt. Mammals simply pass it in their urine, but birds and reptiles have weak kidneys, and can’t remove enough. Penguins and marine iguanas solve the problem with nasal glands, while sea turtles cry salty tears. The sea snake has come up with a gland under her tongue. Can we use these ideas to desalinate water? By now you are loving this beautiful girl and you want to snorkel with her. So picture this. In 1932, the passengers aboard a steamer from Malaysia saw a line of sea snakes 10 feet wide and 62 miles long. I recommend you keep your hands and feet in the boat.

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How Does Mother Nature Clean House?

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

IMAGE: ELIAS LEVY

In my last column for The Biomimicry Manual, I mentioned the way the sea snake keeps herself clean of barnacles and algae by shedding her skin. Keeping surfaces clean is a huge challenge and a big industry. It’s a problem that comes up in nature all the time. Think about it: we have to dust to keep our home surfaces clean, but a plant can’t do that. But they need to let in maximum sunlight. They just can’t afford to be grungy! Lots of creatures deal with this same issue for all kinds of reasons. How do they do it? Can we learn better ways to stay clean from them? Read on to find out!

HOW DOES MOTHER NATURE CLEAN HOUSE?

Think about all the money and time we spend cleaning, not to mention all the water and toxic chemicals. Every two to three years, for instance, ships and boats of all sizes have to be hauled out of the water so owners can lather them in some 80,000 tons of copper-laden paints. It’s a necessary evil: it kills the algae and barnacles that make their home on boat hulls. Critters like these create drag, increasing fuel-costs by 40%. It’s a multi-billion dollar market. Boat-owners deplore the expense and loss of productivity, and harbor communities aren’t happy about their waters and sediments being poisoned. But with a global fleet of over 50,000 large ships burning 370 million tons a year of the worstquality, highest-emission bunker fuel imaginable, it’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t proposition. How would Mother Nature do it?

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She provides us with lots of low-energy, non-toxic ideas for staying clean. Usually, she favors “structural” solutions over chemical or energetic ones. Take sharkskin, for instance. Most of the time, sharks cruise slowly, searching for prey. It’s a perfect ride for free-loading parasites. And yet, sharks stays clean. How? Tiny ridged scales, called “dermal denticles,” (literally, “skin teeth”) keep microorganisms from sticking. They are the inspiration behind ‘Sharklet,’ a thin sandpaper-like film, composed of millions of microscopic denticles. It’s a completely non-toxic, purely structural solution. Critters just don’t like to sleep on this unpleasant bed of nails. With it, boat hulls gather 85% less green algae, while hospitals using it on bathroom walls, door handles, and food trays avoid breeding antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

HOW DOES MOTHER NATURE CLEAN HOUSE?

The coconut provides a different solution. This giant seed is blanketed in a continuously shifting coat of microscopic hairs. Barnacles and algae just can’t get a purchase, allowing the seed to stay lightly bobbing in the waves until it safely floats to land. An effective surface based on this idea has been developed by the Biomimetics Innovation Center. The pitcher plant is renowned for its treacherous, slippery surface. It mimics delicious scents for its insect prey, which find themselves sliding headfirst into the pitcher, to be slowly (and presumably painfully) consumed. Slippery Liquid Infused Porous Surface (SLIPS) is a miracle film developed at Harvard University that mimics the pitcher’s spongy water-infused texture. Water- and oil-based liquids slide right off, like tiny doomed insect feet. Watch the video, it’s crazy stuff.

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Imagine using this on tools, work boots, and your car’s paint job. Suitewall and Microguard are exterior wall and tile coatings that mimic the tiny bumps on a snail shell, using silica. The bumps attract microscopic drops of water for oily residues to “float” on. When rain hits the shell (or wall, or tile), dirt just washes away. This is the same trick used by the lotus. Over 100 patents have been filed using this idea, including Lotusan paint for buildings. Similarly, Morpho butterfly wings have a special nano-scale surface structure that repels water and dirt. NanoSphere® is a self-cleaning fabric finish that mimics this, reducing the need to do laundry (and for chemical detergents). If you have a pair of Levi’s 511 Skinny Commuter Jeans, you’re benefitting from this technology right now.

HOW DOES MOTHER NATURE CLEAN HOUSE?

