Why Spiderman Can't Exist: Sticky Grippers Would Need to be Enormous on Humans

It turns out that Spiderman wouldn't be able to exist. Researchers have found that humans would need adhesive pads covering 40 percent of their body surface in order to walk up a wall like Spiderman.

Researchers have recently been looking into how the largest animals in the world to scale smooth, vertical walls-geckos-are able to do so. These lizards actually have footpads that allow them to climb up walls with the use of van der Waals forces. The footpads consist of a system of small, branched hairs that are called setae that deform when they make contact with a surface, resulting in millions of contact points that can carry a strong load.

However, the heavier an animal becomes, the harder it is to carry a load vertically.

"As animals increase in size, the amount of body surface area per volume decreases-an ant has a lot of surface area and very little volume, and a blue whale is mostly volume with not much surface area," said David Labonte, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This poses a problem for larger climbing species because, when they are bigger and heavier, they need more sticking power to be able to adhere to vertical or inverted surfaces, but they have comparatively less body surface available to cover with sticky footpads. This implies that there is a size limit to sticky footpads as an evolutionary solution to climbing-and that turns out to be about the size of a gecko."

The findings reveal a bit more about the use of adhesive pads. More specifically, it shows that we may be able to learn from these evolutionary solutions in the development of large-scale humanmade adhesives.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Related Stories

NASA Gecko Grippers May Snag Space Junk in the Future

Gecko-Inspired Gloves Allows You to Scale Glass Walls Like Spiderman (VIDEO)

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).