Mantis Shrimp – The Ultra-Fast Predators

[Music] this is one of the fastest motions in nature faster than the blink of an eye faster than your naked eye can even see these Technicolor murder machines are called mantis shrimp and they might just be the coolest animal in the entire ocean and I don&#39;t say that lightly and if the speed of their clubs of up to 31 meters per second isn&#39;t impressive enough the acceleration of those clubs Rivals the acceleration of a bullet being fired from a gun for a human to break the same shells that a mantis shrimp breaks we would need a big hammer and a strong swing a manta shrimp can achieve the same thing with an appendage smaller than a small child&#39;s pinky finger these guys help make up an entire category of the natural world that&#39;s only been recently described the ultra fast forget about the fastest human or even something like a cheetah those don&#39;t even register on the ultra fast scale instead it&#39;s populated by extraordinarily fast creatures such as trap jaw ants launching fungal spores ballistic termite jaws and stinging jellyfish Fishers working around shallow reefs have attested to the damage a mantis shrimp can do to their bare hands and feet and Aquarium owners have to be especially careful not to annoy their powerful Little Friends these guys can sometimes punch through extremely thick glass and will decimate any other animals living alongside them in the tank these Wiley Fighters are among the most ferocious carnivores in the ocean and yet curiously the fastest species among them prey almost exclusively on the slowest creatures like snails and oysters and the slower species go for the fastest prey snatching Creatures two or three times their size from crabs to octopuses and not only are mantis shrimp extremely fast at punching and stabbing their eyes are the most complex in the entire Animal Kingdom whereas humans have three types of photoreceptor cells in our eyes mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptors they see ultraviolet light and polarized light and their eyes are so Advanced that their retina processes visual information before it even gets to their brain scientists are beginning to explore whether mantis shrimp eyes could even see cancer before it starts to spread what is it about these little creatures that makes them so fast so ferocious and so extreme and how do these obscure Crustaceans harness the laws of physics in ways we have never been able to replicate mantis shrimp are small colorful and aggressive Crustaceans that live in tropical and subtropical Waters but for all that they&#39;re usually only about 10 centimeters or 4 inches long the very largest might get to be 40 centimeters or 15 inches only a little bigger than a foot long sub the order stomatopoda to which all mantis shrimp belong separated from other Crustaceans around 400 million years ago then over the next 200 million years the shrimp-like ancestor of modern mantis shrimps had some of their mouth Parts morph into raptorial claws giving them the predatory appearance of praying mantises from which they took their name these types of mantis shrimp came to be classified as spearers and their deadly claws shape everything from the way they hunt to how they live take the world&#39;s largest mantis shrimp for example the zebra mantis shrimp it can grow up to 40 centimeters in size and hunts as an ambush Predator living in Sandy Burrows on the shallow sea floor only its eyes poking out as it waits for its prey it&#39;s impossible for fish to see the zebra mantis shrimp hidden in the sand and by the time it strikes it&#39;s too late for escape the spears shoot out at a speed of 2.3 meters per second impaling the fish on 10 sharp spines that jut out from its claws in one experiment researchers found that most zebra mantis shrimp strikes were successful in capturing fish but if you&#39;ve ever tried to trap a fly with your hand you might be able to imagine how hard it is to snap up prey and hold on to it how do they do it first there is the raptorial claw itself it&#39;s designed to be strong but also flexible because it needs to slice through soft flesh and then hold on to it while the fish tries to get away to achieve all this the spear has several spikes which are slightly hooked Hollow beams made of several layers on the outside is a thin hard and mineralized epicutical decorated by serrations and grooves to lock onto its prey on the inside is a less mineralized region with fibrous layers of chitin protein to allow for flexibility unlike something like a bee stinger or a mosquito proboscis both of which are straight to maximize how deep they can penetrate the mantis shrimp spearing Claw is curved this helps it keep a hold onto its prey to understand more about the Ecology of mantis shrimp we talked to Dr Maya DeVries who spent years studying mantis shrimp both in the lab and in the field when we capture them in the fields we do take advantage of their prey mechanism will put squid or fish on a lure and then we will lure them out of their Burrows that way and then we we have like a little noose that&#39;s around the burrow so it comes out and then we&#39;re able to kind of cook it the next element of the spears strike is how it achieves such high speeds first flexor and extensor muscles in the Maris are engaged the extensor muscles compress the claw while the flexor muscles trigger a latch to lock into place when the flexor muscle relaxes and the latch slips open the claw strikes out at incredibly high speeds while at the same time the mantis shrimp lunges out of its burrow with a fish now trapped in its claws it drags its meal back into the sand to feast and we couldn&#39;t resist asking Dr DeVries the