Earwig fan designing: Biomimetic and evolutionary biology applications

Significance We report a geometrical drawing method enabling to reproduce the complex wing-folding pattern of earwigs. Although the earwig wing has unique properties with an outstanding potential for engineering, such as an extreme compactness when fully creased or self-folding behavior, its design process had not been resolved, which limited practical applications. We provide the means of reconfiguring the modeled earwig wing to satisfy flexible designing needs, including a dedicated software. The new method can also reconstruct the wing folding of Paleozoic earwig relatives, which provides the rare chance to infer evolutionary patterns based on spatial (morphofunctional) constraints. This research represents a step toward using the earwig wing as a model for artificial deployable structures of various sizes and materials.