“Will you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the
fly. Forget walking, this particular 15-kilogram fly was flung by
a giant catapult into a 60-foot-high replica of a web. “We
mimicked the strength and effectiveness of a spider web,” says
Albert Lin, a graduate student in the Jacobs School’s Department
of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Lin was one of four UCSD
post-graduate engineering students who appeared in the opening four
episodes of Chasing Nature, an Animal Planet network reality series
that debuted December 13.
 Lin starred in the spider web episode
with fellow UCSD student Andrew Gapin, ’03,
and two Duke University students. UCSD students Chiara Daraio, ’03, and
Rita Finones, ’04, also appeared in the first episodes with colleagues
from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Duke and Illinois.
Teams of four aspiring engineers were flown to Royal National
Park in Australia and given only four days to duplicate a challenging
animal behavior on a human-scale.
Most importantly, the models the teams built actually worked. “Having a limited amount of time to build a giant spider web, while being simultaneously
filmed and interviewed was a bit intense,” says Lin. “But I would
absolutely love to do something like this again.”
|
