Question: have you lookes at other creatures which clime up other surfaces

Diana Samuel answered on 16 Jun 2011:

I haven’t, personally, but I’ve met a number of people that have (such as geckos, insects e.g. ants, and spiders). Insects and spiders use a similar ‘sticking’ mechanism to frogs, i.e. they secrete a fluid between their pads (or the hairs on their pad structure) and the surface they’re trying to stick to, whilst geckos use a mechanism called dry adhesion; basically, the tiny hairs on their feet can get close enough to a surface to allow intermolecular forces to be generated. These are known as van der Waal’s forces, and require the 2 connecting surfaces to only be nanometres apart (thus showing how close the hairs can get!).