Relative to its size, the snap of this shrimp packs a super-powerful punch.
a quarter-inch long, the amphipod—a crustacean that looks a bit like a shrimp—lives a leisurely life, sifting through algae up and down the East Coast. Well, it’sleisurely, as scientists just discovered. A male amphipod wields a massive claw that can exceed a third of his mass, and when he snaps it in less than a 10,000th of a second, it marshals a supercharged jet of water to make his displeasure known.
When the crustacean snaps, it forms cavitation bubbles, which you can see here. As the bubbles explode, they release a tremendous amount of energy.The critical bit of that appendage, known more formally as a gnathopod, is called the dactyl. In the above image, that’s the long, blade-like structure at the top of the claw. It’s no thicker than a human hair. To snap, the amphipod contracts a muscle, cocking back that dactyl and storing an incredible amount of energy.
Let's work through those points. When it comes to fluid dynamics, aquatic creatures as tiny as the amphipod are up against some serious forces. To them, says Patek, the water is “like honey. If you're going to try to capture prey when you're this size, if you're going to swim up to it or move slowly to it, you literally push the prey away from you. You actually can't reach it.”
The second bit is storing enough energy to make this happen. That energy initially comes from the animal contracting the muscle in the gnathopod, which in turn loads that energy into some kind of spring mechanism. But how much energy can the amphipod store in the material that makes up its claw, and how far can it push that material before it fails?
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