Geckos can control the stickiness of their feet

These little lizards can stick to surfaces thanks hundreds of tiny, flexible hairs on their toes called setae, which split into even tinier hairs called spatulae.

“A gecko by definition is not sticky – he has to do something to make himself sticky,” Alex Greaney, a professor of engineering at Oregon State University in Corvallis, told Live Science.

The setae don’t stand straight up at a 90-degree angle; Greaney’s study revealed that the hairs bend more horizontally, so that, as Kelly Dickerson wrote in Live Science, “the surface area that the geckos can stick to increases, and the geckos can support more weight.”