MANTIS SHRIMP!!!!!

Laura and Jim will be hosting the May meeting this Saturday the 12th and it will be the usual of food, drinks, raffle and fun.
 
Doors will be open at 6:00 pm for social talk and the meeting will start at 7:00.  Parking gets a little tight and the city says you can't park on 4th but there is a parking lot a block away.   Meeting is usually held in the backyard so feel free to bring your favorite lawn chair, weather permitting of course.

If you need address/directions, contact a club member.

Best if you park at Mini Mall (where the spaghetti establishment use to be)
 
You will get to see his new frag tank set up in the making.
 
Hope to see you there!

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[angelscrx]

Lately I had been noticing that my larger feather dusters have had their tubes busted and there was no feather duster. I figured some unknown crab had come in on some new coral or something.  This morning I was enjoying my beatiful tank when cold sheer terror struck me.  It was like the blood in my veins had turned to ice.  When I saw from a little cave two beady eyes looking at me and it claws curled neatly underneath him.  He was mocking me saying "I have been here for a long time and now I am big enough for you to see me!" :x   I had a Mandarin that had a chunk taken out of it's side once and I now think this was the culprit!  

Needless to say the rock is in a pot on the stove cooking away and I beleive I may have shrimp for breakfast :twisted:   I am glad I caught it before it got big enough to attack my fish.  If I can manage to get it out of the rock I will take specs and post them.  What a way to start the morning.

[angelscrx]

I got it out of the rock and its about 1.5 - 2 inches long.  Scariest thing I have ever seen.  

Here is some info on them:
BERKELEY – Forget boxers Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley. The fastest punches are delivered by a lowly crustacean - the stomatopod, or mantis shrimp.

With the help of a BBC camera crew and the loan of a high-speed video camera, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have recorded the swiftest kick, and perhaps most brutal attack, of any predator. The shrimp flail their club-shaped front leg at peak speeds of 23 meters per second to shatter the hard shells of their prey.
 
"The speed of this strike exceeds most animal movements by far," said biologist Sheila Patek, a Miller Post-doctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. "It's insanely fast, but important for generating the forces necessary to crush its preferred food - snails."

Patek is currently conducting experiments which show that the blow yields a tremendous amount of force - well over a hundred times the mantis shrimp's body weight.

In a short note appearing in the April 22 issue of the journal Nature, Patek and her colleagues, graduate student Wyatt Korff and professor of integrative biology Roy Caldwell, report the record-setting strike and the unusual saddle-shaped spring in the hinge of the shrimp's striking appendage that makes it all possible.

This spring is technically a hyperbolic paraboloid, a structure similar to a Pringles potato chip. Very strong, especially when compressed, hyperbolic paraboloids have been used by architects to create structures that don't easily buckle. The nautilus employs this structural element to build a sturdier shell. In mantis shrimp, however, the saddle-shaped structure can also function as a spring, the UC Berkeley researchers found. It stores energy until a quick release propels the shrimp's club in a shell-crushing blow.

"We know of no other biological example where this saddle-shaped structure is used as a spring," Patek said.

Mantis shrimp are distant relatives of the shrimp and lobster, common around the world and major invertebrate predators around coral reefs. Some hide in burrows and dart out to spear fish with their sharp appendages. Others roam the ocean floor in search of other crustaceans - crabs, clams and snails - and smash them open with their club-shaped front appendages. In captivity, these club-equipped stomatopods have been known to break the glass walls of their tank.

Patek, who studies communication in crustaceans and related organisms, has previously looked at the sounds made by the spiny lobster. Three years ago, she discovered that the spiny lobster makes noise in the same stick-and-slip manner of a violin.

Other animals with fast feeding strikes are the trap-jaw ant, at 17 meters per second, and the much smaller nematocysts of the hydra, which accelerate four times faster but achieve much lower speeds.

The shrimp's speed and acceleration were thought to be created solely by a click mechanism: the shrimp cocks and latches its appendage, the muscles contract, and when the latch is released, the energy stored in the muscles is released in a swift kick. This description, however, could not explain the extreme acceleration of the videotaped strike, so the researchers looked elsewhere.

The answer turned out to be a largely ignored piece of the shrimp's exoskeleton - the flexible, saddle-shaped structure in the striking appendage. They showed that it acted like a spring, storing elastic energy when the appendage is cocked, and releasing it when the shrimp strikes.

"All mantis shrimp have the saddle-shaped structure, though there is a lot of variation," said Patek, who is looking for other creatures that employ hyperbolic paraboloid structures as springs. "Using as few structures as possible with the least amount of energetic investment is a fundamental principle in many biological systems."

The high-speed video revealed other interesting aspects of the strike, including bubbles generated at the point of impact. The researchers suggest that the shrimp is taking advantage of a physical process called cavitation - the destructive effect of exploding bubbles - to break snail shells. The bubbles are created by negative pressure near the point of impact, either during the swift strike or as the heel of the appendage pulls back afterward. The popping bubbles also generate sound, and perhaps even light.

The smashing impacts and cavitation also eat away at the heel of the shrimp's appendage. Some shrimp develop holes completely through the exoskeleton to the flesh below, though periodic molting renews the hard mineralized heel surface.

Stomatopods are unique in many other ways. Caldwell discovered last year that these animals are the only known sea creature to use fluorescence to signal one another. The creatures also have the most sophisticated eyes of any animal on Earth. Some species have more than 10 pigments sensitive to different wavelengths of light, compared to only three pigments in humans. And at least one stomatopod is known to move by curling up and rolling like a wheel - uphill as well as downhill.

Patek's research was funded by the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley, while Caldwell was supported in part by a campus Committee on Research Faculty Research Grant.

[angelscrx]

Here's an entire website dedicated to the MANTIS SHRIMP
http://www.blueboard.com/mantis/

[The Apprentice]

Wow Angel Congrats I belive your the first one in the club to have a MANTIS SHRIMP  :shock:  :shock:  :shock:
Glad you got him    

Lately I had been noticing that my larger feather dusters have had their tubes busted and there was no feather duster. I figured some unknown crab had come in on some new coral or something.  This morning I was enjoying my beatiful tank when cold sheer terror struck me.  It was like the blood in my veins had turned to ice.  When I saw from a little cave two beady eyes looking at me and it claws curled neatly underneath him.  He was mocking me saying "I have been here for a long time and now I am big enough for you to see me!" :x   I had a Mandarin that had a chunk taken out of it's side once and I now think this was the culprit!  

Needless to say the rock is in a pot on the stove cooking away and I beleive I may have shrimp for breakfast :twisted:   I am glad I caught it before it got big enough to attack my fish.  If I can manage to get it out of the rock I will take specs and post them.  What a way to start the morning.

[angelscrx]

I may be the first.  It's possible.  Maybe I am numero uno!  Ich bin numer einz!  

But not how I wanted to earn it!

[VickiG]

So, how was your shrimp omelette Angel?  You know, some people actually WANT a Mantis.  We were in a LFS in Tacoma last Friday and they had a little one in one of those 1/2 gal nano tanks - it gave me the creeps  :shock: just looking at it, and I bet it wasn't half as big as yours!  Good thing you got him before he went back to finish off your Mandarin!

[angelscrx]

Yeah was glad I got it too.  Thanks for all the love folks!

[Ryan]

Somewhere in a news article a month back I found a pic of a 13" Mantis they pulled out of some canal in Hawaii. Man, that thing was creepy looking.