The chameleon's tongue is said to unravel at the sort of speed that would see a car go from 0-60 mph in one hundredth of a second – and it can extend up to 2.5 body lengths when catching insects. Oxford Mathematicans Derek Moulton and Alain Goriely have built a mathematical model to explain its secrets.
The use of mathematical models to describe the motion of a variety of biological organisms has been the subject of much research interest for several decades. If we are able to predict the future locations of bacteria, cells or animals, and then we subsequently observe differences between the predictions and the experiments, we would have grounds to suggest that the local environment has changed, either on a chemical or protein scale, or on a larger scale, e.g.