burning question on our minds um have you ever been speared thankfully never a sphere never conspired that sounds scary because these mantis shrimp live in the sand it&#39;s pretty easy to move from one place to another that means they tend not to be very aggressive when it comes to defending their homes it just isn&#39;t worth the risk of injury but that is absolutely not the case when it comes to the other type of mantis shrimp the ones with Incredible smashing claws somewhere along the way of their evolutionary path a small subset of mantis shrimp changed from being Spears to Smashers instead of growing terrifying spines from their raptorial claws these shrimp developed clubs that look much less formidable but looks can be deceiving because these clubs achieve some of the fastest speeds in nature whereas the zebra mantis shrimp can extend its spear at a speed of 2.3 meters per second Smashers like the purple spot mantis shrimp extend their clubs at a speed of 31 meters per second with an acceleration of well over 100 000 meters per second squared this is an acceleration greater than a 22 caliber bullet fired from a pistol their clubs can produce around 1500 Newtons or 340 pounds of force impact forces thousands of times greater than their body weight but when scientists were first studying the impact forces of these punches something absolutely weird was showing up in the force graph there was one Spike showing for the punch as you&#39;d expect but another second Spike would happen soon after the punch and when reviewing the footage of this moment the scientists saw something else weird a bubble forming and a flash of light they realized that the mantis shrimp Club was bouncing back after hitting the shell so fast that it creates a small area of extremely low pressure and when pressure drops this low in water the water instantly vaporizes AKA it boils this creates a vapor bubble called a cavitation bubble but this bubble doesn&#39;t last long the pressure from the water all around the bubble forces it to collapse and when this happens energy is released in the form of sound heat and light this energy is so strong that it heats up to temperatures that rival the surface of the Sun stuns the Mantis shrimp&#39;s prey for a second time and creates that second Peak on the graph to understand this strange phenomenon we talked to the scientist who first discovered it Dr Sheila Paddock so when we saw the cavitation bubbles for the first time it really was like actually thrilling and we knew that that that was probably the first time anybody had seen it because the technology just hadn&#39;t even been there we were using the newest latest greatest cameras do you think do the produce that rotation bubble or do you think the cavitation bubble is like a nice side effect for them you know my careful scientist answer would be I don&#39;t know um just as a as an observer I would say that they did evolve to cavitate because it&#39;s so robust like it&#39;s just no matter what they hit a cavities they don&#39;t cavitate at the wrong time they cavitate at the right time some of the data we have show that you&#39;ll have like Four Peaks in a row that are evenly spaced so to me that looks to me like something that has actually evolved whereas some of the other animals that we&#39;ve studied that cavitate including this really hilarious tiny shrimp that we published about also has an incredibly fast human being appendage that shoots a water jet but it only cavitates if the water jet happens to hit something somewhere along its path and that starts to look a bit more like an accident as opposed to this sort of incredibly robust Phenomenon with the with the Mantis room given how different the attack is for Smasher shrimp than their Spirit relatives their prey is also very different they tend to eat things with hardened exoskeletons like oysters and snails with these prey extreme force is necessary for cracking them open and the cavitation bubbles are definitely helpful but this all seems like a counter-intuitive evolutionary result that the fastest animals prey on the slowest but it&#39;s likely not a coincidence a hint as to why this Paradox might exist can be seen while watching a clubbing mantis shrimp prepare to break a shell first it touches Wiggles and positions the shell exactly where it wants it it Taps the Shell with its antenna seems to wait a moment and then it strikes the key to it all is in the moment it seems to be waiting this is the moment that enables the Smashing mantis shrimp to be so fast the moment this mantis shrimp needs to take to be able to strike and the reason it prefers prey that won&#39;t really move while It prepares to do so the shrimp is winding up Spring loading its claw to an extraordinary degree the spring in question is shaped like a saddle which is made up of chitin and sits on top of the claw in the moment just before the strike the shrimp&#39;s muscles compress it and holds it back with a latching mechanism then when it&#39;s time to strike this potential energy is released and the club swings forwards this saddle spring mechanism allows the club to be released at an enormous velocity a much higher velocity than any muscle would be capable of producing by itself the spearing mantis shrimp also has a saddle like this but it&#39;s much less effective the easiest way to understand it is by comparing your performance throwing an arrow versus launching one with a bow just throwing the arrow using your arm muscles will probably not make it go very far nor very fast but use those same arm muscles to flex a bow and then release the arrow with your fingers suddenly the arrow goes much farther and much faster and yet the energy input is the same whether or