Peacock Mantis Shrimp

The peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) is a brightly colored crustacean of Indo-Pacific reefs that punches with the fastest strikes in the animal kingdom. It smashes shells with a club-like appendage.

🧬 Field Guide Specimen: Open Peacock Mantis Shrimp in the CRV Science Field Guide to log the specimen, see its place among the Ecdysozoa lineages in the Cladogram Explorer, and test your recall in the Red List conservation game.

A spring-loaded mechanism stores energy and releases it so that the club accelerates to speeds of around 23 meters per second in a few thousandths of a second. The impact delivers a force of over a thousand newtons and creates cavitation bubbles in the water whose collapse produces a second shock wave.

The club has layers with fibers arranged in a helical (Bouligand) pattern and a surface of dense mineral. This design absorbs and spreads impact energy and inspires lightweight impact-resistant materials.

Like other mantis shrimps, it has extraordinary compound eyes with many types of photoreceptors and polarization vision. See Spottail Mantis Shrimp.

• Spottail Mantis Shrimp — a spearing mantis shrimp
• Zebra Mantis Shrimp — a giant spearer