The trouble with many mouse traps is they're just too safe: a mouse can lick off cheese, butter and other poorly attached baits. Smeared on baits can be consumed without triggering the trap. Enter cloth cheese: the high tensile strength yummy thing that mouse must wrestle with, thus triggering the trap. Attach to too smooth triggers with a small alligator clip. Bacon might work but some mice don't like the flavor.
-- Steamboat, Jan 11 2019

Cheese Cloth Cheese_20Cloth
[Skewed, Jan 12 2019]

Gecko's Foot https://www.indepen...-forbes-315616.html
A bit quaint now, like most science books aged 10+ years old [not_morrison_rm, Jan 12 2019]

Mosquito seeking missile mosquito_20seeking_20missile
Another insect-focused armament [Voice, Jan 14 2019]

// just too safe: //

Perhaps you may be interested in a selection of our BorgCo mousetraps ... vermin elimination devices so dangerous that they are proscribed under a number of international conventions intended to limit the spread of WMDs ?
-- 8th of 7, Jan 11 2019


I'm pretty sure that the North Vietnamese attack mice were too small to trip a claymore?

Resulting night raids, and "Mickey's in the wire" etc.
-- not_morrison_rm, Jan 11 2019


Technology has moved on since then. Even now, BorgCo designers are working on nanoscale Claymore mines to deal with head lice.
-- 8th of 7, Jan 11 2019


That is unlikely to be effective. A group in Belgium, a while back, showed that insects smaller than 1-2mm are remarkably resilient to explosions - even the heat doesn't kill them, as they are pushed away by the first shock wave. They also showed that you can't shoot similarly small insects; I mean, you can, but unless the insect is squished between the bullet and another object, they just bounce off the bullet and survive the N,000g of acceleration. Houseflies just sort of mush and end up spreading around the bullet, from which they do not recover. But then again, who wants bullet holes in the sugar bowl?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 11 2019


We said they were working on the problem. We didn't say they'd had any actual success.

The optimum projectile configuration has been defined as microscopic flechettes, made of tungsten alloy, but most of the effort at the moment seems to be directed towards trying to stop the bleeding.
-- 8th of 7, Jan 11 2019


"The Gecko's foot" book there's bound to be an example from nature.
-- not_morrison_rm, Jan 12 2019



random, halfbakery