Stories about biomimicry can be catnip for design journalists. They’re catchy, and there’s something seductive about a designer borrowing from a legacy solution in nature to solve a human problem. But some of the most richly interesting biomimicry stories are more complex, with messy causality, dead ends, or undeserved hype. The company claimed a first-of-its-kind approach, borrowing not just one element from nature (like a bird feather or whale fin) but an entire model organism: the boxfish. So he sought out an entomologist at Arizona State University’s Biomimicry Center.