Manta rays’ food-capturing mechanism may hold key to better filtration systems

That strategy can be very successful, but sometimes what you discover is that nature often depends on things like regenerating materials, and other things we can’t come close to replicating. We can understand how a dragonfly flies, but we can’t replicate it efficiently. Nature is also often unconcerned with long service lives, again looking at the dragonfly. What we want from our machine tends to be durability and reparibility, not to mention affordability.

Nature can only get us so far with the current state of the art of materials science.

I share your opinion of it as well! There is a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetics

The animation in the middle of that video was very informative, thank you.