Mimicry is a similarity developed in the course of evolution between two biological species. Sometimes it is useful to one of them, sometimes it is mutually beneficial. Biomimicry, on the other hand, is when technologies, architecture or design mimic the forms, structures and processes that exist in nature. Robots, for example, are made in the image and likeness of either cockroaches, or octopuses, or cheetahs.
The Secret of the Deserted Pond.
When biology educator Janine Benius bought a house in Stevensville, in the far northwest of the United States, she was assured that the backyard pond would be home to a variety of birds, from blue-winged teals to Canada geese. However, very little time passed, and the water in the pond became cloudy, and its surface was covered with duckweed. It would seem that these algae, which in English are called "duck" (duckweed), should have attracted ducks and other birds. But it turned out that when there are too many duckweeds in the pond, the birds fly around it. For two years, birds flew to the pond, looking for nesting sites, but, looking around, flew away.
To save the reservoir from desolation, Janine Benius began to regularly scoop out the duckweed. Each time after that, however, the algae grew more than before. Experts advised the woman to use chemicals, but since there were turtles in the pond, Benius immediately rejected their offer. When she asked the experts for more natural ways to clean up the pond, they just shrugged.
At some point, Benius gave up and, sitting on the shore, plunged into fantasies. She imagined how she would like to see her pond: clean, with a healthy balance between algae and water, with birds of different species vying for a place in the sun. Suddenly, Benius realized that this fantasy pond was not a fantasy at all, but actually an existing place. Putting on rubber boots, the woman got on her bicycle and rode to a pond in a nearby protected forest, which she had already passed once.
All day long she had been watching this clear pool, only fringed with algae and lush vegetation. Benius tried to solve his riddle. She dipped her hand into the water and noticed that it was much colder than the pond in her yard.
When a poplar leaf floated on the surface of the water, it dawned on her: there is a current in the pond!
In her own reservoir, a current arose only during the spring floods, when the snow melted and dirty waters arrived from the surrounding fields. Benius guessed that, apparently, her pond was a spring and somewhere at the bottom had a source of cold, fresh water. He, however, was buried under layers of soil brought from the fields, which had been eroded for many years due to the fact that livestock grazed on it. The pond silted up, heated up and became suitable only for duckweed, but not for ducks.
Returning home, Benius took a shovel, climbed into the pond and began to probe the bottom to find the coldest point. When the woman found it, she began to dig. Suddenly cold water began to rise from the bottom. The turbidity dissipated, and the duckweed washed ashore. Very soon, two families of geese settled in the pond.
All our technologies are already invented by nature.
What Janine Benius did with her pond is an example of biomimicry, which can be translated as "imitation of life." Being one of the main specialists of our time in this field and the founder of the Institute of Biomimicry, in her 1997 book “Biomimicry. Innovations inspired by nature” Benius defines this phenomenon as follows:
"Biomimicry is a new science that studies the models of nature and imitates them or is inspired by its designs and processes to solve human problems."
Designers, robot developers, architects and other professionals, in need of ideas for their inventions, are increasingly spying on nature. And for good reason, because other organisms already millions of years ago invented the technologies that we need today. At the same time, they do without combustible fuel, do not pollute the planet and do not endanger the existence of their descendants and other species.
In addition, they cope with technological tasks much more elegantly than we do. Dragonflies, for example, outmanoeuvre our best helicopters. Ants, without any adaptations, collectively carry hundreds of kilograms of food and building materials over long distances. Bat radars outperform the best of our radars. This series of comparisons can be continued.
“Our most ingenious posts and beams were anticipated by water lily leaves and bamboo stalks,” Benius writes in his book. “Our central heating and air conditioning is no match for the termite towers, where the temperature is constantly kept at 30 ˚C. <…> And our newest “smart materials” cannot be compared with the skin of a dolphin or the trunk of a butterfly.”
