Extreme positive allometry of animal adhesive pads and the size limits of adhesion-based climbing.
David Labonte, Christofer J Clemente, Alex Dittrich, Chi-Yun Kuo, Alfred J Crosby, Duncan J Irschick, Walter Federle
The paper analyzes the allometry of adhesive pad area across 225 climbing animal species, finding extreme positive scaling and phylogenetic constraints on pad area expansion.
bioRxiv · Jan 18, 2016Evolutionary Biology