This is an extraordinary piece of video. You're looking at a mantis shrimp that's just a few
weeks old, about the size of a grain of rice. It's the larval version of a species similar to this,
the famous peacock mantis shrimp. It's a shrimp that lives its adult life amongst
the coral with an ultra-fast modified claw capable of punching through snail shells. But,
this baby version doesn't do any of that. Instead, it wields a lightning-fast spearing appendage
to grab and puncture tiny prey while swimming through the open ocean. Up until a year or so ago,
the strikes of these tiny ocean predators were largely unstudied. Whenever I publish a video with
slow motion footage of a fast insect I often get comments like these: "what about mantis shrimp!?".
Well just down the road at Duke University there's a lab that studies both mantis shrimp and snapping
shrimp, using high speed video to record and analyze their strikes. Recently, i've been working
with a researcher from that lab, Jacob, and he took me over there to get a behind-the-scenes
look at how they filmed these organisms and to learn a little bit about what he's discovered
about those larval mantis shrimp. So we know a lot about adult mantis shrimp strikes. They've been
one of the most studied high acceleration systems. However, we didn't know when this mechanism
emerged. I mean, these organisms go through their own life history. They hatch from eggs. They move
out into the pelagic zone as these larval mantis shrimp and they don't have the same smashing
appendage that the adults do. Instead they have a spearing appendage that they use to capture
other larval pelagic organisms so they can feed while they're out in that in
that environment. I mean these larval mantis shrimp are at the millimeter scale and it's
really hard to work at that size scale. So it took, uh, many years. I mean,
it took me two years to do this project from the start from when we first set out to do it
until we were able to troubleshoot the entire process and figure out a way to actually get
this this research done. So this is where we house our mantis shrimp and our snapping shrimp.
In these bigger tanks we have the larger snapping shrimp and mantis shrimp. They're a little hard
to see just because they tend to burrow. They hang out underneath little PVC pipes that we give them
or they make little burrows inside of the coral or the sand that we offer. These
tanks on top are actually filled with mantis shrimp or juvenile snapping shrimp that are
too small for our system. They would basically just get sucked up into filters that we have. So
they have to be housed outside. Right now we don't have any larval mantis shrimp
because they only last inside their larval form for roughly a month. So what we do have are these
tiny adult mantis shrimp that are a little bit older and a good example for us to use
on how to study these tiny organisms. So, what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull out the adult
mantis shrimp, isolate it, and then use just a small dab of super glue that I will then attach to
the back of a toothpick. And then I will very carefully glue on the back of the mantis shrimp
and position it inside our little apparatus so we can that we can zoom in. Being able to visualize
ultra-fast movement in a grain of rice as it's swimming through the water is just an impossible
task. So our first thing that we had to do was learn how to constrain them in a spot.
So as long as we're careful this is completely harmless to the animal
and they can continue to live with a little dab of superglue on the back of their
carapace until they molt the next time. So what i'm going to do first is set up fit our our
AD20 setup, I call it the oil rig you'll see why in a second. I'll build this up, our little
apparatus, that allows us to suspend our larval mantis shrimp in a little container of water.
Then i'll set up our high speed video camera, connect it to our computer, and then attach our
K2 infinity lens that allows us to zoom in to the millimeter scale, of this type of movement.
So i'll start building here and then it'll take me quite a few minutes to set up all this.
I am recording, i'm gonna have to jump from over here to over here
in a frac..., I could set up like a little trigger system but, uh, that would take too long.
Yeah, I got a strike. You can see actually the first appendage on the opposite side go first and
then the appendage we're focused on follow just after. So we've zoomed in here and focused on
a adult mantis shrimp strike. The larval mantis shrimp, the entire body would be fitting
inside where this appendage is. We didn't know how fast these larval mantis shrimp strikes were
going to be. I predicted that the smaller larvae were going to accelerate their strikes much faster
than the adults. However when I put them in front of the camera and captured these strikes,
I found that they were only producing accelerations roughly on-par with the adults,
which was pretty surprising. One reason potentially why they aren't striking as fast
is because they just live very different lives. I mean those adults living in those coral habitats,
smashing open prey, these larvae don't need to do that. They don't need to be producing those
forces in order to smash open any objects. All they need to do is be faster than the things
around them in order to capture them. Some of the most interesting things I think here are how small
these mantis shrimp are. The size of a grain of rice moving through the open ocean using these
incredibly powerful raptorial appendages. And being able to capture that movement and describe
that behavior was a technical challenge that I was really excited about trying to trying to do.
To really set out, how can I make a contribution to this field of ultra-fast movement.
I hope you enjoyed that behind the scenes look at what it's like to study these ultra fast shrimp.
If you want to learn more about Jacob's research or any of the other projects
happening in professor Sheila Patek's lab check the video description below. Thanks for watching!