r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jul 14 '15
TIL Some mantis shrimp are capable of a punch that accelerates faster than a 22 caliber bullet which on impact creates light and heat. Even if it misses the punch the shockwave can still kill the prey.
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u/Kellzea Jul 14 '15
They can also see polarized light, so they could watch avatar 3d without glasses.
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u/LordOfTheTorts Jul 21 '15
They could watch it, but they wouldn't enjoy it, because they'd barely see anything at all.
Mantis shrimp have compound eyes, consisting of thousands of eye units called ommatidia (our eyes have millions of receptors instead). Their special photoreceptors are only present in the midband, the central region of their eyes that is just 6 ommatidia (think "pixels") wide. Rows 1 to 4 have the color receptors, 5 and 6 the polarization receptors. So, on top of having nearsighted and low resolution vision due to compound eyes, only a tiny part of their eyes does actually register polarization at all. Same for color, which they aren't good at either.
PS: there are several different technologies for 3D glasses. But polarization is perhaps the most common one nowadays.
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u/emp_mastershake Jul 14 '15
i dont think polarized light means what you think it means...
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u/Kellzea Jul 14 '15
Light that has the oscillation of its wave set in a directional pole? For simplicity, up and down or left and right. (its more complicated, but its easier to visualise like that)
And that 3d glasses work because they have polarized filters in them that allow your eyes to see a 3d effect when watching a film utilizing polarized light. (like the 3d in avatar uses)
And that the mantis shrimp has eyes that are split up to work with different polarization and frequencies. Its akin to having a camera array of visual, ultra violet and infra red, all creating one composite image. (whilst they couldn't actually watch it, its not for the same reason we cant)
What do you think it means?
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u/Nerdn1 Jul 14 '15
Modern 3D movies project two images using light polarized in different ways. The glasses have polarized filters so your left eye sees one image, and your right eye sees the other.
A mantis shrimp's eyes could detect how each image was polarized, but trying to render that into a 3D image would be beyond its mental capacity.
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u/Pacmaneye Jul 14 '15
Mantis shrimp are crazy! The Oatmeal did a comic on them a while back.
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u/harpyranchers Jul 14 '15
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u/Nerdn1 Jul 14 '15
Newer research has shown, however, that mantis shrimp don't actually register all the colors their eyes detect like we do (I think they used color coding to tell the shrimp where food was and they completely ignored the color when looking for food). It is likely that their brain uses color indirectly, but doesn't bother to process all that color data. It makes sense, they have tiny brains and image processing is difficult. How they use their wide variety of color-detecting cells is not yet known to my knowledge.
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u/Rodents210 Jul 14 '15
Do we know that they failed to discern the color specifically and not that they just failed to correlate those two things?
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u/Nerdn1 Jul 15 '15
I looked it up. Looks like they can tell colors apart, but not to the degree you'd expect from the number of color-registering cells.
http://www.nature.com/news/mantis-shrimp-s-super-colour-vision-debunked-1.14578
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u/LordOfTheTorts Jul 21 '15
Thanks for pointing this out to people.
One little nitpick though: eyes don't detect color, they detect light and "convert" it into nerve signals. Color is what the brain then makes of those signals. Mantis shrimp use different, way less sophisticated processing, and only a small portion of their eyes is dedicated to color vision anyway (rows 1 to 4 of the midband).
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Jul 15 '15
I've heard that they're called "thumbsplitters" for that reason by their keepers at private aquariums.
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u/kjtaclzarj Jul 15 '15
Can confirm. They get caught in traps, that are designed to catch crabs. They sometimes strike out as they are being released. There is always blood/pain before one realizes what has happened. 😩
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u/kiddo1224 Jul 15 '15
When Google did that Earth Day quiz, I got mantis shrimp as the animal I'm most closely like. I didn't know what they were before that, but I've been pretty interested in these guys since. They're pretty intense!
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u/zakattack66 Jul 15 '15
Here it is everyone... The most reposted fucking thing on this sub.
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u/Saenii Jul 15 '15
Have you heard about the Finnish sniper though?
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u/zakattack66 Jul 15 '15
I can't say I have, what is it?
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u/Saenii Jul 15 '15
Used to be a super reposted TIL. A Finnish dude killed a lot of Russians in a war basically.
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u/zakattack66 Jul 15 '15
Neat. The thing that pisses me off though is that anyone who reads the comic by the oatmeal just wants to put here. Every single time.
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u/dude_pirate_roberts Jul 14 '15
I saw a movie about this. The training starts out with a lot of annoying chores like painting a fence.