Can you think of applications for these kinds of ideas? I’m thinking we can use them to keep optical sensors and solar panels clean, repel the buildup of ice, rain, or snow on roads and aircraft wings, prevent blockage in pipes for oil or water flow, for biomedical devices, and even to stop graffiti. I’m sure you can think of a lot more. Like maybe never doing housework again. Thanks Nature.

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What Can Dung Beetles Teach Us About the Circular Economy? IMAGE: BERNARD DUPONT

IMAGE: ROBERTO VENTURINI

Dung beetles eat poo. It’s what they do, and they do it many different ways. Rollers tumble it home in little balls; they cradle their eggs in it or save it for a snack. Tunnelers bury it right where they find it, and dwellers, well, dwell in it. Nothing goes to waste in nature, and these little beetles are perfect examples of a species that transforms another’s dross into gold. So, what can they teach us about re-using and recycling materials for a true circular economy? Read on to find out!

Each species of dung beetle has their own special place, but the holy rolling Egyptian scarab is sacred. The ancient Egyptians believed all scarabs were male, and that each day at dawn, the little guys re-enacted the birth of Khepri, god of the rising sun. He deposits his semen into a dung ball, re-creates himself out of nothing, and rolls his reborn sun across the sky into darkness. For the Egyptians, the scarab meant renewal, transformation, and the resurrection of the dead into new shapes among the living. That all makes sense, of course. Dung is a precious resource; a concentrated patch of moisture, energy, and nutrients. The scarab knows it, moves fast to get it, and once he lays claim to his fragrant treasure, he rolls it away as fast as he can. Other scarabs will have no compunction about stealing the poo right out from under him,

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like two can-collecting hobos bickering in an alley. A fresh elephant cake will attract over 4,000 dung beetles a mere 15 minutes after it slaps the ground, and another 12,000 are en route. With that kind of competition, you roll fast and hard—dung is a steaming hot commodity. In nature, every creature’s waste is food for another. Nutrients flow from the dead to the living in a raw soup of energy and matter, passing through our temporary bodies in vast webs of digestion as we feed, digest, and move about. Waste is precious. This is the theme that emerged from the Sustainable Brands conference in San Diego last week: Big name companies, some of the biggest in the world, are suddenly sitting up and noticing they’ve been pooping gold in our rivers and oceans and air. Now, they’re starting to wonder, “how can I get that gold poop back, and roll it WHAT CAN DUNG BEETLES TEACH US ABOUT THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY?

off before someone else does?” Trash heaps are fine if junk is cheap, which is true when it grows on trees and gushes from the earth and leaps from the sea. But today, with the commodity price index going berserk, raw resources are expensive and unpredictable, and prices are volatile. It’s also getting pricey to find somewhere to toss all that trash. Once upon a time, there was no garbage. There was only food: for plants and grazers and hunters and scavengers and decomposers. Humans fit nicely in that scheme. But a century or two ago, we started making stuff nobody had evolved to eat yet. Only 7 percent of the petrochemical plastic we make is recycled; the rest, we burn, or throw in a pile, or a river. We pump billions of barrels of yesterday’s carbon nutrients out of the ground, tossing it carelessly, like handfuls of windblown gold dust, up into the air out of 110

reach. In the consumer goods sector, 80 percent of the $3.2 trillion we make goes straight into the trash. With another 2 billion people joining us by 2030, this kind of prodigal waste can’t last. The good news is our biosphere has been working this way for a long time. Nutrients have always found themselves concentrated in one place or another., and the more they do, the greater potential they have to drive the work of making hungry creatures go. It may not be worth chasing one solitary plankton, but a herd of krill makes whale mania. In other words, our overflowing landfills and Beijing “air-pocalypses” are goldmines, and Big Business has noticed. A report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and (decidedly-not hippy-dippy) consulting firm McKinsey points out just how much value our trash has. Europe alone would save as much as WHAT CAN DUNG BEETLES TEACH US ABOUT THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY?

