A quirky video for a Saturday. The mantis shrimp is an intriguing, colorful and frankly, rather frightening creature. Fortunately, most types grow no more than about 4″ long, although the zebra mantis shrimp found from East Africa to the Galápagos and the Hawaiian Islands can often grow to 15″ and an 18″ monster was caught off Ft. Peirce, FL in 2014.
Old Salt Blog
a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea , hosted by nautical novelist Rick Spilman
This was hilarious. Thanks for posting!
What a hoot! Thank you!
The Eyes!
This is the eye of a mantis shrimp—an marine animal that’s neither a mantis nor a shrimp, but a close relative of crabs and lobsters. It’s a compound eye, made of thousands of small units that each detects light independently. Those in the midband—the central stripe you can see in the photo—are special. They’re the ones that let the animal see colour.
Most people have three types of light-detecting cells, or photoreceptors, which are sensitive to red, green and blue light. But the mantis shrimp has anywhere from 12 to 16 different photoreceptors in its midband. Most people assume that they must therefore be really good at seeing a wide range of colours—a “thermonuclear bomb of light and beauty”, as the Oatmeal put it. But last year, Hanna Thoen from the University of Queensland found that they’re much worse at discriminating between colours than most other animals! They seem to use their dozen-plus receptors to recognise colours in a unique way that’s very different to other animals but oddly similar to some satellites.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/03/natures-most-amazing-eyes-just-got-a-bit-weirder/