not a bow is used the only difference is the time over which the energy is released so in other words it&#39;s a small amount of energy but the intensity of the release is extremely high so a lot of people are like oh you know they&#39;re very powerful animals and they use so much energy but actually they just really don&#39;t they use very little energy and they release it over short periods of time which is very explosive the design of their raptorial Claw is also quite different than the spirit of shrimp because the club has to withstand such immense forces repeatedly the exterior of the club is covered by a crack resistant coating a little like the tape boxers use for binding their hands underneath that coating are two regions with fibers aligned in different directions one area of fibers dissipates cracks while the other stops the club from expanding on impact all of this means that the shrimp can batter away on a clam shell or even a glass aquarium wall without damaging its claw and we know that the Manta shrimp have a very good sense of the three-dimensional structure and mechanics of the shells that they&#39;re hitting and that in fact they will hit the shells at the most efficient structural locations to break them so you give them a high spired shell or globular shell and they&#39;ll hit them differently and we&#39;ve seen from our physical models of manta shrimp that that sequence that they&#39;re using is actually the most efficient to break those geometries because Smasher mantis shrimp hunt prey that live on rocks and coral they also live in very different habitats and it turns out their clubs come in handy for more than just hunting by having that superpower appendage to break open snail shells that means that that food is available to them but it also means that they can use it for a bunch of other things like knocking out a crab oh and I should say some species of Smashing mantis shrub um build Burrows with their hammers that they create by like break you know inside the coral they&#39;ll bang out all the little sections and they&#39;ll be like a perfect little house inside the coral which of course is a very nice protected home they prefer hard substrates for their Burrows which means real estate is at much more of a premium the borough needs to be big enough for them to fit but small enough that they can block the entrance with their tail and that means these mantis shrimp regularly get into fights over Burrows and these fights can get very aggressive one group of researchers found that sparring strikes actually pack more energy into them than Strikes used for predation so we had to ask Dr Paddock the same question is there ever any occupational hazard handling these guys are your fingers ever in danger yeah no I mean you do have to be careful the bigger problem is that they have a spike at the end of their appendage and if that goes in your skin it&#39;s really unpleasant but you know I mean if you have a cat you know like with claws you know you just gotta learn how to work with the cat right it&#39;s the same idea so it&#39;s pretty rare that anybody has a problem there are like kind of crazy story stories out there about people who like lost a finger because of a manta shrimp but usually it&#39;s because you know they they were like diving and they stuck their hand down the hole and then the thing hit them and then they didn&#39;t move and so then the animal speared them and then they get all the bacteria in their finger like like these are like this honestly never happened to us and it never will like these are just really weird stories that end up on the Internet um but for the most part they don&#39;t even want to spear you even the spears don&#39;t want to spear you because if they get their appendage stuck in your skin they&#39;re gonna lose the appendage so more typically they just hit you with the hammer or with the bass like with the spearers and that doesn&#39;t hurt that much I&#39;ve been hit bajillion times including in the field because at the end of the day it&#39;s dangerous to be a mantis shrimp luckily mantis shrimp have an incredibly hard armor over their body and especially their telsin or tail and this armor has raised protuberances that protect them from fracturing even when they take such heavy blows so it&#39;s clear that the different types of raptorial claws play a huge role in determining everything about the mantis shrimp&#39;s lives but it&#39;s not only their claws but dictate much of their behavior it&#39;s also their eyes mantis shrimp are often said to have the most complex eyes of any creature in the animal kingdom and they might be the part of their body that makes them look the most alien and these eyes help them to be such effective Predators they do have this amazing predatory Vision because they have two eyes that move independently and each eye has trinocular Vision you know we binocular vision they have trinocular Vision I honestly can&#39;t even conceptualize what that looks like but so together they have hex nocular Vision so they are able to take in an incredible amount of information and that very likely improves the success of their ability to Target things the rest of their body having trinocular Vision in each eye gives them depth perception from just one eyeball a useful adaptation if you regularly get into fights with rivals or other predators and end up losing an eye the three regions of the eye have pseudo-pupils that can scan different parts of the environment but the part that most interests researchers is the mid-band it has six rows of thousands of omitidia or photoreceptor cells which are used to detect specific wavelengths of light including ultraviolet light altogether they have 12 to 