The Curious Zookeeper of Extraordinary Organisms
In his backyard in Atlanta,Saad Bhamla, professor of chemical and biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, observed the glassy sharpshooter with interest. The lightweight insect was peeing for hours in droplets and proceeded to super-propel them into the distance. A high-speed camera would reveal that the bead of urine travels at over 40 times the cheetah’s acceleration. This research into the insect’s urine expulsion behavior could aid in the design of a more efficient water-ejector system for smartwatches to protect the electronics within – Bhamla’s comic based on his own 2023 research paper tells us.
For over a decade now, driven by sheer curiosity, Bhamla and his research group have been studying the behavior of a variety of living organisms. “In our lab, when we see amazing things like slingshot spiders and wriggling worm blobs, we can’t help but ask: HOW? How do organisms do that? What is the physics behind it? What extraordinary discoveries or inventions can be made using the same biological principles?” it says on his website.
Bhamla has an impressive record of publishing in prestigious scientific journals – Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and Current Biology. He also takes the time to collaborate with professional science illustrators and has built a gallery with over a dozen comics that turn the lab’s research into playful, visual stories. Bhamla earned his degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2010, followed by a PhD and post-doctoral work at Stanford University.
Scroll caught up with the prolific Bhamla to talk aboutThe Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms – comics that make complex science accessible, inclusive and fun.
Why do you go to the trouble of converting peer-reviewed papers into comics?
I put a lot of energy into comics, storytelling and outreach. Children need wonder; the general audience – they don’t want to see equations either. The science in the graphic version is still rigorous, but the way we share it has to be accessible, visual, and fun. Comics aren’t a gimmick. They let me take what’s happening in the lab and connect it to kids, to the public, to the next generation of scientists.
For instance, we do research in the Amazon rainforest. When local school students come to the field station, we want to tell them what we’re doing. No kid is ever going to want me to hand them a research paper. Nobody’s asking: “Can I see the supplementary information? I want to study figure 4.” Nearly all our comics are translated into Spanish. This is something tangible to give them. Typically, people from my lab translate the comic into their first language, so they can share their work with their families back home.
My eldest is now six. Every time we make a new comic, I take a printout and my wife reads it to our son – he gets so excited. That’s my way of telling him what new stuff I’ve done.
The protagonist of your first graphic novel was a spider. How did you realize this was an extraordinary organism you had just encountered?
In 2017, as a new assistant professor at Georgia Tech University, I didn’t have enough research ideas, so I thought, well, one way to find ideas is to just walk into nature’s laboratory, and maybe something will hit me. I wanted to study bugs and I went to a field station in Peru and spent two weeks studying leafcutter ants.
On my last night, my guide – a naturalist who knows the forest like his backyard – pointed to a tiny black dot near the bathroom door. He snapped his fingers, and suddenly this little spider launched itself in that direction like a slingshot. “Everybody knows about this,” the guide said, but I realized nobody in science had studied this spider’s kinematics.
We say mammals and primates are cool because they can make tools, but here’s a spider that is building a tool to hunt. Her web isn’t just a trap. She sits in the middle of it, testing each fiber, tuning the stiffness, and the Young’s modulus just right depending on the weather.
A roboticist we worked with even tried to build a robotic web, and it was incredibly hard to keep it under tension. The spider, though, just sits there, holding and holding, until a mosquito buzzes past – and then she launches and catches this insect. All this is happening in the dark. How does she do the sensing? Maybe the web acts like an amplifying antenna. Maybe Doppler effect [in essence – it is the change in how waves sound or look when the source is moving relative to you] – is at play.
What’s fascinating is that the silk itself works like a spring. Not just a single fiber, but a whole constructed structure – a metamaterial spring. But then comes the puzzle: launching takes so much energy – how does she stop? That’s when we realized there’s a clutch mechanism. She’s holding onto one of the tension lines, and that grip lets her release energy in a geared, controlled way. She can reload and do it again and again.
So why is the slingshot spider so cool? Because she’s not just spinning silk – she’s engineering a spring‑loaded hunting machine, complete with sensing, launching, braking, and reloading. We described it in a Current Biology paper .
Apart from making comics, you gave a TED talk about the fluid dynamics of insects peeing. The protagonist, which you saw in your backyard in Atlanta: is the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Then, you observe their cousins – cicadas in the wild.
On another research trip in the Peruvian Amazon, we were traveling by boat from the field station. Midway, the driver stopped in a small riverside village – an unplanned break in a place where illegal logging happens. While wandering around with cameras, we felt droplets falling from a lone Indian almond tree (Terminalia catappa).
Looking closer, we saw cicadas clinging to the bark, camouflaged, expelling streams of xylem fluid. To us, it was a perfect chance to capture rare footage. To the villagers, this was a sacred tree. They called it the weeping tree. “Jesus is crying and blessing us,” they say. To them, the water was not insect excretion but a miracle.
We tried to show them slow‑motion iPhone videos – 240 frames per second, clear evidence of cicadas spraying fluid in high-speed jets. But the villagers refused to believe that a bug could produce so much water. Their conviction was unshakable. Ironically, it was their faith that protected the tree from being cut down. It preserved the very site where we could collect data.
In that half‑hour stop, with nothing more than the iPhone, we captured the phenomenon that became the foundation of our PNAS paper “Unifying fluidic excretion across life from cicadas to elephants.” For me it was a lesson in serendipity and perspective: science revealed the mechanism, but belief gave the tree meaning – and ensured its survival.
That is quite a story! Sometimes, your protagonist is a creature many of us have seen without traveling to exotic places – the flamingo.
A postdoc from our lab observed how flamingos look absurd when they feed: bending their heads between their legs with their bills upside down. It seems clumsy, but we learned that the posture, head bobbing, and foot‑stomping are all significant. Each move manipulates water flow: their bills filter food while vortices stirred by bobbing, chattering, and stomping funnel prey toward the beak. What looks silly is actually a precise fluid‑dynamics strategy.
By mimicking flamingos’ vortex tricks, engineers could potentially design filters that resist clogging – turning a bird’s bizarre feeding into inspiration for cleaner water systems. We describe thr research in a PNAS paper.
Overall, how do you decide which organisms to study? And are you afraid you’ll run out of things to study?
For me, it’s like a Venn diagram. A problem has to check a few boxes. First, the organism – it has to be unusual, something weird or understudied. Second, there has to be some physics, some principle or mechanism we can dig into.
I’m always a little nervous about just finding what I’d call a point solution. Those are fine – they show extremes – but what excites me is a principled framework. My goal is to use a system as the focal point to identify broader principles. That’s why we bring in math modeling and robotics, because they let us move from one system to another.
And once you look at science through that lens, there’s endless material to pick from. If you’re not scared of creepy crawlies, there’s a lot of window shopping to do. Enough inspiration for lifetimes, really. But the challenge is you can only take on so much.