Tag Archives: Dangerous

Hardest hitters on Earth.

Not Muhammad Ali – The Peacock Mantis Shrimp

Peacock Mantis Shrimp - Odontodactylus Scyallarus
Peacock Mantis Shrimp – Odontodactylus Scyallarus

Peacock Mantis ShrimpOdontodactylus Scyallarus – a smasher, with club-shaped raptorial appendages. An active hunter, it prefers gastropods, crustaceans, and bivalves, and will repeatedly smash its prey until it can gain access to the soft tissue for consumption. It is reported to have a “punch” of over 50 miles per hour, this is the fastest recorded punch of any living animal.

Here is an interesting read about their clubbing arms:

The stomatopod dactyl club: a formidable damage-tolerant biological hammer. The dactyl clubs exhibit an impressive set of characteristics adapted for surviving high-velocity impacts on the heavily mineralized prey on which they feed. Consisting of a multiphase composite of oriented crystalline hydroxyapatite and amorphous calcium phosphate and carbonate, in conjunction with a highly expanded helicoidal organization of the fibrillar chitinous organic matrix, these structures display several effective lines of defense against catastrophic failure during repetitive high-energy loading events.

Mantis Shrimp Eyes are also Highly unique in the animal kingdom.
Its specialized eyes can pick up several types of light, including infrared and ultraviolet, and its color vision tops ours. It can also see a type of polarized light that no other animal is known to be able to detect. The key to the extraordinary vision is in the structure of its eyes, which consist of six rows of numerous smaller eyes called ommatidia. It is the way the way light-sensing cells in some ommatidia are arranged. They sit at just the angle to convert circularly polarized light (CPL)–a type of light wave that travels in a spiral–to a form that other cells underneath can detect.

Etymology:

  • Odonto from Greek “having teeth” and Greek daktylos “finger, toe”
  • Scyllarus from Greek skyllaros, kyllaros “hermit crab” + -idae

Whitemargin Stargazer Fish

WhitemMargin Stargazer - Uranoscopus sulphureus
Whitemargin Stargaser look’n up at ya

Whitemargin Stargazer fishUranoscopus sulphureus – Stargazers are not a fish to mess with. They have double-grooved poison spines behind the operculum and above the pectoral fins and wounds can be quite serious. Stargazer possess electric organs located in a specialized pouch behind the eyes and can discharge up to 50 volts, depending on the temperature of the water at the time! Because stargazers are ambush predators which camouflage themselves and some can deliver both venom and electric shocks, they have been called “the meanest things in creation”. The fish is often locally known as the mother-in-law fish.

Inhabits reef flats but is rarely seen because it lies buried in the bottom most of the time, with only the eyes showing. When buried, the cirri on the edge of the mouth serve to keep out the sand during respiration. The oral lure is used to attract the prey within striking range of the mouth.

This little fellow was only about 15cm long but they get to a maximum length of 45.0 cm.

Etymology: Uranoscopus: Greek, ouranos = sky + Greek skopein = to watch