16 kinds of photoreceptors in their eyes humans by comparison have just three dogs have only two and birds have four allowing them to perceive ultraviolet light which is not part of the visible spectrum for humans and yet scientists have found mantis shrimp aren&#39;t actually all that good at discriminating between colors in one experiment they trained 10 mantis shrimp to recognize 10 different color wavelengths respectively ranging from 400 to 650 nanometers they did this by showing the mantis shrimp two colors and giving them a frozen prawn when they picked the right wavelength after the mantis shrimp were adequately trained the scientists presented them with more colors they found that the shrimp could detect between the chosen wavelength and another color as long as that color was 50 to 100 nanometers up or down the Spectrum but if the difference between wavelengths was 12 to 25 nanometers they couldn&#39;t tell them apart and yet humans with our three measly photoreceptor types can differentiate millions of colors and we have little trouble seeing between wavelengths that are only five nanometers apart although they can see this incredibly wide spectrum of light and wavelengths they don&#39;t see color obviously the way we do they can&#39;t actually distinguish between different tones of colors for example like blue dark blue a yellow that kind of thing so we might actually see a widering color in in that way the researchers hypothesized that maybe each photoreceptor in a mantis shrimp picks up a specific color and identifies it in a way that&#39;s less discriminating than the human eye but also doesn&#39;t require so much brain power that way they can quickly determine if something is predator or prey or they&#39;re processing A Vision Works more like our processing of hearing which is a a little bit more step wise and on and off whereas our vision is continuous um we&#39;ve seen like continuous Spectra these photoreceptors might also help them detect polarized light which is a very special skill among animals to understand this we first have to understand how light moves normally the wavelengths of light vibrate in every direction along vertical and horizontal axes it&#39;s random and chaotic and it&#39;s most of what we see polarized light is when the wavelengths vibrate in only a certain direction say on the vertical plane or horizontal plane polarization can happen through reflection or refraction which happens in the water or by applying a filter like polarized sunglasses it&#39;s not something humans can see but other creatures like octopus squid crabs and cuttlefish can see some types of polarized light but Manta shrimp can see six types of polarization horizontal vertical two diagonals and two types of circular polarization when the light waves spiral clockwise or counterclockwise they&#39;re the only animals we know of who can see circularly polarized light researchers think this not only helps them scan their surroundings for prey but also for communication they found that certain species of mantis shrimp have body parts that display circular polarization patterns which could be used in fighting or mating and mantis shrimp are able to process much of this visual stimuli before it even reaches the part of their brain that acts as a visual cortex thanks to something called a reniform body this kidney-shaped structure is located in the eye stalks of the mantis shrimp and connects directly to their brain it seems that it helps them quickly process color and other visual information and send that onto the brain so that all the information can be managed as quickly as possible the incredible adaptations of the mantis shrimp haven&#39;t just astonished zoologists and anatomists they&#39;ve also spurred us towards new Innovations in a variety of fields materials scientists in particular are interested in mantis shrimp claws to help in developing strong yet flexible compounds others built a 1.5 gram sized robot that mimicked a smash or mantis shrimp and it was able to punch faster than any similar device of its size though still not as fast as the mantis shrimp itself researchers who work in Optics have modeled different types of cameras off mantis shrimp eyes from polarized cameras that can be used underwater to cameras that might help in the detection of cancerous cells before they spread out into the body and the research is still ongoing with plenty of more discoveries to be made in just the past few years researchers discovered that mantis shrimp have twice as many light detecting proteins in their eyes as we expected we don&#39;t understand yet why this is the case but it offers another tantalizing direction to explore the ocean is still full of incredible diversity and discoveries waiting to be made nowhere is this more true than the deep sea a place that haunts our imagination with creatures that sometimes look too bizarre to even be real these deep sea creatures are the focus of our next video where we will explore why it is that creatures seem to get weirder and weirder the deeper in the ocean you go to watch this video right now two weeks early head over to nebula thanks to a feature we&#39;re calling nebula first every real science video is posted on nebula two weeks before it ever reaches YouTube nebula is the streaming platform made by me and several other educational YouTube content creators it&#39;s a place where we can take more risks upload videos early and post original content that doesn&#39;t necessarily fit on YouTube there are so many original series like becoming human our series on the incredible story of human evolution Joe&#39;s Scott&#39;s 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[Music] this is one of the fastest