Dead sporulating female fly cadavers infected by the house fly-pathogenic fungus Entomophthora muscae are attractive to healthy male flies, which by their physical inspection may mechanically trigger spore release and by their movement create whirlwind airflows that covers them in infectious conidia. The fungal artillery of E. muscae protrudes outward from the fly cadaver, and consists of a plethora of micrometric stalks that each uses a liquid-based turgor pressure build-up to eject a jet of protoplasm and the initially attached spore. The biophysical processes that regulate the release and range of spores, however, are unknown. To study the physics of ejection, we design a biomimetic ‘soft cannon’ that consists of a millimetric elastomeric barrel filled with fluid and plugged with a projectile. We precisely control the maximum pressure leading up to the ejection, and study the cannon efficiency as a function of its geometry and wall elasticity. In particular, we predict that ejection velocity decreases with spore size. The calculated flight trajectories under aerodynamic drag predict that the minimum spore size required to traverse a quiescent layer of a few millimetres around the fly cadaver is approximately 10 µm. This corroborates with the natural size of E. muscae conidia (approx. 27 µm) being large enough to traverse the boundary layer but small enough (less than 40 µm) to be lifted by air currents. Based on this understanding, we show how the fungal spores are able to reach a new host.

Fluid-structure interactions are ubiquitous in nature and technology. However, the systems are often so complex that numerical simulations or ad hoc assumptions must be used to gain insight into the details of the complex interactions between the fluid and solid mechanics. In this paper, we present experiments and theory on viscous flow in a simple bioinspired soft valve which illustrate essential features of interactions between hydrodynamic and elastic forces at low Reynolds numbers. The setup comprises a sphere connected to a spring located inside a tapering cylindrical channel. The spring is aligned with the central axis of the channel and a pressure drop is applied across the sphere, thus forcing the liquid through the narrow gap between the sphere and the channel walls. The sphere's equilibrium position is determined by a balance between spring and hydrodynamic forces. Since the gap thickness changes with the sphere's position, the system has a pressure-dependent hydraulic resistance. This leads to a non-linear relation between applied pressure and flow rate: flow initially increases with pressure, but decreases when the pressure exceeds a certain critical value as the gap closes. To rationalize these observations, we propose a mathematical model that reduced the complexity of the flow to a two-dimensional lubrication approximation. A closed-form expression for the pressure-drop/flow rate is obtained which reveals that the flow rate Q depends on the pressure drop ∆p, sphere radius a, gap thickness h 0 , and viscosity η as Q ∼ η −1 a 1/2 h 5/2 0 (∆p c − ∆p) 5/2 ∆p, where the critical pressure ∆p c scales with the spring constant k and sphere radius a as ∆p c ∼ ka −2 . These predictions compared favorably to the results of our experiments with no free parameters.