NATURAL PATTERNS

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Patterns in Nature

Patterns in nature are visible regular forms found in the natural world. The patterns can
sometimes be modeled mathematically and they include symmetries, trees, spirals, meanders,
waves, foams, tessellations, cracks and stripes.

Mathematics, physics and chemistry can explain patterns in nature at different levels. Patterns
in living things express the underlying biological processes. Studies of pattern formation
make use of computer models to simulate a wide range of patterns.

In 1202, Leonardo Fibonacci introduced the Fibonacci number sequence. It turns out that

simple equations involving the Fibonacci numbers can describe most of the complex spiral
growth patterns found in nature.
The Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (1801–1883) formulated the mathematical problem of
the existence of a minimal surface with a given boundary, which is now named after him. He
studied soap films intensively and formulated Plateau’s laws, which describe the structures
formed by films in foams.
The German psychologist Adolf Zeising (1810–1876) claimed that the golden ratio was
expressed in the arrangement of plant parts, in the skeletons of animals and the branching
patterns of their veins and nerves, as well as in the geometry of crystals.
Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) painted beautiful illustrations of marine organisms, in particular
Radiolaria, emphasizing their symmetry to support his faux-Darwinian theories of evolution.
The American photographer Wilson Bentley (1865–1931) took the first micrograph of a
snowflake in 1885.
D’Arcy Thompson pioneered the study of growth and form in his 1917 book.
In 1952, Alan Turing (1912–1954), better known for his work on computing and
codebreaking, wrote The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, an analysis of the mechanisms
that would be needed to create patterns in living organisms, in the process
called morphogenesis. He predicted oscillating chemical reactions, in particular
the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. These activator-inhibitor mechanisms can, Turing
suggested, generate patterns of stripes and spots in animals, and contribute to the spiral
patterns seen in plant phyllotaxis.
In 1968, the Hungarian theoretical biologist Aristid Lindenmayer (1925–1989) developed
the L-system, a formal grammar which can be used to model plant growth patterns in the
style of fractals. L-systems have an alphabet of symbols that can be combined using
production rules to build larger strings of symbols, and a mechanism for translating the
generated strings into geometric structures. In 1975, after centuries of slow development of
the mathematics of patterns by Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Cantor, Helge von Koch (the
Koch snowflake), Wacław Sierpiński and others, Benoît Mandelbrot wrote a famous
paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional
Dimension, crystallizing mathematical thought into the concept of the fractal and
the Mandelbrot set.

Causes

Living things like orchids, hummingbirds, and the peacock’s tail have abstract designs with a
beauty of form, pattern and color that artists struggle to match. The beauty that people
perceive in nature has causes at different levels, notably in the mathematics that governs what
patterns can physically form, and among living things in the effects of natural selection, that
govern how patterns evolve.

Mathematics seeks to discover and explain abstract patterns or regularities of all kinds. Visual
patterns in nature find explanations in chaos theory, fractals, logarithmic
spirals, topology and other mathematical patterns. For example, L-systems form convincing
models of different patterns of tree growth.
The laws of physics apply the abstractions of mathematics to the real world, often as if it
were perfect. For example, a crystal is perfect when it has no structural defects such as
dislocations and is fully symmetric. Exact mathematical perfection can only approximate real
objects. Visible patterns in nature are governed by physical laws; for example, meanders can
be explained using fluid dynamics.
In biology, natural selection can cause the development of patterns in living things for several
reasons, including camouflage, sexual selection, and different kinds of signalling, including
mimicry and cleaning symbiosis. In plants, the shapes, colors, and patterns of insect-
pollinated flowers like the lily have evolved to attract insects such as bees. Radial patterns of
colors and stripes, some visible only in ultraviolet light serve as nectar guides that can be
seen at a distance.

TYPES OF PATTERN
Symmetry
Symmetry is pervasive in living things. Animals mainly have bilateral or mirror symmetry,
as do the leaves of plants and some flowers such as orchids. Animals that move in one
direction necessarily have upper and lower sides, head and tail ends, and therefore a left and a
right. The head becomes specialized with a mouth and sense organs (cephalization), and the
body becomes bilaterally symmetric (though internal organs need not be).
Plants often have radial or rotational symmetry, as do many flowers and some groups of
animals such as sea anemones.

Rotational symmetry is also found at different scales among non-living things including the
crown-shaped splash pattern formed when a drop falls into a pond, and both the spheroidal
shape and rings of a planet like Saturn.

Radial symmetry suits organisms like sea anemones whose adults do not move: food and
threats may arrive from any direction.