motions in nature faster than the blink of an eye faster than your naked eye can even see these Technicolor murder machines are called mantis shrimp and they might just be the coolest animal in the entire ocean and I don&amp;#39;t say that lightly and if the speed of their clubs of up to 31 meters per second isn&amp;#39;t impressive enough the acceleration of those clubs Rivals the acceleration of a bullet being fired from a gun for a human to break the same shells that a mantis shrimp breaks we would need a big hammer and a strong swing a manta shrimp can achieve the same thing with an appendage smaller than a small child&amp;#39;s pinky finger these guys help make up an entire category of the natural world that&amp;#39;s only been recently described the ultra fast forget about the fastest human or even something like a cheetah those don&amp;#39;t even register on the ultra fast scale instead it&amp;#39;s populated by extraordinarily fast creatures such as trap jaw ants launching fungal spores ballistic termite jaws and stinging jellyfish Fishers working around shallow reefs have attested to the damage a mantis shrimp can do to their bare hands and feet and Aquarium owners have to be especially careful not to annoy their powerful Little Friends these guys can sometimes punch through extremely thick glass and will decimate any other animals living alongside them in the tank these Wiley Fighters are among the most ferocious carnivores in the ocean and yet curiously the fastest species among them prey almost exclusively on the slowest creatures like snails and oysters and the slower species go for the fastest prey snatching Creatures two or three times their size from crabs to octopuses and not only are mantis shrimp extremely fast at punching and stabbing their eyes are the most complex in the entire Animal Kingdom whereas humans have three types of photoreceptor cells in our eyes mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptors they see ultraviolet light and polarized light and their eyes are so Advanced that their retina processes visual information before it even gets to their brain scientists are beginning to explore whether mantis shrimp eyes could even see cancer before it starts to spread what is it about these little creatures that makes them so fast so ferocious and so extreme and how do these obscure Crustaceans harness the laws of physics in ways we have never been able to replicate mantis shrimp are small colorful and aggressive Crustaceans that live in tropical and subtropical Waters but for all that they&amp;#39;re usually only about 10 centimeters or 4 inches long the very largest might get to be 40 centimeters or 15 inches only a little bigger than a foot long sub the order stomatopoda to which all mantis shrimp belong separated from other Crustaceans around 400 million years ago then over the next 200 million years the shrimp-like ancestor of modern mantis shrimps had some of their mouth Parts morph into raptorial claws giving them the predatory appearance of praying mantises from which they took their name these types of mantis shrimp came to be classified as spearers and their deadly claws shape everything from the way they hunt to how they live take the world&amp;#39;s largest mantis shrimp for example the zebra mantis shrimp it can grow up to 40 centimeters in size and hunts as an ambush Predator living in Sandy Burrows on the shallow sea floor only its eyes poking out as it waits for its prey it&amp;#39;s impossible for fish to see the zebra mantis shrimp hidden in the sand and by the time it strikes it&amp;#39;s too late for escape the spears shoot out at a speed of 2.3 meters per second impaling the fish on 10 sharp spines that jut out from its claws in one experiment researchers found that most zebra mantis shrimp strikes were successful in capturing fish but if you&amp;#39;ve ever tried to trap a fly with your hand you might be able to imagine how hard it is to snap up prey and hold on to it how do they do it first there is the raptorial claw itself it&amp;#39;s designed to be strong but also flexible because it needs to slice through soft flesh and then hold on to it while the fish tries to get away to achieve all this the spear has several spikes which are slightly hooked Hollow beams made of several layers on the outside is a thin hard and mineralized epicutical decorated by serrations and grooves to lock onto its prey on the inside is a less mineralized region with fibrous layers of chitin protein to allow for flexibility unlike something like a bee stinger or a mosquito proboscis both of which are straight to maximize how deep they can penetrate the mantis shrimp spearing Claw is curved this helps it keep a hold onto its prey to understand more about the Ecology of mantis shrimp we talked to Dr Maya DeVries who spent years studying mantis shrimp both in the lab and in the field when we capture them in the fields we do take advantage of their prey mechanism will put squid or fish on a lure and then we will lure them out of their Burrows that way and then we we have like a little noose that&amp;#39;s around the burrow so it comes out and then we&amp;#39;re able to kind of cook it the next element of the spears strike is how it achieves such high speeds first flexor and extensor muscles in the Maris are engaged the extensor muscles compress the claw while the flexor muscles trigger a latch to lock into place when the flexor muscle relaxes and the latch slips open the claw strikes out at incredibly high speeds while at the same time the mantis shrimp lunges out of its burrow with a fish now trapped in its claws it drags its meal back into the sand to feast and we couldn&amp;#39;t resist asking Dr DeVries the burning question on