$630 billion a year in materials if they put their nutrients back in the system. A 20 percent recycling rate would create an additional 3-4 percent GDP. Refurbishing smart phones would reduce manufacturing energy costs by $4 million, save an estimated 100,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions, and $475 million in materials each year. And that’s before we started making our phone cases “out of thin air,” as AirCarbon pollution-built plastic does. That’s right: if the bacteria can’t figure out how to eat our mess fast enough, we’ll do it ourselves. Carbon negative manufacture is on the horizon. Ultimately, “The Circular Economy” is a game changer, but how does a company find and roll off the golden poo-balls before the competition does? Design and innovation. The scarab follows his nose to his trove or attaches directly to the dung-maker (businesses take note!), and the 111

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frenzied scramble to make off with another man’s trash has selected for fantastic innovation. Scarabs dance wildly on their poo balls, asking which way is home? And they know the answer. One species travels by polarized moonlight (yes, that’s a thing), while others use the Milky Way: dung beetles are the only non-humans with galactic steering. The fact is, if business can make a profit from trash, it will. New business models and product designs and take-back strategies will emerge. And the funny thing is, it really doesn’t matter if we, the consumers, even know about it. Our waste is a giant elephant cake, and the dung beetles are coming.

took awhile, but eventually nature claimed that gold. Now, the wood-nutrients are returned to the rest of us, but for a long time, they built up uneaten in the wood landfills of time. Yesterday’s undigested carbon is the stuff we pump out of the ground today. There’s a lot of it, and we’ve been careless. But I have no doubt, eventually all this gold will be collected and rolled away. It’s what nature does. The dead become the living. The sun rolls across the sky. Khepri is reborn.

Our petrochemical discards are like prehistoric wood, before the wood-rot fungi evolved to eat it (to this day, they are the only ones that can). It

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What Can Paper Wasps Teach Us About 3D Printing? IMAGE: ALVESGASPAR

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

3D printing is the coolest thing since sliced bread, but what should we print with? This could go horribly wrong if we don’t take the opportunity to stop and ask how the rest of nature would do it. Maybe our society friends the paper wasps have an opinion: let’s check in with them in today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual.

One of my passions is trying to figure out how societies evolve. I’m not talking about the great faceless herds of wildebeest, or swirling, soulless schools of sardine, though I love those too. When I say “societies,” I mean species that group into tightly coordinated bunches, where individuals do different kinds of jobs, together, at the same time. When everyone does their thing in a society, surprising things happen, be it in human cities or underground naked mole rat labyrinths. Societies aren’t too common among mammals in general though; most are created by insects, but insect societies are a lot like ours. We divide the labor among ourselves, and we will defend our nests alongside family and friends if threatened. Honeybees have hives, ants excavate ant-hills, termites make mounds. But humans make a lot of other stuff too, not just homes. In

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fact, we can’t stop making stuff, which would be perfectly fine if our medium of choice wasn’t a Pacific-Garbage-Dump’s-worth of petrol plastic. There’s good news, though: I hear we’re on the cusp of a radical manufacturing revolution. Yes, the tantalizing prospect of local, on-demand 3D production, without waste or a distribution footprint dangles before us. You probably know that a desktop 3D printer is more or less a fancy robotic hot-glue gun. Tiny dots of liquid feedstock squirt through a nozzle, hardening after they leave the printer, and layers of hardened material build on top of one other to make the object. So the first question to ask when we’re trying to decide on a feedstock could be: “How does nature change a liquid into a solid at room temperature?” Humans do it by melting and cooling plastic, and that’s pretty much how 3D printing gets done. WHAT CAN PAPER WASPS TEACH US ABOUT 3D PRINTING

You’ve got your ABS or PLA (and apparently, Weed Wacker line, though this one is the most toxic of all), and neither will break down in a landfill or your backyard compost pile. Even though they are considered “officially safe” for home use (provided you have, you know, a fume hood), heating these materials does produce a nasty chemical ‘scent’ that normal healthy people do not like. Possibly because it gives them headaches and raw skin, and contains large amounts of ultrafine nanoparticles that swim gracefully across their blood-brain barrier. Surely there’s another way. How would the rest of nature do it? Quite a few creatures make good models for 3D printing, and as usual, most of them are insects. Why is that? Because the little jointy-footed beasts have been around longer than almost everyone else, and they’ve had more time to 115

