According to a new study, Spider Man would need enormous feet in order to be able to climb walls like a true spider.
Explaining the findings of the research, Walter Federle, study senior author and a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, declared that if a human would try to walk up a wall he would need large sticky feet. The study was published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Like spiders, a variety of beetle, lizard and cockroach can climb walls. However, large and heavy animals would need huge sticky footpads in order to perform the same way. Translated in human terms, someone would need a U.S size 114 for this performance. However, according to Guinness World Records, the world record for the largest feet is just a U.S. size 26.
The research also come to the conclusion that in addition to very large feet, humans would also need adhesive pads covering 80 percent of their front or 40 percent of their body in order to be able to climb a vertical wall.
The research team examined the footpad size and the weight of 225 species of climbing animal in order to investigate this sticky phenomenon. They found that spiders and mites have smaller footpads than larger animals such as geckos. The "stickiness" is explained by a physics phenomenon called the van der Waals force. Electrons on the wall and the animal's foot create an electromagnetic attraction.
Another finding of the study is that different animals had almost similar footpads, according to study first author David Labonte, doctoral student in the Department of Zoology at the same university. As cited by Live Science, he explained further that multiple climbing species had an convergent evolution, the nature coming with this solution of the adhesive pads. These species evolved independently but they arrived at the same solution to a problem through different evolutionary histories, according to Labonte.