our minds um have you ever been speared thankfully never a sphere never conspired that sounds scary because these mantis shrimp live in the sand it&amp;#39;s pretty easy to move from one place to another that means they tend not to be very aggressive when it comes to defending their homes it just isn&amp;#39;t worth the risk of injury but that is absolutely not the case when it comes to the other type of mantis shrimp the ones with Incredible smashing claws somewhere along the way of their evolutionary path a small subset of mantis shrimp changed from being Spears to Smashers instead of growing terrifying spines from their raptorial claws these shrimp developed clubs that look much less formidable but looks can be deceiving because these clubs achieve some of the fastest speeds in nature whereas the zebra mantis shrimp can extend its spear at a speed of 2.3 meters per second Smashers like the purple spot mantis shrimp extend their clubs at a speed of 31 meters per second with an acceleration of well over 100 000 meters per second squared this is an acceleration greater than a 22 caliber bullet fired from a pistol their clubs can produce around 1500 Newtons or 340 pounds of force impact forces thousands of times greater than their body weight but when scientists were first studying the impact forces of these punches something absolutely weird was showing up in the force graph there was one Spike showing for the punch as you&amp;#39;d expect but another second Spike would happen soon after the punch and when reviewing the footage of this moment the scientists saw something else weird a bubble forming and a flash of light they realized that the mantis shrimp Club was bouncing back after hitting the shell so fast that it creates a small area of extremely low pressure and when pressure drops this low in water the water instantly vaporizes AKA it boils this creates a vapor bubble called a cavitation bubble but this bubble doesn&amp;#39;t last long the pressure from the water all around the bubble forces it to collapse and when this happens energy is released in the form of sound heat and light this energy is so strong that it heats up to temperatures that rival the surface of the Sun stuns the Mantis shrimp&amp;#39;s prey for a second time and creates that second Peak on the graph to understand this strange phenomenon we talked to the scientist who first discovered it Dr Sheila Paddock so when we saw the cavitation bubbles for the first time it really was like actually thrilling and we knew that that that was probably the first time anybody had seen it because the technology just hadn&amp;#39;t even been there we were using the newest latest greatest cameras do you think do the produce that rotation bubble or do you think the cavitation bubble is like a nice side effect for them you know my careful scientist answer would be I don&amp;#39;t know um just as a as an observer I would say that they did evolve to cavitate because it&amp;#39;s so robust like it&amp;#39;s just no matter what they hit a cavities they don&amp;#39;t cavitate at the wrong time they cavitate at the right time some of the data we have show that you&amp;#39;ll have like Four Peaks in a row that are evenly spaced so to me that looks to me like something that has actually evolved whereas some of the other animals that we&amp;#39;ve studied that cavitate including this really hilarious tiny shrimp that we published about also has an incredibly fast human being appendage that shoots a water jet but it only cavitates if the water jet happens to hit something somewhere along its path and that starts to look a bit more like an accident as opposed to this sort of incredibly robust Phenomenon with the with the Mantis room given how different the attack is for Smasher shrimp than their Spirit relatives their prey is also very different they tend to eat things with hardened exoskeletons like oysters and snails with these prey extreme force is necessary for cracking them open and the cavitation bubbles are definitely helpful but this all seems like a counter-intuitive evolutionary result that the fastest animals prey on the slowest but it&amp;#39;s likely not a coincidence a hint as to why this Paradox might exist can be seen while watching a clubbing mantis shrimp prepare to break a shell first it touches Wiggles and positions the shell exactly where it wants it it Taps the Shell with its antenna seems to wait a moment and then it strikes the key to it all is in the moment it seems to be waiting this is the moment that enables the Smashing mantis shrimp to be so fast the moment this mantis shrimp needs to take to be able to strike and the reason it prefers prey that won&amp;#39;t really move while It prepares to do so the shrimp is winding up Spring loading its claw to an extraordinary degree the spring in question is shaped like a saddle which is made up of chitin and sits on top of the claw in the moment just before the strike the shrimp&amp;#39;s muscles compress it and holds it back with a latching mechanism then when it&amp;#39;s time to strike this potential energy is released and the club swings forwards this saddle spring mechanism allows the club to be released at an enormous velocity a much higher velocity than any muscle would be capable of producing by itself the spearing mantis shrimp also has a saddle like this but it&amp;#39;s much less effective the easiest way to understand it is by comparing your performance throwing an arrow versus launching one with a bow just throwing the arrow using your arm muscles will probably not make it go very far nor very fast but use those same arm muscles to flex a bow and then release the arrow with your fingers suddenly the arrow goes much farther and much faster