Earth is about 71 percent water. An overwhelming 97 percent of that water is found in the oceans, leaving us with only 3 percent in the form of freshwater—and much of that is frozen in the form of glaciers. That leaves just 0.3 percent of that freshwater on the surface in lakes, swamps, springs, and our main sources of drinking water, rivers and streams.

Despite our planet’s famously blue appearance from space, thirsty aliens would be disappointed. Drinkable water is actually pretty scarce.

As if that doesn’t already sound unsettling, what little water we have is also threatened by climate change, urbanization, pollution, and a global population that continues to expand. Over 2 billion people live in regions where their only source of drinking water is contaminated. Pathogenic microbes in the water can cause cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, polio, and typhoid, which could be fatal in areas without access to vaccines or medical treatment.

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Some of the most ingenious tech has been inspired by nature. From color-changing materials that function like cephalopod skin to a tiny biomimetic robot that looks and moves like an actual cockroach, the extraordinary adaptations of some organisms have upgraded our technological capabilities. Now the octopus is lending an arm—or a sucker.

Octopus tentacles have remarkably strong suckers with an adhesion power that could be an asset to soft robots that need to pick things up and hold onto them. Existing artificial suction cups have trouble with irregular surfaces such as rocks and shells. Cephalopods such as octopuses and squid have evolved biological suckers that can adapt to each surface and attach to them. This is why a team of researchers at the University of Bristol, led by Tianqi Yue, have created robotic suckers that are closer to the real thing than ever.

One reason biological suckers have an edge is mucus secretion, better enabling them to stick on an irregular surface. While robotic suckers can’t exactly go there, Yue figured out a way for them to use water instead of mucus.

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How did reptilian things that looked something like crocodiles get to the Caribbean islands from South America millions of years ago? They probably walked.

The existence of any prehistoric apex predators in the islands of the Caribbean used to be doubted. While their absence would have probably made it even more of a paradise for prey animals, fossils unearthed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have revealed that these islands were crawling with monster crocodyliform species called sebecids, ancient relatives of crocodiles.

While sebecids first emerged during the Cretaceous, this is the first evidence of them lurking outside South America during the Cenozoic epoch, which began 66 million years ago. An international team of researchers has found that these creatures would stalk and hunt in the Caribbean islands millions of years after similar predators went extinct on the South American mainland. Lower sea levels back then could have exposed enough land to walk across.

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The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) is a jewel-toned hummingbird found in the neotropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean. It shimmers blue and green in the sunlight as it flits from flower to flower, a tiny spectacle of the rainforest.

Jay Falk, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, expected to find something like that when he sought this species out in Panama. What he didn’t expect was a caterpillar in the nest of one of these birds. At least it looked like a caterpillar—it was actually a hatchling with some highly unusual camouflage.

The chick was covered in long, fine feathers similar to the urticating hairs that some caterpillars are covered in. These often toxic barbed hairs deter predators, who can suffer anything from inflammation to nausea and even death if they attack. Falk realized he was witnessing mimicry only seen in one other bird species and never before in hummingbirds. It seemed that the nestlings of this species had evolved a defense: convincing predators they were poisonous.

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