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test out their designs. Basically, they run the FabLab. Silkworms are tried-and-true human collaborators: they make an excellent all-in-one self-replicating freeform printer and biocomputer, programmed by DNA. And of course, their feedstock is impeccable: 100% biodegradable silk, produced on-site, on-demand. Just give them plants to eat. In fact, 6500 Bombinamoryx silkworms “printed” the beautiful Silk Pavilion in the MIT Media Lab lobby. Caddis flies know their way around the maker space too, in a Kardashian kind of way. Their larvae will assemble protective armor from whatever they find, including Hubert Duprat’s bits of gold, opal, turquoise, rubies, and pearls, gluing it all together with silk. And spiders, of course, are the ultimate 3D print masters, but their technology is hopelessly beyond our pay-grade right now. WHAT CAN PAPER WASPS TEACH US ABOUT 3D PRINTING

Let’s move on to our society friends, who are a little more accessible to human ambitions. My favorite printer in this category is the weaver ant. Crack ant teams grip the edges of leaves with itty bitty bear-trap mandibles (which, by the way, were used by ancient people for sutures). They work together to wrestle the leaf into a tube, and once they get it how they like it, other workers fetch the larvae. Then, using their tender offspring as handheld sewing machines, they stitch the tube into a perfect nest. Now that’s how child labor is done! But, maybe silk technology is a little too impressive for us. I mean, how do they do that? It comes out as liquid protein and then hardens into silk? It’s biodegradable, renewable, non-toxic, and it’s silk? This one might take a little while to figure out. But meanwhile, we have the paper wasps. Wasps, completely independent of the Egyptians, 116

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invented paper. Waking all alone in Spring, with only the memory of her daughters’ corpses to warm her, the pre-fertilized wasp queen crawls from her winter hidey-hole and begins to scrape bits of wood fiber from fences, logs, and cardboard. She chews the fiber into papier mache, flies to a new nest site, and pastes together a little nest to rear her first workers in. Her daughters take over, mixing their own sticky saliva with recycled cellulose to make a lovely, waterproof nest rivaling the finest Italian endpaper. These delicate cardboard tubes are surprisingly strong, because the wasps instinctively (with their mouthparts) orient all the wood fibers in parallel. They even add ant repellant to the slurry!

in wasp spit, grind our old cardboard into paste, and feed it into our printers? This idea pleases me. Maybe I just have too many nanoparticles in my brain, but maybe, it’s so crazy it could work. And if it stops the endless oceanic gyre of discarded Barbie body parts, I think it’s worth a try.

Paper seems pretty doable to me, and we have lots of it lying around our recycling bins. So, maybe we can figure out the magic ingredients WHAT CAN PAPER WASPS TEACH US ABOUT 3D PRINTING

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What Can the Octopus Teach Us About Touch Screens, Wallpaper, and Invisibility Cloaks? IMAGE: THEASEREJE

IMAGE: ALBERT KOK

Cephalopods are the undisputed masters of camouflage. While their relatives, the clams, stayed brainless and safe on the seabeds-of-old, the ancient nautilus (think squid-in-a-shell) made a daring foray into the world of mobile hunting. Today’s cunning stalkers instantly morph into seaweed and rocks, shifting color, pattern, texture, or thermal profile. They become transparent, bioluminescent, or iridescent.How do they do it? Will they teach us? Let’s take a closer look at this remarkable feat of engineering in today’s issue of The Biomimicry Manual.

Meet the “Ben-10″ of the animal world. While other octopuses hide in plain sight to stalk a meal, the Indonesian Mimic Octopus shape-shifts his way through a cast of bold, frightening creatures. Predators flee before a deadly sea snake, venomous-spined lionfish, cruising stingray, poisonous flatfish, or the bullet-fast claws of the mantis shrimp. He can imitate at least fifteen species, each one matched to the creature that comes to him looking for trouble.

