Mantis shrimp (Squilla mantis) don’t take kindly to captivity. “They have a general baseline of being angry,” chuckles Kate Feller, currently at the University of Minnesota, USA, recalling how the contrary stomatopods are particularly keen to lash out when exposed to air. “I had developed a means of holding mantis shrimp with their striking appendages out of water while their gills [arranged beneath the tail] remained submerged for an electrophysiology study I was conducting,” recalls Feller. However, when Greg Sutton from the University of Lincoln, UK, wandered past her University of Cambridge (UK) lab bench, he noticed the exposed crustaceans and commented that it would be interesting to measure their hammer blows in air. “No one had done that,” explains Feller. Knowing that the animals launch their ballistic appendages at the speed of a bullet in dense water, it seemed likely that they could even exceed those eye-watering speeds in thinner air. However, when Feller set up Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido’s high speed camera to catch the angry animals in the act, she was astonished when she realised that the crustaceans’ blows were nowhere near as powerful out of the water as they were in it. They publish their discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology.
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Source: Phys.org