LONDON: The Stenocara beetle lives in the Namib desert, one of the hottest deserts on Earth. During the day the sand is so hot that lizards have to dance from foot to foot to stop their feet being scorched. Strong winds can tear across the desert and the beetles and lizards seem to be the only things able to survive in this extreme environment. How do they avoid getting frazzled and from where do they get water?

Andrew Parker from the department of zoology at Britain’s Oxford University, took a closer look at the unique beetles to discover their secrets of survival. “I used an infra red camera to create thermal images of the beetles to see if they had heat- reflecting shells,” explained Dr Parker.

Stenocara beetles are strange-looking creatures with large bumps all over their backs, a little like a mountain range. Under very high magnification Dr Parker noticed tiny rounded nodules, no wider than a human hair. “The nodules covered the sides and valleys of the ‘mountains’ but the peaks remained bare,” he said. By chemically testing nodules from a dead beetle, Dr Parker found they were covered in wax but the mountain peaks were not. “This made us realize that the beetle’s unusual mountainous back wasn’t just for decoration and since wax repels water we thought this structure must have something to do with collecting water.”

On some mornings in the Namib desert a fog rolls in. Dr Parker tried to recreate this in his laboratory by spraying the beetles with a fine mist.

“It was amazing. They tilted their bodies into the wind and the water droplets from the fog were repelled from the mountain valleys and sides, but attracted towards the peaks. The droplets grew until they were large enough to roll down the beetle’s back and into its mouth.”

The experiment made him wonder if he could create a way of collecting water in arid regions. He asked a colleague, Dr Chris Lawrence, to make a model of the beetle’s back. Dr Lawrence coated a glass microscope slide in wax and then partially embedded tiny glass beads, about the size of the beetle bumps, into the wax. “When we sprayed the bumpy slide with mist, large drops of water formed and then rolled neatly into a collector at the base of the slide,” said Dr Parker.

They have now tested large sheets that mimic the knobbly back of the beetle and the results are encouraging. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service