Rotating locomotion in living systems

Common card · No. 485840

Although several organisms are capable of rolling locomotion, no organisms are known to use true wheels or propellers to locomote, with the exception of the corkscrew-like flagella of many prokaryotes. Biologists have offered several explanations for the apparent absence of biological wheels, and wheeled creatures have appeared often in speculative fiction. Given the ubiquity of wheels in human technology, and the existence of biological analogues of many other technologies (such as wings and lenses), the lack of wheels in nature has seemed, to many scientists, to demand explanation—and the phenomenon is broadly explained by two factors: first, there are several developmental and evolutionary obstacles to the advent of a wheel by natural selection, and secondly, wheels have several drawbacks relative to other means of propulsion (such as walking, running, or slithering) in natural environments, which would tend to preclude their evolution. This environment-specific disadvantage has also...

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