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Photo of the Week: August 24, 2009
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| HEAD ON WITH A PEACOCK MANTIS SHRIMP | |
| Photographer: Marty Snyderman | POTW: 2009-08-24 |
| Comment: Hi Gang! I am headed to Indonesia in a couple of months, and in anticipation of my upcoming trip I was reviewing some images from some of my previous Indonesia dives. One of my favorite photographs is of a male peacock mantis shrimp sitting in the opening to its burrow. To me, the thing that makes the image special is the fact that the male peacock mantis shrimp is such a colorful and interesting looking creature. Because of its bright, peacock-like colors, odd-shape and prominent eyes I had wanted to get a good clean shot of one for sometime. Mantis shrimps are marine crustaceans that are known to members of the scientific set as types of stomatopods. This means that while they are closely related to shrimps, the creatures we call mantis shrimps aren’t exactly shrimps. The peacock mantis shrimp is a commonly seen inhabitant of many Indo-Pacific reef communities, and it is known to occur as far east as Hawaii. The body of a juvenile mantis shrimp is usually colored a bright yellow; the body of the female is typically olive green to brown; by comparison, the colorful male really struts his stuff making it easy to distinguish the sexes. The average length of a full grown adult is somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 to 7 inches. Mantis shrimps are active predators, and specialists generally separate them into two groups, the spearers and the smashers. The claws of these two groups differ as a means of helping them secure and overpower their prey. The claws of spearing species of mantis shrimps are used primarily to impale fleshy prey such as a variety of fishes. Their spiny claws are armed with barb tipped appendages that can “stab and snag”. The claws of smashers are more club-like. Smashers tend to prefer to prey upon hard-shelled animals such as crabs, clams, oyster, snails and other crustaceans. Smashers such as the peacock mantis shrimp use their powerful claws to quickly smash open the shells of their prey. Both smashers and spearers strike their prey by rapidly unfolding and swinging their claws at their prey. A peacock mantis shrimp can employ its weapon with astonishing speed, and the claw is said to accelerate at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet when it is fired from a gun. But it is not just the force of the claw alone that serves to injure the prey. Because smashers are able to strike with such speed they produce cavitation bubbles between their claw and the surface it strikes. When the bubbles collapse they also exert a measurable force on the prey. In essence, the prey gets struck twice by a single blow from a peacock mantis shrimp or other smashing mantis shrimp when the stomatopod unleashes an attack. The peacock mantis shrimp is considered to be primarily a diurnal species, but it is also known to hunt at night, especially during the period surrounding a full moon. This week’s POTW was taken with a Nikon 60 mm lens on a Nikon D2x camera. I used an ISO of 200, two Ikelite DS 125s at half power with an f/stop of f/16 to get the shot. I was approximately 18 inches away from the face of the peacock mantis shrimp when I tripped the shutter. Hope you enjoy the shot! See you next week! | |
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