Fracture mechanics teaches us that the stress applied externally to a bonded system is amplified at the crack tip, which is characterized by a square root singularity. In the real biofouling release situations, however, the above condition is not always met and thus the singularity is tempered (Figure ). For example, if the coating is much smaller than the dimension of the foulant, which is typically the case with many foulants, the stress intensity factor is reduced by their ratio. This reduction can be so huge that release becomes virtually unrealistic. Secondly, the adhesive released by the fouling organism can spread on the coating forming a thin film ahead of the thicker central region of the foulant. Here, crack does not initiate from the edge of contact, so that the only venue to release is the central region, where crack initiates as bubbles via interfacial cavitation. Following cavitation, the bubbles would nucleate and a crack would be formed that then would eventually propagate from the center to the outer region of contact as a run away instability. This mode of failure requires unduly high stress, which, while is beneficial to achieving strong gecko-mimetic adhesion , is a detriment for easy release. What is needed in moving forward is to design a coating that would generate a repulsive force all along the interface, thereby pushing the foulant off the surface of the coating. The main idea of this research is described in Figure . Here, the coating itself is made of an elastomer, in which hydrophilic components are dispersed. When exposed to water, such a coating would swell by absorbing water from the surroundings. As the droplets grow inside the elastomer, two possibilities can emerge. In one scenario, the entire composite film would undergo a volume expansion. Since the film is thin and is well bonded to a rigid support, such a volume expansion would be possible only with a homogeneous increase of its thickness. On the other hand, such a homogeneous deformation is intrinsically unstable with a thin film, as a perturbation would lead to an inhomogeneous growth, thus leading to an Morphological instability in soft elastomeric films. Various types of morphological patterns have been observed in numerous settings, which would be too dauting to review in this paper. Interested readers may consult the reviews cited in references 6-9 and the references cited therein. In a previous study involving thin bonded elastomeric films , such type of instability was observed when a flat rigid object was released from the film with the application of an external force. Various analysis have shown that the formation of periodic undulation of the film thickness is preferable over a homogeneous deformation as the total elastic energy stored in the undulated film is lesser than that of a homogeneous deformation.