Karınca Adhesives

New Research Examines Ant Adhesion to Develop Synthetic Adhesives Many of us are accustomed to seeing ants moving quickly between sidewalk cracks, along pathways and even across our kitchen floors. However, in many parts of the world, such as the tropical regions of Central America, ants live in the treetops and while foraging, winged worker ants climb from their colonies onto tree branches and leaves using their sticky footpads and clawed feet. While foraging, wingless worker ants encounter many environmental challenges such as rain and wind. Assistant Professor Alyssa Stark, Ph.D. from Villanova University began research to understand how ants adhere to surfaces under different conditions. Stark and her colleague Stephen Yanoviak, Ph.D. from the University of Louisville, who conducts research in the same field, studied a species of tropical canopy ant living in Panama by subjecting it to the highly variable conditions it naturally experiences, examining adhesion performance on glass, plastic and wood substrates under wet and dry conditions. Stark attached a needle to the ants to measure the effect of adhesive footpads and determined how much force was needed to pull an ant back or cause it to slip across a substrate. The research team also observed how much wet conditions affected movement speed. The results showed that ants required the same level of force to be pulled back on a wet hydrophobic surface as on a dry hydrophobic surface. However, when ants slipped, the wet surface adversely affected the ant's sticky footpads across all substrates. When measuring speed, water once again affected adhesion and thus the ant's movement across all substrates. In field studies, the researchers observed that ants were not active during rainy periods, confirming their laboratory findings. The research results showed that adhesion and running speed on surfaces wetted by rain limited the activity of at least one species of tropical canopy ant.

So What Does All This Mean?

Stark stated, "All of this is the beginning of a path toward a larger question about where and how ants forage in the canopy and how their delicate adhesive feet can help us develop versatile, reusable adhesives. Our next step will be to test adhesion performance in other canopy species and explore movement speed on hot, wet and hard substrates. According to our hypothesis, some ants are more successful at adhering under extreme conditions than others, and this variation determines ant distribution in the canopy. Discovering the structure and function of the adhesion systems possessed by canopy ants will help us understand their ecology and the evolution of this impressive adhesion system. Using this information, we hope to make widespread use of ant-inspired synthetic adhesives in the future." Stark's research field is based on environmental factors affecting the functional morphology of organisms, particularly how organisms adhere to surfaces in dynamic environments. Stark is currently working on ants, geckos and sea urchins.

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