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An ancient Hawaiian legend describes the octopus as the only living survivor of the last universe. He’s a lone hyper-conscious alien from a lost time and place, caring for none of us. Staring into his goat-slit eyes, it’s not hard to believe. He is deucedly intelligent, capable of advanced reasoning and even self-awareness. He purposefully seeks out and stores his tools, planning his next suit of coconut-armor or a door for his den. He is moody (“red means rage!”) and capricious (“watch me squirt the cute keeper!”). A notorious midnight aquarium marauder, he sneaks on silent suckers into other tanks, returning home satiated with neighborly concern. He takes apart Lego, opens screw-lid jars, and pops the tops off childproof Tylenol bottles. He can solve virtually any puzzle if there is a juicy crab inside it. Yet, the octopus brain seems puny; no bigger than a lizard’s. Oh, but wait. Three-fifths of his neurons are in his arms. He has nerve cells and “eyes” all over his body. Like an eight-legged brainiac Mr. Potatohead, he is an inside-out neocortex covered in cameras. He sees through his skin, and thinks with it too. Each skin-neuron triggers a muscle connected to a tiny, pigment-filled, light-reflecting skin sac, flattening and stretching it to make a patch of that color. As many as two hundred of these sacs, each with its own muscle and brain cell, can fill an area of skin the size of a pencil eraser. It’s a shimmering pixel display that is also watching you. He’s a muscular, pulsing, tentacled Kindle. Like our octopus, your e-reader has light and dark e-ink capsules instead of skin-sacs, each with a different charge. Apply an electrical current, and they clump together and drop out of sight. Turn it off,

and the ink spots diffuse and spread. You may never feel comfortable reading a book again. As you can imagine, a lot of folks are pretty interested in finding out the secret magic of this trickster’s tricks and replicating them for ourselves. Like how about inventing “smart-skins”; metamaterials that perceive light from all directions, like a squid, while changing color, heat, or texture in real time? Imagine squiddy wallpaper in your home, creating three-dimensional reconstructions of everything inside it for virtual reality or surveillance (you know, like, for yoga videos or something). The military was fascinated with this idea before World War II. Today, DARPA, the Pentagon’s arm, has its eye on “active octo-camouflage”, using cameras to detect a scene, then controlling panels or coatings to match it. How about flexible displays for computers, tablets, and smartphones? A skin like this could not only produce and see light, but texture as well. Imagine full-color iPads that roll up like newspapers, braille eReaders, tactile smartphone keyboards, and of course, some awesome pornography (always on top of technology, no pun intended). A wall-size peel n’stick TV that records, senses, and plays? The new OctoBox 3000? A smart, stretchy fabric that mimics its surroundings? An invisibility cloak! Efforts to develop these technologies are underway as we speak. Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and his colleagues in places like Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego and University of California Santa Barbara have spent the last three decades exploring octopus camouflage, above and below the ocean surface. The six-million-dollar question (a grant from the Office of Naval Research) is

WHAT CAN THE OCTOPUS TEACH US ABOUT TOUCH SCREENS, WALLPAPER, AND INVISIBILITY CLOAKS?

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IMAGE: BECKMANNJAN

whether we can emulate this remarkable piece of engineering. Can humans really hope to mimic this brilliant adaptation, fine-tuned over some 500 million years of evolution? Do we really think we can engineer a functional, synthetic squid-skin? Our technologies may seem clever, but they are distinctly primitive compared to the dazzling superpowers of the Mimic Octopus. But at least we get the idea: take a look at what the other 30 million species on this planet are up to, and prepare to have your mind blown. And if the octopus survived from the last universe by consciously imitating the special powers of other species, maybe we can make it to the next one the very same way.

WHAT CAN THE OCTOPUS TEACH US ABOUT TOUCH SCREENS, WALLPAPER, AND INVISIBILITY CLOAKS?

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What Can the Sunfish Teach Us About Submarines? I IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

IMAGE: POWER 680, CREATIVE COMMONS

With a comically tiny mouth and a blunt cauliflower tail, the ocean sunfish is little more than a swimming head. Which is, in fact, its name in German. Grotesquely oversized, these monsters appear to loll helplessly on the ocean surface, sunbathing like blobby grey rafts. They support their great bulk on a meager diet of jellyfish, which means they have to eat a lot of them. Unfortunately, their snack of choice drifts along as far as 2000 chilly feet below the surface, and these tropical loungers don’t care for cold. In response, the Mola mola has evolved a suite of highly unusual adaptations. Can humans find inspiration in this strange diving expert? Find out in The Biomimicry Manual!

WHAT CAN THE SUNFISH TEACH US ABOUT SUBMARINES?

An adult sunfish may be 10 ft long and 14 ft across, and weigh in at up to 5000 lbs. The world’s heaviest bony fish also has the shortest spinal column and the fewest vertebrae, losing his tail and many of his bones to the ravages of evolutionary time. Nowadays, the mola’s skeleton is mostly lighter cartilage, allowing him to grow very big. With this huge frame and no forward thrusting tail, the sunfish has to get around with a pair of tiny pectoral fins. Looking at this guy, you can’t help but find yourself thinking “Go home, Evolution, you’re drunk.” He usually swims slowly and carefully. But this monster is no drifter. Molas in Southern California have been tracked swimming close to the speed of cruising yellowfin tuna. He can move when he wants to. And not just forward, but up and down.

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IMAGE: P.V. REYES OF AVALON, CALIFORNIA.

Although we usually see the sunfish basking passively at the surface, he actually migrates vertically during the day, dining on jellyfish living below the warm surface water. Because he perishes quickly in cold water, researchers think his habit of sunbathing on his side may help him “thermally recharge” after deep dives. A sunfish caught in 1910, with an estimated weight of 3500 lbs. Image via Wiki Commons. The mola has another trick for jellyfish-diving. Unlike most bony fish, he has no gas-filled swim bladder, and therefore doesn’t need to worry about volume changes from pressure in deep water. In fact, this fish has almost the exact same body density as seawater. He has neutral buoyancy at any depth, thanks to a thick layer of water-rich, incompressible, gelatinous tissue just below his skin. As a result, as he moves for-

WHAT CAN THE SUNFISH TEACH US ABOUT SUBMARINES?

ward, the ocean sunfish can also move vertically, using minimal energy. Could we borrow some of these ideas for ocean-based industries? How about wetsuits with constant buoyancy and thermal insulation, at any depth or pressure? Or for submarine robotics, used in underwater construction or dives? And here’s another neat idea: Mola’s don’t chew their jellies. Instead, they suck them in and out of their tiny, beak-like mouths until they’re reduced to Jell-o. Then, they slurp them down into their bellies, where a lining of mucus keeps them from getting stung. I’m sure it’s like really exceptional hospital food, only better.

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What Can the Platypus Teach Us About Collision-Avoidance? IMAGE:MATT CHAN

IMAGE: STEFAN KRAFT

The platypus is a funny little mammal found in Eastern Australia and Tasmania. Aside from echidnas (the also-very-weird Australian spiny anteaters) they are the only living mammals that lay eggs. This bizarro egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-toed, crocodile-bodied assemblage completely bamboozled European naturalists when they stumbled on it back in 1798. It just had to be an elaborate fraud concocted by Chinese taxidermists (who had a reputation for sewing random bits together into mythical beasts). The serious European museum folk spent countless hours digging around with scissors looking for the stitches. In reality, he is the last living descendant of an ancient protomammalian reptile. Or a post-reptilian mammal. It’s not always clear, but this funny little nocturnal predator has some crazy-cool strategies that are apparently still working just fine. For instance, he has the baffling habit of folding up his eyes, WHAT CAN THE PLATYPUS TEACH US ABOUT COLLISION-AVOIDANCE?

ears, and nostrils within his skin when he dives. So, how does he find the wiggly little crunchy creatures he likes best down there? How the heck does he know where he’s going? The answer turns out to be truly marvelous, an exquisite combination of braille and electrolocation. Could we emulate the genius of the platypus? Find out more in today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual !

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IMAGE: JOHN LEWIN, FROM A COLLECTION AT STATE LIBRARY OF NSW'S PICTURES AND

Our platypus’ legs are short and powerful; faintly crocodilian, with webbed forefeet and venomous spurs on the hind. He’s pretty much the only poisonous mammal out there (though watch out for those nasty little shrews- oh, and breaking newsflash, Lady Gaga was just bitten by a venomous slow loris, so I totally retract that). Hold it by the tail, okay, all you wannabe platypi wrestlers out there? Although this neurotoxin is only lethal to small mammals, the pain will apparently make you wish you were dead, and for weeks. And get this- morphine doesn’t make it any better. It seems the poison blocks the pain receptors themselves. Wouldn’t that technology be useful to understand and mimic? So our fierce little beastie floats along the nightsurface of fast-moving fresh-water, grinding his insect and crustacean prey between the horny, ridged pads he calls teeth. He’s got a monster WHAT CAN THE PLATYPUS TEACH US ABOUT COLLISION-AVOIDANCE?

