I discovered this when I was researching friction. If you zoom in on the limbs of frogs and grasshoppers, which have limbs that provide high friction for sticking to walls, you’ll find hexagonal structures. It seems like there are a lot of hexagonal structures in nature.
https://note.com/eryr13f/n/nb879520b968d
Famous examples include the honeycomb structure of a beehive, snowflakes, and turtle shells. To begin with, hexagons are spatially efficient. Of the shapes that can be tiled without gaps, triangles, squares, and hexagons, they have the largest space and are the shape closest to a circle. If they were circles, gaps would form when tiled. That’s the strength of hexagons.
https://logmi.jp/knowledge_culture/culture/133274
In addition, columnar jointed rocks formed by solidified magma also seem to be shaped like hexagonal columns. This rock, as well as the compound eyes of insects and the membranes of soap bubbles, are all hexagonal in shape, but they are formed when a small nucleus-like thing grows and expands. When expanding, the adjacent objects also expand, forming straight lines on the boundary between them, naturally filling in the gaps, resulting in a hexagon. Hexagons are amazing.
https://note.com/bright_eagle661/n/nddc7e574c3c8
And when we expand to the world of molecules, we find a lot of hexagons, such as benzene rings and fullerene structures. I guess they are also stable three-dimensionally. I think geometry such as polygons and solids is beautiful. When you look at molecular structures and rock crystal structures, you see a variety of geometric shapes, and I think it’s amazing that they are functional, rational, and beautiful.
I also learned about this recently: a 40 million year old fossil called Paleodictyon was found in Kouura, Toyo Town. It has a hexagonal mesh-like structure that looks like a trace of something, but nothing is known about it. Traces that look like Paleodictyon have been found on the current seafloor, but still nothing is known. It’s a pretty neat hexagon, but I wonder what it could be.
I looked into hexagons that have arisen naturally on Earth. Many living organisms are made up of proteins, so it may be that the strength of the hexagons in benzene rings supports their bodies. The rocks that support the Earth may also be constructed with the strength of hexagons made of crystals. Hexagons are an amazing structure with such high strength. The geometry of the Earth is amazing.
