Mantis Shrimp: Simply Smashing

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Curious that a British exclamation of approval is uncommon in the formerly United States, but this child is not using it in a literal way. The mantis shrimp smashes things — except for those that have harpoons instead of smashing claws.

This predator has a resemblance to the praying mantis because of a second pair of limbs, hence the name. But it is not a shrimp, only distantly related to them. The mantis shrimp slaps down its prey very hard, very fast.

The mantis shrimp packs a great deal of force in its punch so it can smash the shells of its prey. This shows design work of the Master Engineer.
Peacock mantis shrimp, Wikimedia Commons / Rickard Zerpe (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Believers in stardust-to-stomatopod evolution cannot come up with plausible explanations for this critter's development. Study on it. That claw catapults at high speeds with a special mechanism. In fact, the bubbles made are even more devastating that the initial strike because of cavitation (which would have been powerful in the Genesis Flood). Get your finger too close and you may regret it. They also have exceptional vision which is being studied for biomimetics purposes. No, evolution fails here, too. The most logical explanation is that the Master Engineer put everything in place.
For pound-for-pound boxing records, look not to ‘Sugar’ Ray Robinson or Rocky Marciano. Rather, the 6–10 cm (2.35–4 inches) long mantis shrimp or stomatopod has the fastest punch of all. Crustacean expert Shiela Patek and her team at the University of California, Berkeley, needed high-resolution video at 5,000 frames per second to analyse this.2 They showed that the peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) can punch with a force ‘well over a hundred times the mantis shrimp’ body weight.’

The club-like limb reaches a top speed of 14–23 metres per second (31–51 mph), and a peak acceleration of 65–104 km/s2 (6600–10,600 g, where 1 g is the acceleration due to gravity; astronauts and jet fighter pilots will pass out at only 10 g). They use this to crush the shells of snails they prey on, and in captivity, have shattered the glass walls of their tanks.

To read the rest, head on over to "Shrimpy superboxer." Note the sound and bubbles in this short video: