Bird-Friendly Glass Inspired by Spider Webs

Innovation: Industry

Arnold Glas

2006

Image: Freestocks / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Protect From Animals

Animals–organisms that range from microscopic to larger than a bus–embody a wide variety of harms to living systems, including other animals. They threaten through predation, herbivory, defense, and parasitism, and they compete for resources such as water, nutrients, and space. Any given living organism commonly faces threats from a variety of animals, requiring strategies that effectively defend from each. Trout and other bony fish, for example, escape predators by having scales made of very thin, flake-like pieces of bone covered with slippery mucus. They also have behavioral strategies such as camouflage, fast swimming, and twisting and turning to achieve release from a predator’s grip.

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Modify Light/Color

Color in living systems comes from pigments and the interaction of light with surfaces. Color serves many purposes for living systems, such as attracting prey or mates, providing warnings, or protecting through camouflage. To create the effects needed for each purpose, living systems must control the expression or visibility of pigments and the interactions (such as reflectance and refraction) of light. To do so, they have strategies that modify color or light to increase or decrease the color’s position, intensity, opacity, and more. Male hummingbirds, for example, have brightly colored feather patches on their throats; the coloring comes from pigments, structures that refract light, or a combination of the two. When a male hummingbird hovers near a potential mate, it modifies the angle of these feathers to create a bright, colorful display. However, when it needs to mute the colors to reduce conspicuousness, such as to avoid a predator, it modifies the angle again.

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Brochures

ORNILUX Bird Protection Glass
18.9 MB PDF

Patents

ORNILUX Bird Protection Glass from Arnold Glas has a patterned, UV reflective coating that birds are able to see, helping to reduce collisions with buildings.

Benefits

Bird-friendly
Transparent

Applications

Commercial and residential buildings

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities

The Challenge

It is estimated that hundreds of millions of birds are killed each year due to collisions with glass on human-built structures. Glass is reflective and transparent and is oftentimes not visible to birds.

Innovation Details

ORNILUX Bird Protection Glass is insulated, transparent glass designed to reduce bird collisions. The glass has a patterned, UV reflective coating that is visible to birds, but virtually transparent to the human eye, similar to spider webs. This helps to reduce bird collisions with glass buildings.

Biological Model

Some species of spiders incorporate UV-reflective silk strands into their webs. This attracts certain insects while simultaneously distracting or warning away larger animals, including birds. This is to the spider’s advantage, because if a bird were to fly through the web, the spider would temporarily lose its ability to capture prey.

See Related Strategy

Discoid stabilimenta, or decoration, of an orb-weaver spider

Biological Strategy

Web Decorations Warn Birds

Orb-weaver spiders

Decorations contrast with natural backgrounds to warn birds against flying into spider webs.

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