Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Okay, folks, this is the mantis shrimp information that you’ve all been waiting for without knowing that you’ve been waiting for it. Prepare to run for the hills with your arms waving.

Mantis shrimp are the strongest animals on Earth. No kidding. Okay, a mantis shrimp is not able to exert as much energy as, say, an elephant. No way could a mantis shrimp knock down a tree… as fast as an elephant could.

So what? The elephant is big. Big is easy. Strong is not so easy.

The biggest mantis shrimp is as long as your forearm. However, a mantis shrimp can break through aquarium glass with one blow. How? It’s got a special pair of front legs that are spring loaded with such devastating power that they are as fast as a bullet fired by a small handgun.

A lot of people read that without considering the implications. The bullet fired by a small handgun is fired into the air, a relatively thin material. The mantis shrimp’s claws, on the other hand, have to move through water.

The mantis shrimp unleashes so much force on the objects it smashes that the hammer in its front leg produces a flash of light. You can see this effect in a small video of a stomatopod strike provided by the University of California at Berkeley. The video looks slow, but that’s because it’s displayed at 900 times slower than actual speed. That’s the only way you can actually see what a mantis shrimp attack looks like.

These animals frequent the Chesapeake Bay, among other places, and fishermen call them “thumb busters” because their blow is actually capable of shattering the bone in a human thumb. Dr. Roy Caldwell, the world’s top stomatopod researcher, says that he has seen a mantis shrimp knock the heads off of another mantis shrimp in one brutal blow.

Not all mantis shrimps are like this, of course. Others are slashers. Slasher mantis shrimps have sharp barbs on their front legs, that rip the target to shreds with almost as much power as the smashing blow.

For more on the science behind these attacks, read an excellent article from USA Today on mantis shrimps.