Victor Kang- Doctor of Philosophy
- Lead Scientist at Spotta Ltd
Victor Kang
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Lead Scientist at Spotta Ltd
Insect behaviour, ecology, insect pest management, functional morphology, insect trap design
About
41
Publications
7,151
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Citations
Introduction
Currently the Lead Scientist at Spotta Ltd, a start-up that develops smart insect monitoring devices. I'm continuously fascinated by insects, and I dedicate myself to understanding their behaviour.
Current institution
Spotta Ltd
Current position
- Lead Scientist
Additional affiliations
October 2020 - October 2022
September 2016 - September 2020
July 2016 - August 2016
Education
September 2016 - September 2020
August 2010 - May 2014
Publications
Publications (41)
Limpets (Patella vulgata L.) are renowned for their powerful attachments to rocks on wave-swept seashores. Unlike adult barnacles and mussels, limpets do not adhere permanently; instead, they repeatedly transition between long-term adhesion and locomotive adhesion depending on the tide. Recent studies on the adhesive secretions (bio-adhesives) of m...
Nepenthes pitcher plants live in nutrient-poor soils and produce large pitfall traps to obtain additional nutrients from animal prey. Previous research has shown that the digestive secretion in N. rafflesiana is a sticky viscoelastic fluid that retains insects much more effectively than water, even after significant dilution. Although the retention...
Suction is widely used by animals for strong controllable underwater adhesion but is less well understood than adhesion of terrestrial climbing animals. Here we investigate the attachment of aquatic insect larvae (Blephariceridae), which cling to rocks in torrential streams using the only known muscle-actuated suction organs in insects. We measured...
Insects use their mandibles for a variety of tasks, including food processing, material transport, nest building, brood care, and fighting. Despite this functional diversity, mandible motion is typically thought to be constrained to rotation about a single fixed axis. Here, we conduct a direct quantitative test of this ‘hinge joint hypothesis’ in a...
To resist hydrodynamic forces, two main underwater attachment strategies have evolved multiple times in aquatic animals: glue-like “bioadhesive secretions” and pressure-driven “suction attachment”. In this chapter, we use a multi-level approach to highlight convergence in underwater attachment mechanisms across four different length-scales (organis...
Leaf-cutter ants cut fresh leaves to grow a symbiotic fungus as crop. During cutting, one mandible is typically anchored onto the leaf lamina while the other slices through it like a knife. When initiating cuts into the leaf edge, however, foragers sometimes deviate from this behaviour, and instead used their mandibles symmetrically, akin to scisso...
How animals process and absorb nutrients from their food is a fundamental question in biology. Despite the continuity and interaction between intraoral food processing and post-oesophageal nutritional extraction, these topics have largely been studied separately. At present, we lack a synthesis of how pre- and post-oesophageal mechanisms of food pr...
Herbivores large and small need to mechanically process plant tissue. Their ability to do so is determined by two forces: the maximum force they can generate, and the minimum force required to fracture the plant tissue. The ratio of these forces determines the relative mechanical effort; how this ratio varies with animal size is challenging to pred...
Insects use their mandibles for a variety of tasks, including cutting and material transport, defence, building nests, caring for brood, and competing for mates. Despite this functional diversity, mandible motion is thought to be constrained to rotation about a single fixed axis in the majority of extant species. Here, we conduct a direct quantitat...
Herbivores large and small need to mechanically process plant tissue. Their ability to do so is determined by two forces: the maximum force they can generate, and the minimum force required to fracture the plant tissue. The ratio of these forces determines the required relative mechanical effort; how this ratio varies with animal size is challengin...
To resist hydrodynamic forces, two main underwater attachment strategies have evolved multiple times in aquatic animals: glue-like “bioadhesive secretions” and pressure-driven “suction attachment”. In this review, we use a multi-level approach to highlight convergence in underwater attachment mechanisms across four different length-scales (organism...
Nepenthes pitcher plants live in nutrient-poor soils and produce large pitfall traps to obtain additional nutrients from animal prey. Previous research has shown that the digestive secretion in N. rafflesiana is a sticky viscoelastic fluid that is much more effective at retaining insects than water, even after significant dilution. Although the phy...
Switchable underwater adhesion can be useful for numerous applications, but is extremely challenging due to the presence of water at the contact interface. Here, deformable cupped microstructures (diameter typically 100 µm, rim thickness 5 µm) are reported that can switch between high (≈1 MPa) and low (<0.2 MPa) adhesion strength by adjusting the r...
Suction is widely used by animals for strong controllable underwater adhesion but is less well understood than adhesion of terrestrial climbing animals. Here we investigate the attachment of an aquatic insect larva (Blephariceridae), which clings to rocks in torrential streams using the only known muscle-actuated suction organs in insects. We measu...
Background
Suction organs provide powerful yet dynamic attachments for many aquatic animals, including octopus, squid, remora, and clingfish. While the functional morphology of suction organs from some cephalopods and fishes has been investigated in detail, there are only few studies on such attachment devices in insects. Here we characterise the m...
Recent advances in bio-inspired micro-fibrillar adhesives have resulted in technologies that allow reliable attachment to a variety of surfaces. Because capillary and van der Waals forces are considerably weakened under water, fibrillar adhesives are however far less effective in wet environments. Although various strategies have been proposed to a...
Suction organs provide powerful yet dynamic attachments for many aquatic animals, including octopus, squid, remora, and clingfish. While the functional morphology of suction organs from various cephalopods and fishes has been investigated in detail, there are only few studies on such attachment devices in insects. Here we characterise the morpholog...
Biatriospora (Ascomycota: Pleosporales, Biatriosporaceae) is a genus with unexplored diversity and poorly known ecology. This work expands the Biatriospora taxonomic and ecological concept by describing four new species found as endophytes of woody plants in temperate forests of the Czech Republic and in tropical regions, including Amazonia. Riboso...
Questions
Questions (2)
Hello,
I've observed a curious phenomenon that I need help with understanding. I have a hydrogel sample that is ~3% protein, ~3% polysaccharide (unknown size), in saltwater. When this sample air dries, there are many crystals forming, almost like tree branches. I initially thought this was just NaCl or other mineral crystallisation, but this type of crystallisation does not occur when saltwater is dried on a clean glass surface. I'm beginning to think that the salt is nucleating around macromolecules (either on protein-protein polymers or polysaccharides), but the size scale seems off (at least tens of microns long).
Any ideas?
Thank you,
Victor
Hi everyone,
I'm imaging marine molluscs, and I've found these strange columns of fuzzy globules. I'm afraid that they are some microorganism contaminants that did not get washed off during the sample prep. Does anyone have idea what these structures might be? I know more about terrestrial fungi, and these don't look like fungal hyphae/spores.
