Cross-disciplinary review reveals methodological frameworks for analyzing puncture and injection across diverse taxa, highlighting physical principles guiding evolutionary adaptations.
Symposium Synopsis This collection is from a symposium on the study of puncture and injection mechanics in biology spanning a massive range of scales and taxonomic kingdoms. The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology hosted this symposium at its 2026 meeting in Portland, Oregon. Puncture and injection are widespread strategies used by a diversity of organisms that have independently evolved vastly different morphological and behavioral traits to overcome the physical principles governing successful puncture. Through this symposium, we aimed to bring together scientists across disciplines, both engineers and biologists, to discuss current strategies for studying biological puncture and to introduce those interested in the field to the breadth of research at the forefront today. In this subsequent collection of papers, our contributors provided their current methods for exploring questions on some of the vast physical parameters that influence the function and evolution of biological puncture systems.
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Weber et al. (2026) studied this question.
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