Fivefold symmetry is found in the echinoderms, the group that includes starfish, sea urchins,
and sea lilies. The reason for the fivefold (penta-radiate) symmetry of the echinoderms is
puzzling. Early echinoderms were bilaterally symmetrical, as their larvae still are. Sumrall
and Wray argue that the loss of the old symmetry had both developmental and ecological
causes.
Among non-living things, snowflakes have striking six-fold symmetry: each flake’s structure
forming a record of the varying conditions during its crystallization, with nearly the same
pattern of growth on each of its six arms.
Crystals in general have a variety of symmetries and crystal habits; they can be cubic or
octahedral, but true crystals cannot have fivefold symmetry (unlike quasicrystals).
Mirror symmetry
Threefold Symmetry
Fourfold Symmetry
Fivefold Symmetry
Sixfold Symmetry
Rotational symmetry
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Trees, fractals
Fractals are infinitely self-similar, iterated mathematical constructs having fractal dimension.
Infinite iteration is not possible in nature so all ‘fractal’ patterns are only approximate.

For example, the leaves of ferns and umbellifers (Apiaceae) are only self-similar (pinnate) to
2, 3 or 4 levels.

Fern-like growth patterns occur in plants and in animals including bryozoa, corals, hydrozoa
like the air fern, Sertularia argentea, and in non-living things, notably electrical discharges.
Lindenmayer system fractals can model different patterns of tree growth by varying a small
number of parameters including branching angle, distance between nodes or branch points
(internode length), and number of branches per branch point.

Fractal-like patterns occur widely in nature, in phenomena as diverse as clouds, river

networks, geologic fault lines, mountains, coastlines, animal coloration, snow flakes, crystals,
blood vessel branching, and ocean waves.

Leaf of Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, is 2- or 3-pinnate, not infinite

Spirals

Spirals are common in plants and in some animals, notably molluscs.

For example, in the nautilus, a cephalopod mollusc, each chamber of its shell is an
approximate copy of the next one, scaled by a constant factor and arranged in a logarithmic
spiral. Given a modern understanding of fractals, a growth spiral can be seen as a special case
of self-similarity.
Plant spirals can be seen in phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, and in the
arrangement (parastichy) of other parts as in composite flower heads and seed heads like the
sunflower or fruit structures like the pineapple and snake fruit, as well as in the pattern of
scales in pine cones, where multiple spirals run both clockwise and anticlockwise. These
arrangements have explanations at different levels – mathematics, physics, chemistry,
biology – each individually correct, but all necessary together.
Phyllotaxis spirals can be generated mathematically from Fibonacci ratios: the Fibonacci
sequence runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… (each subsequent number being the sum of the two
preceding ones). For example, when leaves alternate up a stem, one rotation of the spiral
touches two leaves, so the pattern or ratio is 1/2. In hazel the ratio is 1/3; in apricot it is 2/5;
in pear it is 3/8; in almond it is 5/13.
In disc phyllotaxis as in the sunflower and daisy, the florets are arranged in Fermat’s
spiral with Fibonacci numbering, at least when the flowerhead is mature so all the elements
are the same size.
Fibonacci ratios approximate the golden angle, 137.508°, which governs the curvature of
Fermat’s spiral.
From the point of view of physics, spirals are lowest-energy configurations which emerge
spontaneously through self-organizing processes in dynamic systems. From the point of view
of chemistry, a spiral can be generated by a reaction-diffusion process, involving both
activation and inhibition.

Phyllotaxis is controlled by proteins that manipulate the concentration of the plant hormone
auxin, which activates meristem growth, alongside other mechanisms to control the relative
angle of buds around the stem.

From a biological perspective, arranging leaves as far apart as possible in any given space is
favoured by natural selection as it maximises access to resources, especially sunlight for
photosynthesis.
Chaos, flow, meanders

In mathematics, a dynamical system is chaotic if it is (highly) sensitive to initial conditions

(the so-called “butterfly effect”), which requires the mathematical properties of topological
mixing and dense periodic orbits.

