"Who you calling a shrimp?": The deadly mantis punch

I stayed up 'til all hours making this animation/slideshow, or whatever it is - variable-speed gif? It's easy-peasy to find eye-aching photos of mantis shrimp, since for a while they were the darling of the internet. Animals can be "in" or  "out", and for a while it was the tardigrade, or water bear (which bears no relation to bears, believe me - they're ugly little suckers, even though indestructible). Mantis shrimp aren't merely gorgeous and gaudy, but they have these things like red boxing gloves that spring out at light speed and knock their prey out cold. Maybe THAT'S why they became so popular, especially in the United States (where boxing is king).

This is an excerpt from one of those NatGeo for Kids things that I find helpful because it gives me just the facts I need:

"Found in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the peacock mantis shrimp is arguably one of the most captivating creatures in the sea. Its hard-shelled body is bursting with color—hues of bright red, green, orange and blue, and its forearms are covered in spots. At the top of its head rests a set of protruding eyes, and they aren’t just for show.

These crustaceans have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom, containing millions of light-sensitive cells. With 16 color-receptive cones (compared to humans, who have just three), the peacock mantis shrimp can detect ten times more color than a human, including ultraviolet light. It can move each eye independently and uses this exceptional eyesight to avoid predators and track down prey.

The peacock mantis shrimp lives in the crevices of coral and rocks on the ocean floor. A territorial creature, it has been known to exhibit aggressive behavior toward intruders. This ferocious shrimp has club-like appendages that fold beneath its body, resembling a praying mantis.

With a spring-like motion, it uses these appendages to attack prey—and a mantis shrimp’s punch is no joke. With the ability to strike at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet (50 times faster than the blink of an eye), a blow from a mantis shrimp can easily break through the shell of a crab or mollusk."

Being incredibly lazy, I dredged up these mantis shrimp gifs  (which I made myself, so no stealing) from a previous post - but can you blame me? The weebly-wobbly eyes alone are gif-worthy, I think. When I first saw even a still photo of a mantis shrimp, I doubted my eyes, thinking it was a Facebook hoax. Looking it up, I saw all sorts of gosh-gee-golly blog posts about the New Cool Animal. Which they are, I fully admit (if not new any more).

I don't think every mantis shrimp is this gaudy. Some of the more pedestrian ones I saw just looked like brown lobsters with no claws. But the peacock variety is fascinating enough that photographers must look at them for hours to get just the right shot of its tarantula-like legs and alarming swivelling eyes with those awful little holes.

Everything this creature does is creepy, even if it's just going about its business. It's all those skittery little appendages, with things sticking out all over its body.

And this one, oh God. It is very slowly swallowing a fish, dissolving it on the way in.

But this is the crowning glory of the mantis shrimp: its incredible punch. I have read that they can actually break aquarium glass, so that lab technicians have turned on the lights in the morning to find an inch of water and shattered glass all over the floor.

That sounded like a social media myth to me.. But it's a fascinating species. I had a few questions, which of course the internet was kindly enough to answer: yes, you can eat them. Yes, you can buy them as pets (for around $90.00 - $130.00). Full-grown, they range from 2" to 7". And it's not a myth that they can shatter glass: that punch is the equivalent to a bullet fired at close range. 

This thing, though - it just sort of happened. When I have a lot of short gifs, I sometimes try to put them together into a compilation. Sometimes it works. This time, I came up with something infinitely more interesting. The gif animator just didn't like the gifs, or there were too many frames, or something, because they came out all patchy, but the effect is very cool because there's no background to these. I don't know how it happened, and I doubt if I could make it happen again. Normally if I try to feed in too much, the app just refuses to make the gif (and my, aren't I cool with the terminology today!). So this scary gif, made by accident, turns out to be the best of the whole set.

Prawn killer! Thumb splitter! Must be the mantis shrimp

This is the picture that started it all. I think. God knows what I was actually looking for. Oh, I know. I was helping my granddaughter with an assignment. She said, "Nanny." "Yes." "I have to do the ocean." I wasn't sure what she meant. I had just printed out internet images of just about every animal that ever existed. But now I found out we had to "do the ocean".

So this led to me downloading a quite ordinary image of a shrimp:

God only knows how that led me on to THIS:

Like tardigrades, it's almost impossible to believe these things exist. Like tardigrades, they have some sort of supernatural strength. And they're icky. Plain icky. They're not pretty at all, no matter what that first picture looks like.

It's not so much all the swivelling around - which is creepy enough. It's the way those little holes in their eyes open and close. ICK. It's like some sort of evil wink. It also looks sort of like the top of an old microphone from the 1940s. I don't like any of those connotations.

For some reason I can see Louis Wain painting mantis shrimp. They have that hectic, even hellish quality that makes his cats look so scary. Most of the bright-colored stuff doesn't even show very much - it's kind of hidden under a buglike shell that I don't want to show right now.

I think the mantis thingie is eating something here. It's eating this fish which is probably still alive. It's sickening, really. The eyes remind me of Jeff Goldblum's in The Fly when he has made his final transformation into that sickening rotting thing stomping around.

I don't like it, in fact it shouldn't be allowed, when things in Nature diddle their parts around like that, especially when they have a lot of legs. This thing has too many legs, obviously. Anything more than four is always too many.

This shell may look pretty, but in black and white it would just be wretched, like a giant. . . mantis. I looked at the Wikipedia entry and it was too long, so I'll just quote the more interesting part.

Called "sea locusts" by ancient Assyrians, "prawn killers" in Australia and now sometimes referred to as "thumb splitters" – because of the animal's ability to inflict painful gashes if handled incautiously – mantis shrimp sport powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning, or dismemberment. In captivity, some larger species are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike.

Along with being pretty frightening, this looks a bit obscene to me, as if the mantis shrimp has two penises like some legendary figure of myth. Bi-penal? Never mind. These creatures are the Sylvester Stallones of the sea world. I don't like Sylvester Stallone.

It turns out that, as with so many other things, there is a mantis shrimp subculture. I was charmed and somewhat taken aback when I discovered the tardigrade paintings on DeviantArt. It made the fact of tardigrades' existence somewhat more bearable. But I was blown out of my chair to see well over a THOUSAND images, artwork in all media including origami and paper clips, celebrating the mantis shrimp. All I can do here is provide the link, as I really can't reproduce any of it here. Well OK, just a couple, with accreditation.

http://satanizmihomedog.deviantart.com/art/All-Hail-THE-MANTIS-SHRIMP-452373061


Really, they're all good, and some of them are headspinningly wonderful, making me think I should just retire from all creative endeavour. It makes me marvel at the richness and depth of talent out there, and it pisses me off that most artists can't make a living from their work. They should be able to make a living just by painting mantis shrimp. Anyone who can make me marvel at images of something I hate is OK by me.

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Mantis-Tank-367131884

http://onikage108.deviantart.com/art/Mantis-Shrimp-154320196

For more like this - and trust me, you DO want more like this - just click on this link.  It's helping me wipe out some of those gut-sinking mental images of Jeff Goldblum.


http://www.deviantart.com/browse/all/?section=&global=1&q=mantis+shrimp

(Not Jeff Goldblum - I couldn't. But Jeff Goldblum played him once. Badly.)

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