appetite, gobbling over two pounds of critters every night. Periodically, he dives down like an otter to the riverbed floor, whisking his fleshy bill back and forth in the tumbling stones and gravel. He stirs up worms, snails, grubs, and yummy ‘yabbies’ (little prawns), snatches them up, and tucks them into his squirrely cheek pouches for his floating grind session. But how does he find his way and his prey at the bottom of this swift dark stream, with his eyes, nose, and ears screwed so tightly shut? Scientists had been scratching their heads, until they found the tiny electroreceptors that cover his leathery bill, each one a magical mucus gland attached to a cord of nervous fiber. As he sweeps it side to side, sifting his way through the cobbles, he picks up minute electrical impulses generated by the muscle activity of his prey. Meanwhile, his bill also fea127

IMAGE: KATJA SCHULTZ

tures a series of ultra-sensitive touch “mechanoreceptors,” (I love that word), each containing a simple pushrod device that triggers a nerve when pressed. Together, these two types of signals go straight to his little platypus brain, painting a sonar-like image of the riverbed and any creatures he might stir up there. You can think of it like using the time difference between thunder and lightning (traveling to you at the speed of sound and light, respectively) to anticipate a storm’s arrival. The electrical discharges from the prey’s muscles are like lightning, while disturbance ripples in the water are like thunder. Our platypus ‘calculates’ the time delay between the two to know where his dinner is hiding.

that combines electrolocation and touch. Or prosthetic fingers with feeling? Collisionavoidance in cars? Exploring virtual worlds in video games? Fine-scale manufacturing applications? Anywhere detailed tactile sensing would be useful… ideas? Maybe the iPlatypus will be unveiled sometime soon. I will be first in line. But can I have my monotreme in stereo? Minus the venom?

Such a brilliant design: multifunctional and effective, high-tech and low-tech. Surely we could find a use for this idea? How about sensors for the blind? I imagine a walking cane WHAT CAN THE PLATYPUS TEACH US ABOUT COLLISION-AVOIDANCE?

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What Can Parasites Teach Us About Zombies? IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

Near Halloween each year, this young girl’s fancies turn to, what else? Zombies! Yes, we all secretly worry about the coming zombie apocalypse, though not enough to assemble the disaster-preparedness kits that we are actually supposed to have. But zombies aren’t real, right? Aside from The Joker’s laughing gas, mass hypnotism, or watching too much Fox TV, there’s no scientific mechanism for turning people into puppets. Or is there? Let’s find out in today’s entry of The Biomimicry Manual.

WHAT CAN PARASITES TEACH US ABOUT ZOMBIES?

It actually turns out many parasites have figured out the art of host mind-control. They set up shop in an unsuspecting host, and force them to do their evil bidding. Which is pretty much just making more parasites. This diabolical possession strategy is straight out of The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. A certain female wasp in Costa Rica, for instance, searches for a specific spider, paralyzes it and lays her egg on it. The larva hatches and feeds on the spider, who doesn’t seem too bothered by it until a couple weeks later, when the larva injects a chemical which makes the spider build a special web. Instead of his usual “bug-catching net,” the spider builds a very strong, rain-resistant hammock, then goes straight to the center to be poisoned and sucked dry. The wasp larva knits herself a tidy cocoon in the hammock, sheltered from the elements, and the adult wasp emerges and flies off to find a new spider. But 130

IMAGE: CREATIVE COMMONS

these are alien arthropods, of course, engaged in an ancient and endless evolutionary war. This stuff doesn’t happen to cute furry mammals and people, does it? There are many cases of possession among the spineless set. There’s a flukeworm who spends its whole adult life in the liver of a cow. There, it mates and lays eggs, to be shat out by the host. A snail slurps up this flukey delicacy. The eggs hatch, spiral down to its intestines, clone themselves, then float dreamily up to the surface of the snail, to be left behind in a bubbly trail of flukeworm slimeballs. An ant comes along and hoovers up these sweet cystic treats, like an all-girl’s old folks home watching Lawrence Welk. The diabolical flukes set up shop in her brain, then force her to hypnotically ascend a blade of grass and wait, in a bolero-themed trance, to be eaten by another cow. If the ant is still alive at WHAT CAN PARASITES TEACH US ABOUT ZOMBIES?

