Whether tissue is wet or dry, a new bandage will stick to it — like an intestinal parasite.

Jeffrey Karp at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and his team have designed a gripping material that steals the sticky secrets of the spiny-headed worm Pomphorhynchus laevis. The parasite pierces its fish host with a proboscis that then swells up to lock into place.

The researchers' adhesive is made up of spikes coated with a super-absorbent plastic. When the spikes come into contact with water in tissue, they swell and fasten to the tissue. The removable bandage adhered tightly to pig skin and intestine, and was more than three times as adhesive as surgical staples for affixing skin grafts.

Nature Commun. 4, 1702 (2013)