How to improve soil anti-adhesion by studying the micro relief of the cuticle surface of digging beetles: Exploring the Sulcophanaeus batesi pronotum using translucent replicas

Abstract

In 2020, we started to explore the micro relief of the cuticle surface of beetle species living in Argentina that are considered true soil diggers with the aim of finding new non-stick patterns. Afundamental step for the design of antiadherent patterns is to characterize the biological surface micro relief using different microscopy techniques. In two previous works, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images were used for the study. In this case, we have used translucent replicas for the observation of the thorax cuticle of female and male specimens with pronotum of similarsize of Sulcophanaeus batesi (Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae), a true dung beetle, collected from Tucumán (Argentina).