happy medium

Those feet are more sophisticated in design than anything man has managed to produce. Geckos can pretty much walk up, or upside down on any surface. On each of the toes are microscopic hairs, which in turn split into hundreds of smaller hairs or “setae” which are about 200 nanometres in diameter. Each of these setae produce a strong intermolecular force called “Van der Waals” force, attracting the molecules of the setae to the molcules of the surface. Basically that Gecko is sticking to the glass through electricity. They also have transparent eyelids which are fused over their eyes and can live for 20 years…

These guys are Northland green geckos, are currently protected and are only found here in New Zealand.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 2:25 pm and is filed under happy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.