EcoWorldly

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My grandmother could never have made this connection in a million lifetimes. But she would have cursed me for suggesting that the menacing elephants that occasionally come to our dusty village somewhere in remote Africa to pillage on our crops and the geckos that roam the village paths could have a connection with her lying on her death bed and needing the knife of a surgeon for her perennial ulcers.

But two separate scientific studies and discoveries in very different settings in Africa and the US can easily make the connection, if you may.

Connecting the Elephant and the Gecko
The pounding feet of the 15,000 pound African Bush Elephant make protective crevices in the savanna grasslands that help the geckos hide from their predators and the hot, penetrating African sun, according to Robert Pringle, an ecologist and conservation biologist at Stanford University in California, who conducted his research at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. Significant numbers of geckos have been reported in the aftermath of an elephant’s feeding - the vertebrates often finding breeding space and security in fallen tree limbs and stripped barks. This makes the Elephant a change agent of habitat creation at the patch scale for small species that seem insignificant.

Connecting You and the Gecko
The gecko is a small to average sized lizard belonging to the family Gekkonidae that come in 1,196 different species and which are found in warm climates throughout the world.

Many species have specialized toe pads that enable them to climb smooth vertical surfaces and even cross indoor ceilings with ease. Some species like the house lizard are entirely harmless and feed on irritant house insects, which is good. But that is not all.

You and the Gecko, Again
A joint team of MIT and Harvard researchers were inspired by the sticky feet of the gecko to create a dissolving bandage that can be issued on soft tissue within the human body. Sounds incredible.

They borrowed from principles that allow the gecko to stick upside down on walls and identified the gecko-special effects (nanoscales) that would produce the required result, and completely biodegradable, improving on earlier trials that have been available since 2001.

In a concept called the “biorubber”, the bandage was first tested on intestinal tissue taken from pigs, after creating profiles that would be stickiest yet maintain a grip and lock effect with the underlying tissue.

This type of gecko-inspired adhesives have been tried for a number of years but without the profound results of this creation which is biocompatible and biodegradable and elastic at the same time and good to use on the human body. With a very thin layer of a sugar-based glue, it sticks perfectly to surface tissues like those of lungs, intestines, heart or bladder.

This makes this unique bandage a high potential for sealing wounds and replacing damaged organ tissue, thanks in part to the elephant and more so to the gecko.

So the next time my grandmother goes to the surgeon for her ulcers, before she passes out under the bright lighting on the ceiling, she might just as well make the connection…

Further reading and resources:
Ecological Society of America, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Lizard Longue

Photo credit: David Clements via Wikimedia Commons