#pateklab

With the world’s fastest punch, dazzling colors, incredible eyes, and unique body structure it’s no wonder these little powerhouses have been getting attention all over the internet.  From comics, to inspiring next generation body armor, and new types of cameras, they are tremendously intriguing.  

Mantis shrimp are in an order of crustaceans called stomatopods, with 17 families and over 400 species.

Weaponizers 

In general they are divided into two groups based on their method of attack, smashers and grabbers.  Mantis shrimp’s most defining feature are their raptorial appendages. Their first pair of legs are specialized predatory weapons, similar legs are found on their insectoid namesake, praying mantises, as well as a few other kinds of insects.  

Grabbers are ambush predators, lying in wait to grab a fish that comes in range. Their raptorial appendages are extremely similar to praying mantis, and superbly adapted for spearing and grabbing fish.

Smashers are more active predators that pursue their prey and use their raptorial appendages to club and smash clams and crabs.  This club, to withstand the extreme forces inflicted by smashing, has several layers of mineralized fiber to reinforce their exoskeleton.  Each layer of this is aligned and arranged at an angle to the layer below, this created a spiral structure perpendicular to the point of impact, dissipating the force.  

This structure is currently being researched to develop for use in body armor.

The raptorial appendage’s speed is way faster than is possible by muscle movement alone, so how do they achieve such power? They store potential energy with a system of pivots, springs and trigger latches.  They work on the same principle as a crossbow, build up potential energy in something by applying force to it, hold it there with a latch, and use a trigger to release it.  The structure that they use for this isn’t found anywhere else in the biological world, it is called a hyperbolic paraboloid spring, a saddle shaped mechanism. 

When the trigger is released, along with the potential energy, the dactyl can accelerate to 50 mph in only 3 thousandths of a second, as quickly as a .22 caliber bullet, and that’s with the added resistance of being underwater!  To put this in perspective, the average time it takes you to blink is 3 tenths of a second, the mantis shrimp’s punch is one hundred times faster than that, and it imparts forces thousands of times more than it’s own body weight.  

You might think the devastation would be over by now, you’d be wrong.  The club moves so fast that it can create a cavitation bubble, this is caused by the speed of the dactyl altering the pressure in the water creating an extremely low pressure area which makes the water vaporize, literally boiling the water.  However, due to the relatively high pressure of the surrounding water the bubble collapses back onto itself creating a shockwave.  This shockwave has a fraction, yet still significant amount, of the force of the actual impact.  

Extreme Eyes

Mantis shrimp eyes are so different from ours that it’s hard to even comprehend.

Dogs and a lot of other animals have 2 types of color receptor cells called cones, this is called dichromacy.  Most humans have 3 types of cones trichromacy, allowing us to see wavelengths from 400-too nanometers, this is what we call the visible spectrum, about a million colors.  There are many animals with 4 cones, most insects reptiles and birds, tetrachromacy, and even some that have 5 including pigeons and some butterflies, pentachromacy.  The mantis shrimp however blows these all away.  They have a mind boggling 16 types of cone cells.

They can also see polarized light using a specialized band across their eyes.  And if that wasn’t enough, each eye has 3 focal points which gives them unparalleled depth perception and what I’m going to call hexanocular vision.

any animal with an exceptionally unique and interesting feature is something to be amazed by, but the mantis shrimp truly is like an alien on earth, absolutely fascinating.  

Check out some mantis shrimp in action. And if you like these kinds of videos check out other videos by both of these channels.