Blue Season Bali Newsletter February 2010
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Question: What marine animal is said to have a strike that has the acceleration of a .22cal bullet?
Answer: The Peacock Mantis Shrimp - sometimes called a harlequin mantis shrimp or painted mantis shrimp.
Or Scientifically – Odontodactylus scyllarus and they are members of the order Stomatopoda.
There are generally two types of Mantis shrimp, ‘smashers’ and ‘spearers’ and they are one the oceans most impressive predators with the fastest strike rate in the world. It’s ’kick’ or ‘strike’ is faster than the punch of Oscar De la Hoya or even the legendary Muhammad Ali ! It is so fast that it is nearly impossible for the human eye to make out the full strike.
The Peacock Mantis shrimp is a smasher and you can easily see the difference by studying their front appendages, you will see blunt club like appendages that are suited to cracking the shells of crustaceans such as crabs and shrimp which are its main food source. They repeatedly strike and bludgeon the exoskeleton until their prey is dead, then grab hold of it and retreat into their burrow to feed at their leisure. Please take a look at this short video clip to see what I mean.
These wonderful creatures also hold the world record for the most sophisticated eyes of any animal on Earth. Some species have more than 12 pigments sensitive to different wavelengths of light, compared to only three pigments in humans. And they are also capable of distinguishing between 100,000 colors — 10 times as many as humans. Their compound eyes sit on independently moving stalks and can see colours ranging from ultra-violet to infra-red. Each eye is divided into three regions for tracking motion, forms, depth, and colour. All of this, it is theorized, is done without the aid of its tiny brain.
The Peacock Mantis shrimp are beautiful creatures and can appear in a variety of colours, from shades of browns to bright neon colours and they generally live hiding in rock formations or burrowing intricate passageways in the sea-bed, they are also one the underwater world’s most photogenic animals, but beware of that ‘kick’ is powerful enough to crack the glass of many aquariums and even the lens on your underwater housing - so photograph them if you dare!
Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.
Contact us if you would like to see the Peacock Mantis shrimp in Bali.
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