Excerpts from The Curious Zoo…: Meet the deadly spider, a bug that sprays pee

Each edition of this comic series offers tales about ‘nature’s super-engineers’, based on research at the Bhamla Lab of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The comics series is the brainchild of Saad Bhamla, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and head of the Bhamla Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. (Above) A story on the glassy-winged sharpshooter that can jet-spray urine. (Image: Bhamla Lab)

The comic describes how the sharpshooter is able to fling droplets of urine at record speeds, over and over, with the help of a catapult-like structure on its rear. (Image: Bhamla Lab)

The comics were born in 2020. There have been 15 editions so far. (Above) In Unbelievable Untangling Worms, tiny California blackworms retain humidity in arid landscapes and survive high temperatures, by tangling themselves into a giant messy knot. (Image: Bhamla Lab)

The knots can be untangled in an instant, if threatened, for instance, in something like a magician’s trick. The comic illustrates how this works. (Image: Bhamla Lab)

It all started for Bhamla in the Amazon Rainforest, seven years ago. In Peru, he came upon a slingshot spider: arachnids that trap their prey by making catapults of a sort, from their webs. That became the first comic in the series. (Image: Bhamla Lab)

Free to download, the series is aimed at the next generation of researchers. “No young person is going to read scientific papers. 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. (Image: Bhamla Lab)

A story featuring the “engineering prowess” of the flamingo. (Image: Bhamla Lab)