Achromatic Quarter-Wave Retarder-Having Shrimp Are Terrifying
Scientific American translates that terrifying letter abstract about shrimp eyes from Nature into English. "The compound eye of the peacock mantis, the new study's authors found, harbors a natural quarter-wave retarder, a sort of filter that converts circularly polarized light to linearly polarized light, which then activates receptors below." (Umm. Okay. And that's good, right?) Also, the peacock mantis shrimp are very strong. They range from 3 to 18 centimeters in length, but have been known to shatter thick aquarium glass with a blow from a forelimb. Says Roy Caldwell, a University of California, Berkeley, biologist: "We have had a couple cases where animals have hit a pane of glass dead in the center and there was a massive explosion." So don't fuck with them.
Blow to a forelimb, Dave. Blow to.
Ya, but how do they taste?
I bet they are a bit tough to digest.
That ain't kosher.
I've got a skewer and some marinade for that glass-shattering thug, right here.
It's like a rabid grizzly bear, except with an exoskeleton and massive pincers of death.
I've never understood how people can eat things like this.
They're carnivorous cockroaches, for pete's sake!
Mantis shrimp are pretty awesome. In addition to the smashy mantis shrimp that can break glass there are also stabby ones with knifelike claws. The ones off the US east coast are the stabby kind. Euell Gibbons, who advocated eating almost anything in ones path, had a technique for catching and eating the little guys.
I spent a little time in Caldwell's lab as a student. We could make the mantis shrimp come out and start hammering the glass with their claws by taking a dead mantis shrimp glued on a stick (kept in the lab for such purposes) and wiggling it in front of the aquarium. Those guys hit HARD. The aquaria were all made of plexiglass, though, so no dramatic explosions. Good times.
Yes, but it looks like it has googly eyes, so it can't be that terrifying