Ninjabot getting ready to strike the pointy part of a spired shell. Were the strikes random, or a carefully planned assault? So they'll start again and place and tap and then they'll strike." When she began her Ph.D at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, Crane decided to see what those turns were for. "They'll roll the shell around and then place it and then tap it and then the shell kind of wobble or fall over. The mantis shrimp will take its time setting up its prey. "It's actually this really long process to set up each strike for a shell," she says. "It has these small appendage mouth-parts that it uses to roll the shell around, and then it gently places the shell against the substrate and then it'll tap it with its sensory antennules a couple of times before it strikes." Whenever she dropped a crab into the aquarium, the mantis shrimp would turn it over carefully before smashing it to bits. Rachel Crane first noticed the mantis shrimp's odd behaviour when she was a graduate student feeding the resident Mantis Shrimp in the Patek lab at Duke University. Caldwell, courtesy of National Science Foundation) In a new paper published by the Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers looked at how much brain is behind this brawn, and showed that these small crustaceans put a lot of "thought" into where they deliver their savage strikes.Ī female mantis shrimp (Pseudosquillana richeri). These cavitation bubbles produce an underwater shockwave that can kill prey even if the shrimp's bludgeons don't make contact. Their limbs move so quickly, the water around them boils - a process known as supercavitation. The mantis shrimp strikes out with the same velocity as as a speeding bullet, hitting prey at 30 metres a second, generating 1500 newtons of force - the same as a tiger's bite - all in less than three-thousandths of a second. Their weapons are their hinged front appendages which stick out from their thorax and are spring powered like a crossbow, giving them the fastest punch in the animal kingdom. Add a splash of colour and sophisticated eyes, and you have the mantis shrimp. This crustacean - neither a mantis or a shrimp - is known for the sheer violence with which it attacks its prey, smashing apart crabs, snails, oysters and clams until their squishy and tasty insides come out. Imagine, if you will, a small lobster with "Rock'em Sock'em Robot" appendages on the front.
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