insects that capture water from fog
1. Wiry tangles capture fog: lichens
"The Namib close to the coast does, however, have one source of moisture that most deserts lack. Almost every day, a fog rolls in from the sea, billowing across the dunes. On slopes where little else can survive, a lichen grows in a great orange c...
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2. Rosettes capture fog: Tillandsia
"Plants that use fog as an important watersource frequently have a rosette growth habit. The performance of this morphology in relation to fog interception has not been studied. Some first-principles from physics predict that narrow leaves, tog...
3. Trees comb water from clouds: cloud forests
"Cloud forests, which are dense tracts of evergreens rising thousands of meters above sea level, contribute to yield, but in a novel manner: they literally comb water from the clouds. In the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and other coastal slopes or ...
4. Trenches gather water: flying saucer trench beetle
"A third method involves uptake of free water directly from fog-moistened sand. The most elaborate procedure is used by the genus Lepidochora (Seely and Hamilton, 1976) (Fig. 3 c). These flat, circular, short-legged beetles construct a shallow tre...
5. Fog-catching materials
Oxford biologist Dr. Andrew Parker and Dr. Chris Lawrence of QinetiQ were studying tenebrionid (Stenocara) beetles in the barren Namibian Desert when they discovered the shell of these insects has a bumpy surface texture. Further research show...
6. Leaves gather water: geophytes
"In the semidesert of Namaqualand and adjacent regions of the former Cape Province, South Africa, there occurs an assemblage of geophytes belonging to eight monocot families and some Oxalis species that exhibit special morphological adaptations of...
7. Sticky hairs capture insects: Roridula plant
"The flypaper trap of the protocarnivorous plant Roridula gorgonias is known to capture various insects, even those having a considerable body size, by using an adhesive, visco-elastic resinous secretion released by glandular trichomes of diffe...
8. Leaves channel dew as water source: Welwitschia
"Further inland, one of the oddest of all plants manages to survive largely on dew. Welwitschia is related to the conifers and the cycads and consists of just two long strap-like leaves that sprout from a central swollen trunk only a few inches hi...
9. Fog-harvesting mesh
Shreerang Chhatre of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a fog-harvesting material that mimics the fog-harvesting strategy of the Namibian desert beetle. The beetle moves to a spot where the fog rolls in, raises its wings, and the f...
10. Leaves capture water: bromeliads
"So successful are these techniques for sending seeds up into the canopy that the massive branches of many forest trees are often densely lined with squatters. These are known as epiphytes and among the commonest are bromeliads. They anchor the...
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