JOSEPH PAXTON is said to have been inspired in his design of the Crystal Palace by studying the leaves of the giant water lily Victoria amazonica.

And Velcro — the hook-and-loop fastener — owes its origin to a natural product. Swiss engineer George de Mestral took his dog for a walk in 1941 and when he got home found the dog’s coat, and his trousers, were covered with burrs.

They were the flowers of the mountain thistle. Under the microscope he saw that they were covered with thousands of tiny hooks that attached themselves to fur and fabric. Much labour later he had developed Velcro, from the French velours (loop) and crochet (hook).

Nature has produced solutions to many problems faced by engineers and scientists, and the use of natural mechanisms to solve those problems is called biomimetics. In spite of some successes, Julian Vincent, Professor of Biomimetics at the University of Bath, says the overlap between natural and engineering solutions is only about 10 per cent.

Often, engineers devise a technique before they recognise that it is already used by the animal kingdom: helicopter blades and sycamore seeds, for example. But the wing shape developed in 1904 for a pioneering aircraft by Ignaz and Igo Etrich was based on the wing-shaped seed of Alsomitra macrocarpa, a liana from the Pacific islands.

Much more recently, Australian researchers have developed a self-cleaning paint by studying the water lily. Lily leaves stay clean because they have a waxy coating, mimicked in the paint by using a water-repellent polymer designed to weaken the bond between dirt and paint.

Butterfly wings produce their brilliance by the manipulation of light, a technique copied by Professor Greg Parker at the University of Southampton to develop computer chips that manipulate light rather than electrons. “Nature has been conducting evolutionary experiments for millions of years,” Professor Parker said, “so if we’re lucky enough to find something close to what we require in nature . . . we’re unlikely to do much better.”

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