and yet the energy input is the same whether or not a bow is used the only difference is the time over which the energy is released so in other words it&amp;#39;s a small amount of energy but the intensity of the release is extremely high so a lot of people are like oh you know they&amp;#39;re very powerful animals and they use so much energy but actually they just really don&amp;#39;t they use very little energy and they release it over short periods of time which is very explosive the design of their raptorial Claw is also quite different than the spirit of shrimp because the club has to withstand such immense forces repeatedly the exterior of the club is covered by a crack resistant coating a little like the tape boxers use for binding their hands underneath that coating are two regions with fibers aligned in different directions one area of fibers dissipates cracks while the other stops the club from expanding on impact all of this means that the shrimp can batter away on a clam shell or even a glass aquarium wall without damaging its claw and we know that the Manta shrimp have a very good sense of the three-dimensional structure and mechanics of the shells that they&amp;#39;re hitting and that in fact they will hit the shells at the most efficient structural locations to break them so you give them a high spired shell or globular shell and they&amp;#39;ll hit them differently and we&amp;#39;ve seen from our physical models of manta shrimp that that sequence that they&amp;#39;re using is actually the most efficient to break those geometries because Smasher mantis shrimp hunt prey that live on rocks and coral they also live in very different habitats and it turns out their clubs come in handy for more than just hunting by having that superpower appendage to break open snail shells that means that that food is available to them but it also means that they can use it for a bunch of other things like knocking out a crab oh and I should say some species of Smashing mantis shrub um build Burrows with their hammers that they create by like break you know inside the coral they&amp;#39;ll bang out all the little sections and they&amp;#39;ll be like a perfect little house inside the coral which of course is a very nice protected home they prefer hard substrates for their Burrows which means real estate is at much more of a premium the borough needs to be big enough for them to fit but small enough that they can block the entrance with their tail and that means these mantis shrimp regularly get into fights over Burrows and these fights can get very aggressive one group of researchers found that sparring strikes actually pack more energy into them than Strikes used for predation so we had to ask Dr Paddock the same question is there ever any occupational hazard handling these guys are your fingers ever in danger yeah no I mean you do have to be careful the bigger problem is that they have a spike at the end of their appendage and if that goes in your skin it&amp;#39;s really unpleasant but you know I mean if you have a cat you know like with claws you know you just gotta learn how to work with the cat right it&amp;#39;s the same idea so it&amp;#39;s pretty rare that anybody has a problem there are like kind of crazy story stories out there about people who like lost a finger because of a manta shrimp but usually it&amp;#39;s because you know they they were like diving and they stuck their hand down the hole and then the thing hit them and then they didn&amp;#39;t move and so then the animal speared them and then they get all the bacteria in their finger like like these are like this honestly never happened to us and it never will like these are just really weird stories that end up on the Internet um but for the most part they don&amp;#39;t even want to spear you even the spears don&amp;#39;t want to spear you because if they get their appendage stuck in your skin they&amp;#39;re gonna lose the appendage so more typically they just hit you with the hammer or with the bass like with the spearers and that doesn&amp;#39;t hurt that much I&amp;#39;ve been hit bajillion times including in the field because at the end of the day it&amp;#39;s dangerous to be a mantis shrimp luckily mantis shrimp have an incredibly hard armor over their body and especially their telsin or tail and this armor has raised protuberances that protect them from fracturing even when they take such heavy blows so it&amp;#39;s clear that the different types of raptorial claws play a huge role in determining everything about the mantis shrimp&amp;#39;s lives but it&amp;#39;s not only their claws but dictate much of their behavior it&amp;#39;s also their eyes mantis shrimp are often said to have the most complex eyes of any creature in the animal kingdom and they might be the part of their body that makes them look the most alien and these eyes help them to be such effective Predators they do have this amazing predatory Vision because they have two eyes that move independently and each eye has trinocular Vision you know we binocular vision they have trinocular Vision I honestly can&amp;#39;t even conceptualize what that looks like but so together they have hex nocular Vision so they are able to take in an incredible amount of information and that very likely improves the success of their ability to Target things the rest of their body having trinocular Vision in each eye gives them depth perception from just one eyeball a useful adaptation if you regularly get into fights with rivals or other predators and end up losing an eye the three regions of the eye have pseudo-pupils that can scan different parts of the environment but the part that most interests researchers is the mid-band it has six rows of