Alongside fractals, chaos theory ranks as an essentially universal influence on patterns in

nature. There is a relationship between chaos and fractals—the strange attractors in chaotic
systems have a fractal dimension. Some cellular automata, simple sets of mathematical rules
that generate patterns, have chaotic behaviour, notably Stephen Wolfram’s Rule 30.
Vortex streets are zigzagging patterns of whirling vortices created by the unsteady separation
of flow of a fluid, most often air or water, over obstructing objects. Smooth (laminar) flow
starts to break up when the size of the obstruction or the velocity of the flow become large
enough compared to the viscosity of the fluid.
Meanders are sinuous bends in rivers or other channels, which form as a fluid, most often
water, flows around bends. As soon as the path is slightly curved, the size and curvature of
each loop increases as helical flow drags material like sand and gravel across the river to the
inside of the bend. The outside of the loop is left clean and unprotected, so erosion
accelerates, further increasing the meandering in a powerful positive feedback loop.
Waves, dunes
Waves are disturbances that carry energy as they move. Mechanical waves propagate through
a medium – air or water, making it oscillate as they pass by.
Wind waves are sea surface waves that create the characteristic chaotic pattern of any large
body of water, though their statistical behaviour can be predicted with wind wave models.
As waves in water or wind pass over sand, they create patterns of ripples. When winds blow
over large bodies of sand, they create dunes, sometimes in extensive dune fields as in the
Taklamakan desert.

Dunes may form a range of patterns including crescents, very long straight lines, stars,
domes, parabolas, and longitudinal or Seif (‘sword’) shapes.

Barchans or crescent dunes are produced by wind acting on desert sand; the two horns of the
crescent and the slip face point downwind.
Sand blows over the upwind face, which stands at about 15 degrees from the horizontal, and
falls on to the slip face, where it accumulates up to the angle of repose of the sand, which is
about 35 degrees.

When the slip face exceeds the angle of repose, the sand avalanches, which is a nonlinear
behaviour: the addition of many small amounts of sand causes nothing much to happen, but
then the addition of a further small amount suddenly causes a large amount to avalanche.

Apart from this nonlinearity, barchans behave rather like solitary waves.
Bubbles, foam
A soap bubble forms a sphere, a surface with minimal area — the smallest possible surface
area for the volume enclosed. Two bubbles together form a more complex shape: the outer
surfaces of both bubbles are spherical; these surfaces are joined by a third spherical surface as
the smaller bubble bulges slightly into the larger one.
A foam is a mass of bubbles; foams of different materials occur in nature. Foams composed
of soap films obey Plateau’s laws, which require three soap films to meet at each edge at
120° and four soap edges to meet at each vertex at the tetrahedral angle of about 109.5°.

Plateau’s laws further require films to be smooth and continuous, and to have a constant
average curvature at every point. For example, a film may remain nearly flat on average by
being curved up in one direction (say, left to right) while being curved downwards in another
direction (say, front to back).

Structures with minimal surfaces can be used as tents. Lord Kelvin identified the problem of
the most efficient way to pack cells of equal volume as a foam in 1887; his solution uses just
one solid, the bitruncated cubic honeycomb with very slightly curved faces to meet Plateau’s
laws.

No better solution was found until 1993 when Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan proposed
the Weaire–Phelan structure; the Beijing National Aquatics Center adapted the structure for
their outer wall in the 2008 Summer Olympics.
At the scale of living cells, foam patterns are common; radiolarians, sponge
spicules, silicoflagellate exoskeletons and the calcite skeleton of a sea urchin, Cidaris rugosa,
all resemble mineral casts of Plateau foam boundaries. The skeleton of the
Radiolarian, Aulonia hexagona, a beautiful marine form drawn by Haeckel, looks as if it is a
sphere composed wholly of hexagons, but this is mathematically impossible.
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The Euler characteristic states that for any convex polyhedron, the number of faces plus the
number of vertices (corners) equals the number of edges plus two. A result of this formula is
that any closed polyhedron of hexagons has to include exactly 12 pentagons, like a soccer
ball, Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, or fullerene molecule.

This can be visualised by noting that a mesh of hexagons is flat like a sheet of chicken wire,
but each pentagon that is added forces the mesh to bend (there are fewer corners, so the mesh
is pulled in).
Tessellations
Tessellations are patterns formed by repeating tiles all over a flat surface. There are 17
wallpaper groups of tilings. While common in art and design, exactly repeating tilings are
less easy to find in living things.
The cells in the paper nests of social wasps, and the wax cells in honeycomb built by honey
bees are well-known examples.
Among animals, bony fish, reptiles or the pangolin, or fruits like the Salak are protected
by overlapping scales or osteoderms, these form more-or-less exactly repeating units, though
often the scales in fact vary continuously in size.
Among flowers, the Snake’s Head Fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris, have a tessellated
chequerboard pattern on their petals.
The structures of minerals provide good examples of regularly repeating three-dimensional
arrays.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of known minerals, there are rather few possible types of
arrangement of atoms in a crystal, defined by crystal structure, crystal system, and point
group; for example, there are exactly 14 Bravais lattices for the 7 lattice systems in three-
dimensional space.
Cracks

Cracks are linear openings that form in materials to relieve stress.

