Ant-Man may be fictional, but the insect world is full of superheroes, of a kind.
There’s a spider with a lethal high-speed trap. Worms that can knot and unknot themselves. An acrobatic six-legged bug.
These super-creatures are starring in their own comic books too.
For five years, Saad Bhamla, 38, has been editor of The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms. Each edition holds illustrated tales told through a series of panels, usually across two pages. The accounts feature key highlights from research at the Bhamla Lab of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Bhamla, after all, isn’t an artist or a storyteller; he is an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, working with other biophysicists and bioengineers to answer the questions: What can we learn from organisms that are already capable of what, in our world, seems like a kind of magic? What devices could we aim to create; what barriers might fall? (The helicopter was inspired, after all, by the hovering-in-place hummingbird, as well as certain insects).
The team at Bhamla Lab has been working on these themes for eight years, conducting research that sits at the intersection of biology, physics, mathematics and robotics. As part of their mission, they study worms, spiders, bugs and birds. Or, as Bhamla likes to remind readers, “nature’s super-engineers”.
The comics represent some of their findings. Free to download, they are aimed at the next generation of researchers.
“No young person is going to read scientific papers. Adults and even scientists rarely do. But there’s so much to discover about these magnificent creatures and the science behind how they do what they do. With comics grounded in scientific research, everyone can feel like science is their treasure,” Bhamla says.
Each story is translated into at least one more language, so some have versions in Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Telugu, Bangla, Hindi, Spanish or Thai.
STING OPERATIONS
It all started for Bhamla in the Amazon Rainforest, seven years ago.
It was there, in Peru, that he came upon a slingshot spider at work. These arachnids trap their prey by making catapults of a sort, from their webs, slowly stretching the silky strands into a cone-like structure, then quickly snapping it around a nearby insect.
Talking to local communities later on that trip, he found, as he always did, that the children in particular were curious. The researchers, after all, were looking at their world with fresh eyes, much as they were. The youngsters seemed to enjoy slideshows and videos.
“Parents were always so grateful for the sessions. And yet, they would all leave empty-handed. It struck me: Why should all our science be, in a sense, limited to the digital world, and to English,” Bhamla says.
So, in 2020, the comics were born. The first edition focused on the slingshot spider. There have been 15 editions in all, so far.
In The Fan-cy Footwork of Rapid Ripple Bugs, readers are invited to row alongside the tiny aquatic insect and observe the fan-like appendages on its legs that help it glide through water without tiring.
In Unbelievable Untangling Worms, tiny California blackworms retain humidity in arid landscapes and survive high temperatures, by tangling themselves into a giant messy knot; one that can be untangled in an instant, if threatened, for instance, in something like a magician’s trick (because each worm had instinctively coiled itself in just the right way). Could these slippery creatures one day inspire just the right kind of robotic swarm, the comic asks.
CREATURE FEATURE
Each story is crafted by a team of science communicators and illustrators, who work with Bhamla and his team to condense pages of research into engaging, playful narratives.
Physical copies of the comics are distributed free to community centres, libraries, schools and colleges, and during field visits. The stories have thus travelled across the US, and to Peru, Afghanistan, India and Syria, among other countries.
“A student from Afghanistan wrote to us to say they chanced upon the series in Arabic, and dreams of someday being part of such research too,” Bhamla says. Illustrator Jordan Collver, who works on the comics, adds that he is himself discovering the “amazing elegance of the natural world”.
Two years ago, the comics won Bhamla the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication, handed out by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Perhaps his greatest validation, though, comes from his elder son, Bhamla says.
“At some point, my boys (one aged six; the other 15 months old) will want to know what their dad really does, and I hope they read my papers, but they are so technical,” he adds. “So my biggest joy is when we print a new story and I get to come home to my wife and sons, get into bed and read these comics to them.”
