Boxfish have enchanted scientists and marine enthusiasts for decades.
Despite their boxy shape, they are agile swimmers, inspiring research into how they get around. They are also cute, with pouting mouths and cubic bodies that come in a variety of bright, striking patterns: yellow with black polka dots, gray with blue stripes and more.
Two engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder are particularly intrigued with the spots, stripes and hexagons found on an Australian species in the boxfish family: the ornate boxfish. The designs on that species’ skin, they discovered, can be described and reproduced using decades-old mathematics once explored by Alan Turing, who is often referred to as the father of modern computing.
The engineers, Siamak Mirfendereski and Ankur Gupta, recently unveiled a mathematical model able to accurately recreate the ornate boxfish’s patterns, even accounting for the graininess and other imperfect features that are observed in nature.
According to Dr. Gupta, the model, described in a study which was published last week in the journal Matter, brings scientists one step closer to understanding the mechanisms by which such patterns form in nature on fish and other organisms.
“This helps bridge the gap between mathematical models and the messy beauty of biological reality,” Dr. Gupta wrote in an email.
Someday, he added, that knowledge may lead to bio-inspired fabrics for camouflage or advances in soft robotics, which stray from typical rigid hardware to build machines with softer materials, like silicone.
