CAREER: Fast, Furious and Fantastic Beasts: Integrative principles, biomechanics and physical limits of impulsive motion in ultrafast organisms

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In nature, certain small organisms can achieve ultrafast accelerations of millions of g-forces in nanoseconds. These extreme organisms exploit unusual elastic spring and latch structures to generate extraordinary amounts of power, far outperforming human-engineered robotic systems. However, how these diverse systems, from microscopic single cells to millimeter-sized spiders, generate high power and survive the tremendous forces generated during rapid motion remains unclear. To address this crucial knowledge gap, this project will combine mathematical theory, biological experiments, and physical modeling to better understand ultrafast motion in animals. Beyond advancing fundamental biomechanics, this work could contribute to development of faster, smaller, and stronger robots that use elastic power amplifiers. The project will support science training at many levels, including K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral stages. Research and training activities will broaden the participation of students from under-represented minority backgrounds in the physics of living systems. The researcher will develop a field-based invertebrate biomechanics course to bring students from many backgrounds into the rainforest to study the biophysics of ultrafast living systems. Research findings of this work will be disseminated through multiple outlets including live demonstrations at the Atlanta Zoo, bilingual comic books, and social media outlets such as YouTube and Twitter.Important gaps remain in the understanding of mechanics extreme biological spring-latch systems, which rapidly amplify power input to repeatably deliver high power at small length scales. This project will develop slingshot spiders as a new model organism for studying ultrafast motion. By storing elastic energy in an extraordinary 3-D web topology, slingshot spiders can repeatedly hurl themselves and their webs at flying insects in less than 20 milliseconds with accelerations exceeding 130g. Webs made of elastic silk actuated by hydraulically controlled legs comprise an exception springs/latch system, thus slingshot spiders are excellent models for fundamental questions concerning elastic mechanisms. Their webs and legs are ideally suited to material characterization and modelling in both lab and field environments. The principal investigator will bring high-speed instrumentation into the Peruvian Amazon to capture the ultrafast dynamics of these extreme arachnids. Combining in-situ force measurements and modeling, this research will probe fine-tuning and integration of mechanical properties of the web (spring) and hydraulic mechanics of the spider’s legs (latch) and will analyze how power amplification is maximized for a spider of a given size. This work will apply the physics of damped harmonic oscillators to reveal how slingshot webs dissipate energy and enable repetitive loading with minimum damage. By bringing low-cost, portable scientific tools to rainforests (Jungle invertebrates Biomechanics Laboratory), the project will train future scientists in invertebrate biomechanics and expand the range of potential model organisms. By developing bilingual comics (Curious Zoo of Crazy Organisms), this work will bridge language barriers in science communication to Hispanic populations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.