thousands of omitidia or photoreceptor cells which are used to detect specific wavelengths of light including ultraviolet light altogether they have 12 to 16 kinds of photoreceptors in their eyes humans by comparison have just three dogs have only two and birds have four allowing them to perceive ultraviolet light which is not part of the visible spectrum for humans and yet scientists have found mantis shrimp aren&amp;#39;t actually all that good at discriminating between colors in one experiment they trained 10 mantis shrimp to recognize 10 different color wavelengths respectively ranging from 400 to 650 nanometers they did this by showing the mantis shrimp two colors and giving them a frozen prawn when they picked the right wavelength after the mantis shrimp were adequately trained the scientists presented them with more colors they found that the shrimp could detect between the chosen wavelength and another color as long as that color was 50 to 100 nanometers up or down the Spectrum but if the difference between wavelengths was 12 to 25 nanometers they couldn&amp;#39;t tell them apart and yet humans with our three measly photoreceptor types can differentiate millions of colors and we have little trouble seeing between wavelengths that are only five nanometers apart although they can see this incredibly wide spectrum of light and wavelengths they don&amp;#39;t see color obviously the way we do they can&amp;#39;t actually distinguish between different tones of colors for example like blue dark blue a yellow that kind of thing so we might actually see a widering color in in that way the researchers hypothesized that maybe each photoreceptor in a mantis shrimp picks up a specific color and identifies it in a way that&amp;#39;s less discriminating than the human eye but also doesn&amp;#39;t require so much brain power that way they can quickly determine if something is predator or prey or they&amp;#39;re processing A Vision Works more like our processing of hearing which is a a little bit more step wise and on and off whereas our vision is continuous um we&amp;#39;ve seen like continuous Spectra these photoreceptors might also help them detect polarized light which is a very special skill among animals to understand this we first have to understand how light moves normally the wavelengths of light vibrate in every direction along vertical and horizontal axes it&amp;#39;s random and chaotic and it&amp;#39;s most of what we see polarized light is when the wavelengths vibrate in only a certain direction say on the vertical plane or horizontal plane polarization can happen through reflection or refraction which happens in the water or by applying a filter like polarized sunglasses it&amp;#39;s not something humans can see but other creatures like octopus squid crabs and cuttlefish can see some types of polarized light but Manta shrimp can see six types of polarization horizontal vertical two diagonals and two types of circular polarization when the light waves spiral clockwise or counterclockwise they&amp;#39;re the only animals we know of who can see circularly polarized light researchers think this not only helps them scan their surroundings for prey but also for communication they found that certain species of mantis shrimp have body parts that display circular polarization patterns which could be used in fighting or mating and mantis shrimp are able to process much of this visual stimuli before it even reaches the part of their brain that acts as a visual cortex thanks to something called a reniform body this kidney-shaped structure is located in the eye stalks of the mantis shrimp and connects directly to their brain it seems that it helps them quickly process color and other visual information and send that onto the brain so that all the information can be managed as quickly as possible the incredible adaptations of the mantis shrimp haven&amp;#39;t just astonished zoologists and anatomists they&amp;#39;ve also spurred us towards new Innovations in a variety of fields materials scientists in particular are interested in mantis shrimp claws to help in developing strong yet flexible compounds others built a 1.5 gram sized robot that mimicked a smash or mantis shrimp and it was able to punch faster than any similar device of its size though still not as fast as the mantis shrimp itself researchers who work in Optics have modeled different types of cameras off mantis shrimp eyes from polarized cameras that can be used underwater to cameras that might help in the detection of cancerous cells before they spread out into the body and the research is still ongoing with plenty of more discoveries to be made in just the past few years researchers discovered that mantis shrimp have twice as many light detecting proteins in their eyes as we expected we don&amp;#39;t understand yet why this is the case but it offers another tantalizing direction to explore the ocean is still full of incredible diversity and discoveries waiting to be made nowhere is this more true than the deep sea a place that haunts our imagination with creatures that sometimes look too bizarre to even be real these deep sea creatures are the focus of our next video where we will explore why it is that creatures seem to get weirder and weirder the deeper in the ocean you go to watch this video right now two weeks early head over to nebula thanks to a feature we&amp;#39;re calling nebula first every real science video is posted on nebula two weeks before it ever reaches YouTube nebula is the streaming platform made by me and several other educational 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Transcript for:Mantis Shrimp – The Ultra-Fast Predators

Transcript for:
Mantis Shrimp – The Ultra-Fast Predators