And even better, they can shatter aquarium glass with their fore-limbs, at least according to my invert. zoology prof.
April 29, 2008
Anonymous said...
Mantis shrimp are fascinating. They featured once or twice in "The Most Extreme" on Animal Planet. Apparently, each eye has its own visual cortex, because the shrimp's brain isn't big enough on its own to handle what it sees.
wowww I remember doing CPL tests on gasses in chemistry lab, I cant imagine what it would be like to see that as colors!
May 02, 2008
Anonymous said...
I've heard of people who have these in tanks. If they reach in to clean the tank an aren't careful, these cranky crustasians can split thumbs and slice hands open lightning fast. Me... I think I'll stick to goldfish.
May 05, 2008
I've posted on the mantis shrimp before (can you go wrong with a name like mantis shrimp?), and I'll post on them again. But the Bleimans have alerted me to an article in Wired that reveals whole new depths to this colorful (you'll catch the pun in a moment) creature.
Photo source: Wired [Image]
It turns out that the mantis shrimp has spectacular eyes. For one thing, those compound eyes are composed of thousands of rows of light-detecting units called ommatidia. These ommatidia allow the mantis shrimp to see in 100,000 different colors -- that's 10 times what we humans are able to see. Wow. Crayola and the cosmetics trade would have to hire full time personnel just to create names for all their new crayons and lipsticks.
But there's more. These shrimp are the first animals ever discovered to be able to perceive circular polarized light (CPL).
7 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formThere is no creepier, more alien creature on earth than the mantis shrimp. When they look at you, you can tell they're working things out.
April 29, 2008
Not strictly true - the bit about the number of colours. Human colour vision can distinguish quite a few more shades than 10,000!
April 29, 2008
I myself can see roughly 10,124 shades.
April 29, 2008
And even better, they can shatter aquarium glass with their fore-limbs, at least according to my invert. zoology prof.
April 29, 2008
Mantis shrimp are fascinating. They featured once or twice in "The Most Extreme" on Animal Planet. Apparently, each eye has its own visual cortex, because the shrimp's brain isn't big enough on its own to handle what it sees.
May 01, 2008
wowww I remember doing CPL tests on gasses in chemistry lab, I cant imagine what it would be like to see that as colors!
May 02, 2008
I've heard of people who have these in tanks. If they reach in to clean the tank an aren't careful, these cranky crustasians can split thumbs and slice hands open lightning fast. Me... I think I'll stick to goldfish.
May 05, 2008