Drawing Upon Nature: How Aye-Ayes are Helping Resolve Engineering Problems

 

Figure 1: Dr. Ehsan Dehgan-Niri working with an aye-aye on his engineering project 

There is an age old idiom about how necessity is the mother of invention. While this is true in many cases one can never know or predict when inspiration will strike.  This was the case for Dr. Ehsan Dehgan-Niri, Associate Professor of Engineering out of Arizona State University (Figure 1).  While he and his young son were watching National Geographic programming Dehgan-Niri learned about the aye-aye, a unique primate who uses the percussive foraging technique to locate its meals.  Dehgan-Niri quickly realized that this technique employed by the aye-aye could be used by engineers to resolve some of the problems they face in their work, leading him to engage in a study with primatologists at the Duke Lemur Center.  This blog post will explain more about this collaboration and how it is an exceptional example of applying anthropology.

 

Aye-ayes are the world’s largest nocturnal primate.  They are also odd in various ways.  They most closely resemble their primate ancestors in that they do not look like a typical primate at all, leading to them actually not be classified as such when they were originally discovered.  The aye-ayes unique characteristics include very large ears and one of the largest internal ear structures of all known primates.  They also have an elongated middle finger that they use to locate their preferred foods: insects and grubs.  Using a technique known as percussive foraging the aye-aye employs a combination of tapping on wood with their elongated finger and their large external and internal ear structure to listen for weaknesses in the wood to indicate where insects and grubs are located.

 

Dehgan-Niri observed these activities in the National Geographic programming and realized that there were applications for the aye-ayes percussive foraging technique in engineering.  Engineers are responsible for building structures or composite parts in mechanical apparatuses (e.g., engine parts for cars or aircraft), and it is incredibly important to ensure that there are no weaknesses in the structures or parts.  If there are the results can be disastrous. Presently, there are destructive and nondestructive methods for locating weaknesses, but they all carry risks or are only effective in certain circumstances. Dehgan-Niri wanted to explore the potentials for the aye-aye’s techniques being used, in an altered and human manipulated way, to resolve these issues. 

 

Dehgan-Niri, his colleagues in his field of engineering, and those at the Duke Lemur Center worked together to first study the aye-ayes to fully understand their percussive foraging technique.  This benefited the primatologists as they learned that the aye-ayes do not just tap on the wood.  They also glide and rub their fingers across the wood.  The three means actually produce different types of sounds that the aye-ayes listen to in order to better understand the types of weaknesses in the wood, which better enables the aye-aye to identify spots where insects are versus not.  This makes their technique more effective and saves time.  These are also useful for the engineers.

 

Dehgan-Niri and his engineering colleagues then replicated the external and internal ear structures of the aye-aye by 3-D printing them.  They then went about a series of experiments to determine how these 3-D printed models may be used to nondestructively locate weaknesses in structural components.  They have made some strides in the process, expanding nondestructive options for their work, but they are continuing to refine their results to create something that can be used in the field.

 

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how creative solutions to complex problems are necessary to drive innovation.  It also goes to show that nature can provide some of those solutions if one is willing to consider those options versus just writing them off as impossible or ludicrous. 

 

References

Burkhart, Matthew. "Tapping Into Nature." Lemurs Magazine February 2026: 56-57.

Nemati, Hamidreza and Ehsan Dehghan-Niri. "Biomimetic investigation of the impact of the ear canal on the acoustic field sensitivity of aye-ayes." Applied Acoustics (2023).