Mantis shrimp sport powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning or dismemberment. In captivity, some larger mantis shrimps are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike.
Mantis shrimp have two raptorial appendages on the front of their bodies which accelerate with the same velocity as a gunshot from a 22 caliber rifle. In less than three-thousands of a second they can strike their prey with 1,500 Newtons of force. If human beings were able to accelerate our arms at just one-tenth of this speed we would
be able to throw a baseball into orbit.
The front limbs of the mantis shrimp move so quickly that the water around them boils. This process is known as supercavitation. When the supercavitation bubbles burst an underwater shock wave is produced that can kill the prey even if the shrimp missed them with it's strike.
Mantis shrimp also have extremely sophisticated eyesight, their eyes are considered the most complex in the animal kingdom. They possess sixteen colour receptive cones (humans have only three) and can perceive both polarised light and multispectral images. It has been suggested that the capacity of these shrimps to see UV light enables observation of otherwise hard to detect prey on coral reefs, a great selective advantage.
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