“Nature, forced by need to be quick-witted, has long ago solved the problems over which we puzzle. Our job is to take these time-tested ideas and apply them to our own lives,” concludes Benius.
Why biomimicry is the future.
By education, Benius is a specialist in forestry. She recalls that during her studies, she was not at all told about the close relationships between living beings. Reductionist teachers described each part of the forest separately, and the value of information was determined only by its usefulness for human life. Only when Benius began to independently study the relationship of living organisms in nature, she realized how inseparable animals are from the environment in which they live.
We, until recently, perceived nature as something separate from us and existing solely for our needs, the scientist believes. We are accustomed to dominating nature, to cultivate it, to "improve" it. But according to Benius, it is time for our culture to “return to the forests”:
“When we look to nature as a mentor, our relationship with the living world changes. Gratitude subdues greed, and as plant biologist Wes Jackson says, “the very concept of resources becomes obscene.”
Biomimicry is based not on what we can take from nature, but on what we can learn from it.
One of the features of natural technologies that exist in nature is that living organisms optimize the use of resources. Birds, for example, need a minimum of elements to give strength to their nests without any glue and cement. Biomimicry is our chance to minimize the amount of materials that we ourselves use in production.
And this will be followed by the reduction of waste. After all, by learning how to create durable materials, imitating the minimalism of nature, we can reduce the production of plastic and other artificial polymers.
In addition, biomimicry will help to use energy more economically. An example is the products of REGEN Energy, which Janine Benius mentioned in her 2009 TED lecture on biomimicry. This company, now renamed Encycle, spied on the communication of ants and bees, created a swarm technology (English swarm technology), which allows you to coordinate household appliances in the house. With the help of wireless controllers, devices interact with each other and self-regulate so that one turns off when others are working.
At this historic moment, “when we see the real possibility of the extinction of a quarter of all species in the next thirty years,” biomimicry becomes not only a new optics, but also a real salvation for all of us, sums up Benius.
Three forms of biomimicry
Biomimicry, according to the classification of Janine Benius, is of three types. The case when a scientist spied on a pond in the wild and reproduced its characteristics in her own pond is an example of imitation of an entire ecosystem. But this is only one of the variants of biomimicry - the most complex and rare. Imitation of natural forms and processes is more common.
Think, for example, about shoe "Velcro". The principle of operation of such a contact tape is borrowed from the burdock. Velcro microhooks are copied from the same devices on burrs. More recently, a scientist at Imperial College London has invented a soft surgical needle that mimics the sting of a wasp. Both are biomimicry of form.
But the idea that self-driving cars of the future will be able to communicate with each other for coordinated movement around the city is reminiscent of how ants communicate, which, as you know, do not obey a single decision-making center. This is the biomimicry of processes.
Let's analyze each of the types of biomimicry in more detail.
Kingfisher-beaked train: biomimicry as imitation of form.
It was 1989. Japan has been working on ever faster trains for the Shinkansen railway network. One of the trains developed a speed of up to 273 km/h. And everything would be fine, but every time this train entered the tunnel, a powerful sound wave arose, which left the tunnel with a deafening pop, reminiscent of the sound of a shot. This noise, which could be heard 400 meters from the tunnel, disturbed not only passengers, but also local residents and animals living in the area. In addition, the compressed air that arose when the train entered the tunnel slowed down its movement.
An engineering team was assembled to solve the problem. At first, I couldn't think of anything. But one day, one of the engineers, Eiji Nakatsu, read in the newspaper the announcement of a lecture on how many ideas airplane designers borrowed from birds. After listening to the lecture and inspired by it, Nakatsu suggested that his colleagues apply knowledge from ornithology to the design of trains. The experiments took several years.
Different parts of the redesigned train were inspired by different birds. From the lecture, among other things, Nakatsu learned that owls, unlike most birds, fly without making any noise. This is due to the special notches on their feathers that break up sound waves. As a result, the engineers applied the same notches to the current collector of the entrance. This allowed to reduce the noise of the entrance when driving.
However, the noise that arose when entering the tunnel did not go anywhere. Nakatsu, however, was already in the right mood and also turned to ornithology to solve this problem. The engineer thought: are there living beings in nature that daily face sharp drops in aerodynamic resistance?
"Yes, there is - it's a kingfisher," Nakatsu realized. “To catch prey, the kingfisher dives from low-resistance air into high-resistance water, and does so without splashing.”
But how does the kingfisher do it? All thanks to the unique shape of the beak: folded from two identical triangles with rounded sides, it is narrow and oblong, and its diameter increases from tip to base. When a kingfisher plunges into the water, she does not collide with his beak, but envelops him. And this is exactly what was missing from the train, which was designed by Nakatsu and his colleagues.
When engineers tested the new train model in 1997, it was 10% faster, used 15% less electricity, and the noise from the train was less than 70 dB.
Robot Ants and Cancer Cells: Biomimicry as Process Mimicry.
“An ant colony is made up of sterile female workers — those are the ants you usually see around — and one or more reproductive females that just lay eggs. They don't give any instructions. Although they are called queens, they do not tell anyone what to do. So in an ant colony there is no master, and all such systems without central control are regulated by very simple interactions, says biologist Deborah Gordon in a TED lecture. Ants interact using smells. They perceive smells with the help of their antennae and communicate also thanks to them. So when one ant touches another with these antennas, it can find out, for example, whether the other belongs to the same anthill and what task this other ant performs.
Thanks to this decentralized interaction, ants are extremely successful in finding food in large areas. In particular, Argentine ants, says Gordon, are able to effectively find a balance between the thoroughness of the search and the area of \u200b\u200bthe territory under study.
When many ants accumulate in a small space, everyone searches very carefully. When a small number of ants explore a large area, they sacrifice thoroughness but widen their search diameter.
Ant communication has inspired roboticists.
It became clear that instead of sending one complex and expensive robot to explore another planet or search a burning building, it might be more efficient to use a group of cheaper robots that would exchange a minimum of information, as ants do,” says Gordon.
An entire area of robotics, which in English is called swarm robotics, that is, group or “swarm” robotics, is built on imitation of the interaction of insects such as ants. Communication between such groups of robots is based on swarm intelligence.
However, the benefits of observing ants are not limited to this. Deborah Gordon believes that studying the interactions between ants can also be useful for cancer treatment. We are talking about those types of cancer cells that - like ants that are not controlled from a single center - thanks to metastases, spread from the focus to other tissues to obtain resources:
“Look at the situation from the point of view of metastatic cancer cells that are in search of the necessary resources: if the resources are grouped, then most likely they will begin to attract other cells. And if we understand how this “recruitment” happens, we may learn to set traps that prevent it.”
Prairie instead of a farm: biomimicry as an imitation of ecosystems.
“Ten thousand years ago we first plowed rich soil. We saved the seeds, planted them, and rejoiced when they sprouted and gave us a harvest. We celebrated our liberation from the adventure of hunting and gathering, and this was followed by unprecedented grain harvests and the birth of our countless descendants. The more children we gave birth to, the more land we had to cultivate in order to feed our offspring, ”writes Janine Benius in the book Biomimicry. Innovations inspired by nature.
While we secured long-term food supplies in this way, we also unwittingly stepped on a slippery slope that biologist Wes Jackson calls the “vigilance treadmill.” Janine Benius explains the essence of his metaphor this way: the more we cared for domesticated plants, the more they depended on us. Today, this treadmill seems to be unstoppable. Cultivated plants are so far from their descendants that they simply cannot survive without fertilizers and pesticides.
At the same time, fertilizers and pesticides only hide the real problems. Fertilizers, for example, help us cover up a real threat: soil erosion. And we need pesticides, Benius explains, because genetic fragility and the inability to defend against insects is an inherent property of monocultures, that is, plants that grow in isolation from other species on giant plantations of hundreds of hectares.
