Super sticky barnacle glue cures like blood clots
Barnacles are a big problem for boats. Adhering to the undersides of vessels, carpets of the crustaceans can increase fuel consumption by as much as 25%. Ship owners would love to know how to stop these hitchhikers gluing on, but before you can learn how to disrupt an adhesive, you have to understand the curing process. Curious about many aspects of the crustacean's lifestyle, Dan Rittschof from Duke University decided to find out how barnacle adhesive polymerises. 'The process must be related to something because glue isn't de novo,' says Rittschof, so he wondered what else coagulates under water and came up with two answers: blood and semen. With a colossal body of blood clotting literature to draw on, Rittschof decided to follow his evolutionarily inspired theory to see whether barnacle glue polymerisation is really an extreme example of scab formation and publishes his results on 16 October 2009 in...