Studying Snail Slime Substitutes

A snail's slime acts as both a glue and a lubricant, allowing the snail to crawl up walls and across ceilings without falling off.

The snail pushes until the structure of the glue breaks, at which point it glides forward. When the snail stops, the glue structure reforms - sticking the snail safely to the ceiling.

The team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and the Catholic University of Leuven (CUL), Belgium, looked at how the cycle of glue breakdown and repair works in natural snail slime.

They also studied synthetic slimes based on clay and polymers, and calculated the ideal slime properties that climbing robots would need - and found a wide range of likely candidates, including hair gel and peanut butter.

Christian Clasen, of CUL, who worked on the study, said: "Who would have thought that snails could use other soft solids such as mayonnaise or axle grease as an adhesive lubricant to climb up vertical walls?"

Co-worker Randy Ewoldt, of MIT, said: "An important result is that snail mucus per se is not required for robots to climb walls. We can make our own adhesive locomotion material with commercial products of harvesting slime from a snail farm."

Dr Ewoldt has first hand knowledge of the challenges involved in collecting snail slime.

He said: "I would entice a slug or snail with a piece of lettuce to crawl across a glass plate, and on the good days it would co-operate and leave enough of a slime trail for me to collect and test."

The news is reported in the latest edition of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Soft Matter.