Fig. 4
From: Intertidal exposure favors the soft-studded armor of adaptive mussel coatings
Hydration effects on cuticle nanomechanics. All panels labeled with (i) represent M. galloprovincialis, (ii) M. californianus, (iii) S. bifurcatus, and (iv) M. capax. a, b AFM amplitude (top row), phase (middle row), and force spectroscopic (lower row, 32 x 32 pixels) images of the submerged (a) and desiccated (b) cuticles of all species (scale bar = 150 nm). Arrows indicate the granular structures within the individual channels. c Corresponding fitted stiffness distributions of all force maps (submerged/blue, exposed/green, and desiccated/red, see Supplementary Figure 6 for unfitted raw datasets), along with the peak values (n = 576 binned datapoints, mean ± s.d.), are overlaid and summarized
