When it comes to astounding feats of engineering, Mother Nature never fails to impress. Scientists are taking a lesson from a primitive marine creature that may one day help us optimize optical networks in ways we might never have considered.

Researchers at Bell Labs have been busy examining a type of biomaterial found in brittlestars to see if nature's blueprint for the undersea creature can yield some ideas about improving designs for optical networks and other computing components.

This type of research falls into a relatively new category called biomimetics. Practitioners in this field believe that studying nature will reveal mechanisms and processes that can be applied to solving technological problems.

A multidisciplinary team of scientists from Bell Labs, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History has been focusing their research on the calcite crystals that coat the five arms of the brittlestar. These crystals appear to have a unique dual function; they not only act as skeletal components for this member of the echinoderm family, which also includes starfish and sea urchins, but also function as high-resolution optical lenses that seem to work like a compound eye.

How will this dual-function biomaterial lead to better-designed optical elements for telecommunications networks? It seems that the brittlestars' calcite microlenses have the singular ability to somehow compensate for the physical effects--birefringence and spherical aberration--that cause lenses to distort light. In other words, the almost-perfect lenses can concentrate light exactly in one position, and the crystals are oriented on an optical axis in such a way as to compensate for the multiple image information. Figuring out how these photo receptors perform these complex functions could very well make it possible to develop more precise optical network components or even improve upon the optical lithography techniques used in chip design.

"These organisms show us how to orient these crystals to get the best signal possible," says Joanna Aizenberg, a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs, which is a unit of Lucent Technologies Inc., in Murray Hill, N.J.

According to Aizenberg, the ultimate goal of this research is to be able to grow optical networking components. While this isn't going to happen in the next year or even five years from now, this primitive organism shows that it's at least possible to do. Lesson learned.