I took this photo in December at the Henry Doorly Zoo while I was living in Omaha. This little guy is very colorful and became one of the 'most interesting' in my flickr photostream, but I never knew this little guy was such a heavyweight.

It turns out, he's the fastest and most powerful 'puncher' in all the world. I learned all this after noticing a few people had clicked through to my old blog by googling for 'mantis shrimp videos.' The high-speed, high-def video images precipitated the scientific discovery of the amazing power built into the shrimps' boxing arms. A UC-Berkeley article calls it the most brutal attack of any predator. The also flouresce, in order to communicate with one another, and are the first animal documented to have and use a language of glowing code-words, and on top of that, they may have the most complex eyes in the Animal Kingdom, attributed to their utter fearsomeness: "One simple explanation is that these animals need complex signaling because they're so dangerous. Mantis shrimp spear or club their prey and have been known to break aquarium glass with their heavy, calcified clubs. They can easily kill an opponent with a single, well-placed blow," Caldwell from UC Berkeley in the fluorescence article said.

You can find reams of footage online, like this clip of Squirt on YouTube, beating up on what looks like fiddler crab, and I even found a blue-and-green-haired, bonafide badass (warning: profile heavy metal) on MySpace who raises the little whipper-snappers and who claims his posse of Stomatopods has beaten Godzilla nine times. Flickr has a dearth of images, although I believe mine are the best, or at least some of the more kaleidoscopic.



The moral of this story is, "check it out." The Omaha Zoo has notoriously bad signage, and failed to reveal anything interesting. I remember thinking how quickly the little guy moved his front legs around, and in the above snapshot you can see they became a blur, but I don't think they were his 'punching legs' and I was more amazed that out of the entire exhibit, this fella was putting on a real show. My curiosity has only led me to the True Hollywood Story on the glow-talking, briny brawlers more than six months after I first saw them, and that's too long.

Learn your world!

I'm going to the newly reopened Aquarium of the Americas for some serious aquatic enrichment toute suite. I love that place, and its just been too long. Even if they don't have a Stomatopod or two, I'm sure someone there will be able to kindly and enthusiastically give me more information.