dawn, the flukes release their control and she resumes her ordinary existence, until the next night, when she repeats her somnambulance. She’ll do it every night until her tiny puppetmasters make it back to the mothership. But what about sweet little bewhiskered furry zombies? Well, there’s rabies… Remember Old Yeller? Bitten by a rabid wolf, which turned this previously sweet and beloved lab into a frothy mouthed killer. The rabies virus slips slyly from infected saliva to dance among the neurons, turning shy creatures into rage-roids who aggressively savage new victims. And then there’s Toxoplasma gondii. This microscopic one-celled protozoan lives inside our kitty companions. Harmless to them, apparently, but it only reproduces sexually in puddy’s tummy. In between cats, it has to spend its lifecycle inside somebody else, usually cat-fecessnorting rats and cows (bet you 131

didn’t know litter-box snorting was a thing). And while Toxo is slumming it with Ratty, it rewires his brain so that, instead of fleeing from cats, he runs right towards them. This malevolent protozoan goes straight for the primal jugular, disabling the neural circuitry for fear and hijacking the chemistry for lust. Because not only does Toxo assist the cat-rat baton hand-off, it also makes lady rats seriously HOT for infected males. That’s a crafty move for Toxo, because now most of the rat babies will have it too. That’s a brilliant strategy for guaranteeing a round-trip ticket. Well, okay, that’s pretty creepy. But human zombies? It’s a stretch. But Toxo is the reason pregnant women aren’t supposed to change cat litter—a fetus can suffer severe brain damage from it. I milked that one for a whole decade (pregnancy, not brain damage). But healthy adults who get it from drinking litter box tea or from liking their meat done rare just get a touch of flu and never know the difference. Toxo cysts lie dormant in over a billion of our brains worldwide, but they don’t seem to do much. Or so we thought. Recently, some interesting studies are showing that people carrying Toxo are a little… well, special. They are about 250% more likely to be in a car crash, for one thing. Could tiny cat-creepers be eating our brains? It’s bizarre, but this infection comes with a whole suite of sex-specific personality traits. Men with Toxo are more introverted and suspicious. They are risk-takers and rule-breakers. Infected women, on the other hand, are more outgoing and trusting than non-infected women, with more friends. Infected men are more likely to wear wrinkled old clothes, while infected women like the expensive stuff even more than most. And… men with Toxo like the smell of cat pee. Toxo women tolerate the stench even less WHAT CAN PARASITES TEACH US ABOUT ZOMBIES?

than uninfected women. And it gets even weirder… women think Toxo men are sexier, and 75% percent of females would rather get to know a guy if he has it. So, I suggest that horny women roll in cat pee (if you’re looking for a serial car accident), and men drink cat litter tea. What on earth is going on here? Apparently, Toxo increases the dopamine in our brains, blocking caution and enhancing pleasure. Just FYI, dopamine levels are extra high in schizophrenics, and one-quarter of them have reduced ‘gray matter’ in their brain. This same 25% is also…wait for it… Toxo-positive. We do have effective antipsychotic medicines that help, and when you give these meds to infected rats, they stop running toward cats. Toxo’s association with schizophrenia could be as high as 75%, and infection may be linked to other dopamine disturbances, like OCD, ADHD, and mood disorders. How does the parasite manipulate our feelings of anxiety and pleasure? Maybe we can even borrow their strategy to help people suffering from phobias or PTSD. The take-home Halloween message here is that the world is full of tiny beasts trying to make it back to their home cat-base so they can have sex. In the meantime, they have hijacked your brain to make you more likely to pass them around. And the crazy-cat lady next door? She wants to eat your brain. For more on Toxo, read Katherine McAuliffe’s fascinating March 2012 article in The Atlantic: “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy.” And watch out for zombies!

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Here is an excerpt from my soon-to-be published book, BioInspired Inc. I hope you will like it, and that it will whet your appetite for more... Enjoy! Tamsin