Résumé
Climbing is a risky business for biological species and technical artefacts. Vines and lianas have evolved many mechanisms to ensure that searching, spanning gaps, climbing upwards, and attaching to supports all work in the conditions for which they have evolved. Recent observations of climbing plants in their natural environment: time lapse imaging, mechanical measurements and anatomical studies indicate that things rarely work perfectly. Strong winds, poundingby rain, slipping off supports, mechanical failure of attachments and even “decapitation” by herbivores, to list a few, are some of the perils that are ever present in natural conditions in the tropical rainforest. So, how do climbing plants avoid these difficulties and construct the biomechanically resistant and safe-looking, well-organised trellises and canopies we see in tropical forests ? We show some of the tricky and dangerous situations that climbing plants find themselves in and discuss the mechanisms that help them come out on top. It is an interesting example for studies in functional ecology and how we measure “functionality”. Things might just work half the time or half the potential or perhaps only 10 % functionality will do. If one mechanism doesn’t work well, another mechanism might be deployed meaning that functional traits can act partially together to achieve a kind of compromise functionality. This is common in climbing plants and seems to be particularly suited to highly perturbed environments. Such characteristics, both conceptual and practical, are interesting pointers for designing artefacts and soft robots adapted to explore unstructured and perturbed environments