Namibia

In the Namib Desert, one of the oldest deserts on Earth, a beetle climbs to the crest of a sand dune to drink fog.

The Namib has been dry for some 55 to 80 million years. The beetle lives among its dunes along Namibia’s Atlantic coast, one of the driest places on the planet. At dawn, when fog rolls in from the sea, it climbs to the dune’s highest point — where the fog is thickest — and tilts its body into the wind. Water droplets gather on its shell and roll down toward its mouth.

Other beetles in the same dunes dig narrow trenches in the sand instead, collecting water there.

The behaviour was first documented scientifically in 2001. Since then, engineers have used the beetle’s back as a model for materials that capture water from fog in real life, in parts of the world where clean water is still hard to come by.