“Every day our soil, our crops and ourselves become more vulnerable,” says Benius. “What I want to know is how much longer are we going to keep this issue quiet?”
Fortunately, some activists have already recognized these threats and are trying to find ways to overcome them. One such method is ecosystem biomimicry. This is what The Land Institute, a non-profit organization founded in 1976, does. Employees of the institute, which owns 270 acres of land, grow perennial cereals, legumes and oilseeds on these lands.
The peculiarity of the local economy is that the farm is practically indistinguishable from the wild prairie.
The institute team does not have to plow the land every year, because the crops they grow are perennial. Farmers do not remove weeds, do not use pesticides and herbicides, and generally interfere minimally in the life of this man-made ecosystem.
“In front of me is a variety of forms: grasses of different heights and widths, a bold sweep of a sunflower, dark leaves of legumes that look like ferns. <…> Butterflies and bees, pollinators who like to scratch their tongues, spread rumors from one plant to another,” Janine Benius, who visited the farm, describes this farm.
In this land of flowers and grasses and infested with ants, centipedes and bed bugs, each of the 231 cohabiting plants plays a role and cooperates with other species, she concludes.
“Uproot or plant something new and you will already change the local microecology. Plow, pollinate or harvest every year and you will change it completely. Some of the organisms that will be gone may be those that increase the fertility of the soil, or help resist attacks by insects and diseases, or produce hormones that cause the flower to bloom and the root to sink its tentacles even deeper into the ground. It takes years to tune in such an orchestra of collaborating organisms, but it takes moments to silence it,” adds Benius.
“The goal of the Land Institute is to create a community of domestic plants that is indistinguishable from a prairie, but that is predictable in terms of yield, to serve agricultural purposes,” says one of the institute’s employees, environmentalist John Piper.
“We must run the economy the way nature does it,” adds the founder of the institute, the already mentioned biologist Wes Jackson. Instead of patronizing domesticated crops, we should build an agricultural system based on the natural benefits of the plants we grow.
Why and how we need to talk to nature
In order for a dialogue to take place between man and nature, you must first pacify your mind, and then listen to what nature says and echo back to it. Biomimicry is this echo. This is exactly what happened when Benius tried to clear her pond of turbidity and duckweed. Sitting on the bank and giving up trying to invent a new mechanism or tactic for clearing the pond, she calmed her mind. Going to a pond in a protected forest and spending time studying it, Benius listened to what nature was telling her. When she realized that her pond was silty and, having dug out deposits of silt, recreated in the reservoir the cold current inherent in a wild pond, she responded to nature with an echo.
However, the dialogue between nature and man should not end there, says Benius. After we echo back, in gratitude for the help, we must promise to take care of nature. Therefore, having freed the pond from silt and duckweed, Benius planted local plants in it that would support the soil and prevent new siltation with regular floods.
“For a long time we thought that we were better than nature, and now some of us tend to think that we are worse than it, and everything we touch turns into soot,” Benius reflects. But none of these points of view is correct. We need to remember what it's like to be on a par with other living beings."
In one handful of soil live from four to five thousand bacteria. For most of them, we have not even come up with names, and it will take decades to understand how they work and why they are important for our lives. Modesty from the awareness of the limitations of our knowledge of nature and restraint in habits should be our new ideals, says Benius.
What really sets us apart from all living beings is our ability to learn, she adds. Thanks to our unusual brain, we can look closely at nature and repeat after it. Our species is simply designed to be an echo of nature.
Benius concludes:
“I was taught by Montana veterans that when talking to newcomers, it’s more important to ask not ‘When did you get here?’ but ‘How long do you plan to stay?’ advice on how we can be better neighbors for her.”
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When a poplar leaf floated on the surface of the water, it dawned on her: there is a current in the pond!