When an elastic material stretches or shrinks uniformly, it eventually reaches its breaking
strength and then fails suddenly in all directions, creating cracks with 120 degree joints, so
three cracks meet at a node.

Conversely, when an inelastic material fails, straight cracks form to relieve the stress. Further
stress in the same direction would then simply open the existing cracks; stress at right angles
can create new cracks, at 90 degrees to the old ones.
Thus the pattern of cracks indicates whether the material is elastic or not. In a tough fibrous
material like oak tree bark, cracks form to relieve stress as usual, but they do not grow long
as their growth is interrupted by bundles of strong elastic fibres.

Since each species of tree has its own structure at the levels of cell and of molecules, each has
its own pattern of splitting in its bark.
Spots, stripes

Leopards and ladybirds are spotted; angelfish and zebras are striped.

These patterns have an evolutionary explanation: they have functions which increase the
chances that the offspring of the patterned animal will survive to reproduce.

One function of animal patterns is camouflage; for instance, a leopard that is harder to see
catches more prey.
Another function is signalling — for instance, a ladybird is less likely to be attacked by
predatory birds that hunt by sight, if it has bold warning colours, and is also distastefully
bitter or poisonous, or mimics other distasteful insects.

A young bird may see a warning patterned insect like a ladybird and try to eat it, but it will
only do this once; very soon it will spit out the bitter insect; the other ladybirds in the area
will remain unmolested.
The young leopards and ladybirds, inheriting genes that somehow create spottedness, survive.
But while these evolutionary and functional arguments explain why these animals need their
patterns, they do not explain how the patterns are formed.
Pattern formation
Alan Turing, and later the mathematical biologist James Murray, described a mechanism that
spontaneously creates spotted or striped patterns: a reaction-diffusion system.
The cells of a young organism have genes that can be switched on by a chemical signal,
a morphogen, resulting in the growth of a certain type of structure, say a darkly pigmented
patch of skin.

If the morphogen is present everywhere, the result is an even pigmentation, as in a black

leopard. But if it is unevenly distributed, spots or stripes can result.

Turing suggested that there could be feedback control of the production of the morphogen
itself. This could cause continuous fluctuations in the amount of morphogen as it diffused
around the body.

A second mechanism is needed to create standing wave patterns (to result in spots or stripes):
an inhibitor chemical that switches off production of the morphogen, and that itself diffuses
through the body more quickly than the morphogen, resulting in an activator-inhibitor
scheme.

The Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction is a non-biological example of this kind of scheme, a

chemical oscillator.

Later research has managed to create convincing models of patterns as diverse as zebra
stripes, giraffe blotches, jaguar spots (medium-dark patches surrounded by dark broken rings)
and ladybird shell patterns (different geometrical layouts of spots and stripes, see
illustrations).

Richard Prum’s activation-inhibition models, developed from Turing’s work, use six
variables to account for the observed range of nine basic within-feather pigmentation
patterns, from the simplest, a central pigment patch, via concentric patches, bars, chevrons,
eye spot, pair of central spots, rows of paired spots and an array of dots.

More elaborate models simulate complex feather patterns in the Guinea fowl, Numida
meleagris, in which the individual feathers feature transitions from bars at the base to an array
of dots at the far (distal) end. These require an oscillation created by two inhibiting signals,
with interactions in both space and time.
Patterns can form for other reasons in the vegetated landscape of tiger bush and fir waves.
Tiger bush stripes occur on arid slopes where plant growth is limited by rainfall. Each
roughly horizontal stripe of vegetation effectively collects the rainwater from the bare zone
immediately above it.

Fir waves occur in forests on mountain slopes after wind disturbance, during regeneration.
When trees fall, the trees that they had sheltered become exposed and are in turn more likely
to be damaged, so gaps tend to expand downwind.

Meanwhile, on the windward side, young trees grow, protected by the wind shadow of the
remaining tall trees.

Natural patterns are sometimes formed by animals, as in the Mima mounds of the
Northwestern United States and some other areas, which appear to be created over many
years by the burrowing activities of pocket gophers.

In permafrost soils with an active upper layer subject to annual freeze and thaw, patterned
ground can form, creating circles, nets, ice wedge polygons, steps, and stripes.

Thermal contraction causes shrinkage cracks to form; in a thaw, water fills the cracks,
expanding to form ice when next frozen, and widening the cracks into wedges. These cracks
may join up to form polygons and other shapes.