Tardigrades

Tardigrades have found to be able to dry out completely but stay alive for months and months then regenerate itself.

Spider Silk

Spider silk is five times stronger than steel, ounce to ounce. It can elongate 40 per cent (unlike steel) and spring back to the original length, when released of load.

Abalone

The inner shell of a sea creature called 'abalone' is twice as tough as our highest tech ceramics. The nearest tougher material made by man is polyaramid Kevlar - a fibre so tough that it can stop bullets. But to make Kevlar, petroleum molecules are poured into a pressurised vat of concentrated sulphuric acid and boiled at several 1 00 of, in order to force it into a liquid crystal form. Then, it is subjected to high pressure drawing. The energy input is extreme, and this process results in toxic byproducts

Mussels

a sea-creature produces 'adhesive; uses it and cures it in 3 min, right inside water, to stick itself to anything in the tidal zone for eating or mating. This adhesive needs no primer and such a sticking power is unachieved by man-made adhesives. We are only dreaming of inventing one, which can work in moist conditions.

Rhino Horn

Rhino horn manages to self repair itself, through it contains no living cell.

Rhinoceros horns, unlike those of other horned mammals, consist of keratin only and lack a bony core, such as bovine horns. Rhinoceros horns are used in traditional Asian medicine.

Beetle-inspired Water Harvester

A fog-catching device patterned on the Namibian Beetle’s prodigious water harvesting abilities captures ten times more water than existing fog catching nets. The beetle’s ability to pull water from fog is due to bumps on its wing scales that have water-loving tips and water-shedding sides. QinetiQ (UK) has developed plastic water-harvesting sheets that mimic the beetle’s bumps, useful for capturing water in cooling towers and industrial condensers, arid agricultural systems, and buildings in fog-rich areas.

Website: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/11/1101_TVdesertbeetle.html

Giant, Deep Sea Sponges Evolved Fiber Optic Exoskeletons

This gigantic sea sponge has an exoskeleton made of glass rods, and each rod can grow up to a meter in length. In the deep sea, these massive sponges contain a menagerie of other tiny lifeforms, all dependent on their sea sponge hosts for something in short supply far under the water. They need light - and some sponges have a evolved a way to provide it using fiber optics.

Sea sponges are among the most primitive animals on Earth. They don't move and don't have differentiated body structures. They basically have organized groups of cells living in an exoskeletal framework. Glass sponges build their exoskeletons from silica and create elaborate shapes from glass-like rods called spicules, pictured below.Some glass sponges get incredibly large, with spicules a meter long and surprisingly wide. No one was really sure why the sponges and their spicules sometimes grew so large. It turns out another mystery about sea sponges was the key to solving this one. The sponges often have millions of tiny organisms living inside them, like glass shrimp and algae. Those organisms need light to survive, and if you were writing a Lovecraftian horror story, there are worse analogies you could use than, "Dark as the inside of a sea sponge."

Some curious German scientists stuck photosensitive paper inside glass sponges, then shined a light into their spicules. Sure enough, the paper showed light exposure patterns consistent with the spicule positions. Those glass-like tubes are more glass-like than we thought. The sponges use them to transmit light (a rare commodity deep beneath the ocean) down into their own bodies, where it shines (dimly) onto their wee symbiotes. The spicules act exactly like fiber optic cables, even bending the light around curves. They're still waiting for FiOS though.

Website: http://io9.com/5085064/giant-deep-sea-sponges-evolved-fiber-optic-exoskeletons

Brittle Star Found Covered With Optically Advanced "Eyes"

Scientists have discovered a species of brittle star whose outer skeleton is covered with crystalline lenses that appear to work collectively as an all-seeing eye.

The visual system of lenses in the species Ophiocoma wendtii is the first of its kind observed in nature and is superior to any manufactured lenses, said Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

"These lenses have exceptional optical performance," said Aizenberg, who is co-author of a report on the discovery published in the August 23 issue of Nature. "They are compensated for physical effects that bother us when we fabricate lenses in the laboratory"—effects known as birefringence and spherical aberration.

Brittle stars are sea creatures that have long, thin arms emanating from a small disk-shaped body. They belong to the phylum of echinoderms, which includes sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea stars.

O. wendtii is about the size of an outstretched human hand and lives in coral reefs from Bermuda to Brazil.

Light Sensitive

Gordon Hendler, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Los Angeles, California, and co-author of the study, discovered that O. wendtii is sensitive to light and can change color.

"They are dark reddish in color during the daytime and go through a striking change in color at night, turning a blackish brown and gray," he said.

After several years of studying the species, Hendler realized that the change in color is controlled by chromatophores, or cells that contain pigment. The chromatophores are clustered around clear "windows" in the bones on a brittle star's arms.

"I started thinking then that those windows might be involved in the reception of light by brittle stars," he said. "The chromatophores could control the amount of light let in."

Website: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/08/0822_starfisheyes.html

Peacock - Colour Without Pigments

A peacock creates colour with shape. Light comes through, it bounces off the layers, its called thin film interference.

The male (peacock) Indian Peafowl has iridescent blue-green or green coloured plumage. The so-called "tail" of the peacock, also termed the "train," is not the tail quill feathers but highly elongated upper tail coverts. The train feathers have a series of eyes that are best seen when the tail is fanned. Both species have a crest atop the head.

The female (peahen) Indian Peafowl has a mixture of dull green, brown, and grey in her plumage. She lacks the long upper tail coverts of the male but has a crest. The female can also display her plumage to ward off female competition or danger to her young.

The Green Peafowl is different in appearance from the Indian Peafowl. The male has green and gold plumage and has an erect crest. The wings are black with a sheen of blue.

Unlike the Indian Peafowl, the Green Peahen is very similar to the male, only having shorter upper tail coverts and less iridescence. It is very hard to tell a juvenile male from an adult female.

Many of the brilliant colours of the peacock plumage are due to an optical interference phenomenon, Bragg reflection, based on (nearly) periodic nanostructures found in the barbules (fiber-like components) of the feathers.

Different colours correspond to different length scales of the periodic structures. For brown feathers, a mixture of red and blue is required: one colour is created by the periodic structure, and the other is a created by a Fabry-Perot interference peak from reflections off the outermost and innermost boundaries of the periodic structure.

Such interference-based structural colour is especially important in producing the peacock's iridescent hues (which shimmer and change with viewing angle), since interference effects depend upon the angle of light, unlike chemical pigments.

Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl