Once commercialised, sport companies and the navy could reap the benefits of this invention.

While large ocean dwelling creatures such as seals and whales keep their bodies warm in the chill ocean water with layers of blubber, smaller mammals such as otters and beavers use a different method for insulating their bodies from the cold. Nature has given them a dense fur which helps trap warm air bubbles which separates the cold water from their bodies.

In order to provide the same sort of insulation to sports-loving humans engineers at MIT have designed a wetsuit that can insulate surfers and divers from the cold thanks to a hairy layer of rubber.

To design the wetsuit material, the researchers studied beavers and otters because they can keep their bodies warm while being nimble and agile, key metrics required for a wet suite.

Moreover, although they can be submerged for a prolonged duration, they can still quickly shed water when they are out of the water.

The current scientific understanding of their hair theorizes that longer “guard” fur trap air in their dense “underfur” beneath however since their exact mechanics were unknown, it required further research.

According to the result of their study published in Physical Review Fluids, the spacing of each individual hair along with the speed at which they dive determines how much surface air is trapped between them. In order to verify their findings, the researchers, simulated the fur strands as tubes in a computer equation and were able to arrive at a mathematical model which can throw out the amount of hair and air required to provide a certain warmth.

“We have now quantified the design space and can say, ‘If you have this kind of hair density and length and are diving at these speeds, these designs will trap air, and these will not.’ Which is the information you need if you’re going to design a wetsuit,” said Anette (Peko) Hosoi, associate head of the mechanical engineering department at MIT and co-author of the study.

She went on to add, “Of course, you could make a very hairy wetsuit that looks like Cookie Monster and it would probably trap air, but that’s probably not the best way to go about it.”

Here is a video of how this works.