The ability of organisms such as cacti and desert beetles to collect water from thin air helps them survive in dry environment. For example, the Namib beetle gathers water droplets on the bumps of its shell while V-shaped cactus spines guide droplets to the plant’s body.

A graduate student at MIT, Kyoo-Chul Park has worked on a model comprising large mesh panels that could be put up in foggy weather, which would provide surfaces for the airborne water to condense upon. Such “fog-catchers” are being tested in Chilean hillsides to explore means to provide drinking water to people living in these extremely arid and remote places.

Park had subsequently moved to Joanna Aizenberg’s lab at Harvard University where he focused on darkling beetles, the animals that have been making use of a the fog-catching idea since millions of years.

The beetles are found in southern Africa’s Namib Desert, an area that receives less than a centimeter of rain annually but has water in the form of fog blown in from the Atlantic Ocean on its west. For harvesting fog, the beetles sit amid it while pointing their abdomen towards the sky, letting the water condense on their bodies and trickle it down into their mouths, thus quenching their thirst.

“In arid environments, there’s a lot of evaporation. If we can’t collect water with fast growth and transport, we’ll lose it. The super-condenser surfaces are also useful for power plants, desalination plants, and other operations whose heat exchangers rely on efficient condensation”, explains Park.

Another scientist involved with the research informed that this interesting experiment, however, shows that artificial surfaces inspired by nature can go beyond it, leading to new properties that are paradoxically not found in nature. A Cambridge-based company, SLIPS Technologies, has now been working on to exploit the beetle-fog-water idea commercially.