And humans? We’d need as much as 40% of our total body surface, or roughly 80% of our front, to be covered in sticky footpads if we wanted to do a convincing Spider-Man impression.
A new study, published today in PNAS, shows that in climbing animals ranging in size from mites to geckos, the percentage of body surface covered by adhesive footpads increases as body size increases, setting a limit to the size of animal using this strategy because larger animals would require impossibly big feet.ĭr David Labonte and his colleagues in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology found that tiny mites use approximately 200 times less of their body surface area for adhesive pads than geckos, nature's largest adhesion-based climbers.
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