Francis Ngannou, step aside sir.
“A mantis shrimp might not be a heavyweight, but ounce for ounce, it can throw some of the fastest and most powerful punches in nature.”
Nicknamed Tyson, this mantis shrimp cripples its prey with a devastating jab. It strikes with the force of a 22-caliber bullet— breaking both quarter-inch glass and the shell of crabs alike.
Unlike its heavyweight namesake, this Tyson is only four inches long.
How Does The Mantis Shrimp Strike so Hard?
With the help of super high-speed video cameras, researchers were able to film the blow in action at up to 100,000 frames per second— discovering that it is in fact one of the fastest and most powerful strikes in nature. This is an especially impressive feat considering the substantial drag imposed by water. Even the quickest martial artist would have considerable difficulty punching in it— yet the mantis shrimp strikes in under three-thousandths of a second.
The mechanics of the mantis shrimp involves specialized limbs that store energy and act like a spring and latch. One muscle compresses the spring while a second muscle holds the latch in place and a third muscle releases the latch when ready to strike. When the latch is released, the spring expands and releases all the stored up energy— accelerating the blow up to 10,000 times the force of gravity.
Even more amazingly, the mantis shrimp strikes so quickly that it produces small flashes of light upon impact— lowering the pressure of the water in front of it, which actually causes the water to boil! And it doesn’t stop there. It also has hexnocular vision— two eyes that have three focal points each— and so many light-sensitive cells that it can see in both ultraviolet and infrared.
This creature is truly a freak of nature. It is often seen beating up much larger prey, such as bigger fish and octopus, and because the rock crevices they inhabit are so fiercely contested, they are the only invertebrates that can recognize others of their same species and can remember the outcome of a rival fight for up to a month!
Given the ubiquity of bitter Twitter quarrels in MMA, that is yet another Tyson attribute that could prove useful.